Racetrack Wiseguy and the Ante Post Plunge

 It's not obvious how to turn a £1 free bet into worthwhile money. I'm not ungrateful for the small bonus from Corals but one might as well go for the big one rather than fiddle about trying to win a real fiver with it.

I have five horses lined up for Cheltenham in March. A few years ago one of Mr. Henderson's stable lads landed a very ambitious five-timer on their own horses, won a million quid and went off to set up his own stable in America. I won't be doing that with the odds already having shrunk to 99/1 against all five winning and that includes the ante-post risk that any of them not running spoils it anyway. Ante-post generally is a mug's game but it's one you can play with a free quid that's there's not much else you can do with.

I'll save the names of the five horses for a Cheltenham Preview nearer the time. Two are surely copper-bottomed, the other three must have good chances. I'm not that thrilled with the prices of some of them this far ahead but what can you do. It might only pay 50/1 by Tues 15 March.

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Wendy Lesser's book, below, has provided the ideal opportunity to work my way through the Fitzwilliam Quartet's consummate account of Shostakovich's brilliant, brilliant (brilliant) cycle again. She makes many astute points that I make myself sometimes, only she does it far better, not least the unsatisfactory nature of writing about music. It is about 47 years now since  I first became acquainted with Quartets no. 3 and 8, recorded onto cassette from the wireless through a microphone. They are no less sensational now than they were then and Wendy makes the rest of them just as compelling. At present, finishing the book and the set of CD's look like being co-terminus, as it were, even if they haven't remained in step pace with each other.  I'm expecting another run through the discs to follow hard upon this one, reading the summaries if them alongside. This is in spite of some opposition frrom Corelli's Christmas Concerto that I heard the other day, desperate to listen out for what it was at the end.

Some music is worth every effort and, like Bach and Shakespeare or maybe Proust and James Joyce, never wears out and always has more to give. Such things give the impression that one could spend your whole life with them but one can't because there are other things and so one enjoys the impression, the sense of depth that it creates and the knowledge that they will always be there to return to. But the Shostakovich Quartets, for me, are the C20th's answer to other monumental cycles, like the Bach Cantatas, all of them, or Cello Suites, maybe the Josquin masses, of course the Beethoven symphonies and piano sonatas, the Mozart operas. They are terse, bleak, lyrical and absolutely get it right. They are the music and anything you say about them only makes them seem less and so it's best not to say too much.  

The Revised Plan

 Perhaps we can do without Sounds of the 60's here after all. I'm halfway through Move Over Darling and I'll park it there. It got about as far as most of my bright ideas get and will still be there, with the short stories, the Thom Gunn book, the last vainglorious attempt to start a novel and other fragments, to be taken up on some furure occasion which might never arrive.

One project at a time is the best plan and I have been making gradual progress but progress nonetheless with the play and that might get finished. The word count on the document is at 6000 but that's not all dialogue. I've been looking up how long plays are, knowing that The Comedy of Errors is Shakespeare's shortest- that's 22 thousand words- but finding some encouragement in 130 words per minute which means I'm over the half hour already and only in Act, by which I mean Scene, 3. So I will persevere with that. It is enjoyable to do once one tries and it makes me laugh (at my jokes or recycled other ones) if it's never going to make anybody else do so.

As well as there being any amount of writing and memoir aabout pop music available from writers better qualified to write it I also have my other excuse that one's time is surely better spent reading good books than writing bad ones. Wendy Lesser's Music for Silenced Voices is as good as they come. A couple of years ago I piled such praise on Ian Bostridge's Schubert's Winter Journey that I made it the best book I'd ever read and must one day check again aand see if it really is. 

Music for Silenced Voices doesn't do quite the same thing for the Shostakovich String Quartets. Ian used the Winterreise as a starting point to expand impressively into a wide range of themes whereas Wendy's book is more a biographical account of Shostakovich done via the String Quartet cycle. The ideal situation is to have the Fitzwilliam Quartet playing while one reads but so far it's been rare for the quartet they're playing to coincidence with the one I'm reading about but it's hugely useful and, for a non-musician, very cogent aand sympathetic.

For me, Shostakovich becomes more and more the greatest composer of the C20th. The anxiety, the isolation and despair run through it, even the dance passages are tinged with it but there's a lot more to him than that. The layers or irony, the references smuggled in under the Soviet censor's ignoramus attention and the biographical significance are there in among the purely abstract music that Wendy argues is what the quartets are, much more than the symphonies. And even if he was understandably nervous in his perilous position, he was not the studious introverted academic type that he looked like. He had a great capacity for deep friendship, mourned the loss of several close friends who died too soon and was one for a laugh, joke and dancing, too.

It might have been unnecessarily brave of him to remain in the USSR, unlike Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Rachmanninov who had easier celebrity lives in America, but he stayed with Mother Russia, miraculously tip-toeing the high-wire between dissidence (and dissonance) and the Party. He is a 'colossus' and Wendy's book does him some service.  

Busoni, Sartre and the Next Project

 Good Lord. The Busoni Piano Concerto comes as a bit of a shock. You might think at the start it's going to be something like the Tchaikovsky but that's only its opening bid. I've never heard anything like it, it trascends the genre like the Gurrelieder goes beyond what one thought was a song cycle or perhaps even as Finnegans Wake, or at least A le Recherche, do the traditional novel.

It teems with musical ideas and in the fifth movement includes a chorus singing some far-fetched, extravagant words. I didn't know there was a piano concerto with a part for choir so if it ever turns up in a quiz, the answer is Busoni and you can thank me that you knew.

To be honest, it's a bit much for me, more than I can manage. Like the Shostakovich symphonies, Wagner opera, some of Mahler and the complete symphonies of Hovhaness, slightly less of it might be more than I can take on but it was worth buying just to find out about it.

I'll finish Iron in the Soul, the last part of Sartre's Roads to Freedom trilogy, tomorrow. There's been a little bit more of a sense of duty about reading than than most of what I read by now. Not having to read Vanity Fair for Victorian Lit, Paradise Lost for A level or Solzhenitsyn as part of a teenage obsession is as close to Sartre's idea of 'freedom' that I'm likely to get. I'm sure he's a fine fiction writer and that comes as a surprise for a philosopher, there are gripping passages in it and it is an important document of its time but I was forever distracted by wondering how it related to Being and Nothingness, how heavy on ideas it must be and how much of those I was missing. But it can be safely ticked off the list and it won't be taking up shelf space. The library can have them back. In exchange, I'll collect a couple of books on the story of Tamla Motown. Music is much better listened to that read about which is a shame for me with my increasing output of music writing.

The next project here is Sounds of the 60's and chapter 1 is shortly to follow, above.  The premise is that Tony Blackburn's R2 show of that name features 32 records in two hours, at least half a dozen of which each week are masterpieces.

I thought I'd compile my own show consisting entirely of 60's masterpieces. The shortlist soon went over 40 even without all those artists, only one track each, that I hadn't thought of and those I still haven't but I have a provisional playlist and will feature them here as the weeks go by. If I can write 500 words on each, that's 16 thousand words but if we then move on to Sounds of the 70's, then maybe The Rock Show and then soul, reggae and disco shows of my own making, that book on pop music I always wanted to write will emerge. I'll make it up, and possibly have to look some of it up, as I go along. It has to be said that I'm much better at announcing new projects than seeing them through to their conclusion but we can but try and see what happens.

English Piano Trio in Chichester

 English Piano Trio, Chichester Cathedral, Jan 18

I'm sure this was originally listed as being Haydn and Beethoven when I first booked it. It's not a problem at all that last night it had turned into Schubert but it means the world will have to wait for the words of wisdom I had ready to compare Haydn and Beethoven. Schubert is the next stage down the time-line as the history of Western classical music edges its way forward. Some might say Romanticism begins in the early work of Beethoven but the late Schubert Piano Trio in B flat major, op. 99 is evidence enough for me that he was equally still a Classical composer, 'late' Schubert being written when he was no more than 31 with him being so prolific and another that leaves us wondering what might have been.

It begins optimistically, the piano sometimes the engine room and otherwise effervescent and rippling while the cello and violin exchange the roles of leading and following. The English Piano Trio are in their 27th season and one senses a polish and cohesion in their performance as a unit that is a great benefit of that experience.

The Andante second movement starts as a cello line of profound clarity, with Pal Banda's rich sound, augmented and taken up by Jane Faulkner's violin with Timothy Ravenscroft's piano part redolent of a Mozart concerto. As a whole it creates a gentle sway and where Robert Schumann's remarks, quoted by Jane in her introduction, are most justified, that 'the troubles of human existence disappear and the world is fresh and bright again'.

The Scherzo is immediately dance-like, skittering and taking flight, making its way restlessly towards a smoother conversation between the strings and a unifying conclusion.

The violin cheerily introduces the Rondo which is marked Allegro vivace but could surely qualify as 'spiritoso'. Sustained piano trills over a long cello note has music, as ever for Schubert, coming 'as naturally as leaves to a tree' as Keats said that poetry should until the movement gathers itself, led by the violin, to a joyous ending. 

A fine, fluent account of a gorgeous piece set a tremendous standard that I'm sure will be maintained by the quality acts that Chichester get for their Tuesdays.

All the seats are back in place, no longer spaced out in socially distanced formation, and although they'd prefer you to book a place on-line you won't be turned away if you just turn up. It costs whatever you want it to cost on your way out and is generally worth more.

Chichester is a great place for a charity shop. The selection of books in the Oxfam Shop, for example, is far more interesting than Waterstones and the CD's suggest that some local people with a genuine interest in music have either had a clear out or maybe are no longer with us. One can hardly leave them all there and I came away with Busoni's Piano Concerto played by Marc-Andre Hamelin and Music for Silenced Voices, a book by Wendy Lesser about the Shostakovich String Quartets. And then I got home in time to see two of today's horses win to help pay for them. Sadly, earlier one had got beat or else I'd be having a party of Downing Street proportions. It had been interesting to overhear the conversation regarding such flagrant abuse of their own rules a couple of rows ahead of me before the concert. It is a chat being replicated up and down the country, I'm sure. But one can't quite have everything and one could have worse days than today and still think you'd had a great time. I'm very grateful and the applause from the Chichester audience, including a shout of 'bravo', was evidence I'm not the only one.   

The T.S. Eliot Prize

 I set the Virgin box to record last night's edition of The Verb because it was the readings by the poets shortlisted for the big £25k T.S. Eliot Prize for the best collection of last year which is held, I'm fairly sure, in the Royal Festival Hall. And I listened to it earlier this evening.

It was an opportunity to take a crash course in the new poetry of 2021, most of which I'd missed, in the intrepid hope of dragging myself up to date and finding something to admire. I had my doubts from the beginning because I've long found Ian MacMillan's boundless enthusiasm a bit like poetry's answer to Boris Johnson, before he became forlorn, when although Philip Larkin's attitude towards many of his contemporary rivals was unnecessarily scathing, I tend to think that some scepticism is healthy.

The introduction to the programme warned listeners of some 'very strong language'. One would hope so, given that it was going to be 'poetry', that many-splendored thing that regards itself as worthy of the 'deep listening' that Ian credited the poets and audience with doing. But that's not what it meant. It meant those commonplace four-letter words, more often identified as having Anglo-Saxon origin rather than French or Catullus, that they are less shocked by but we in these islands need parental guidance about. I'm sure Larkin intended a few more 'sharp tender' shocks with his sparing use of them 60 years ago but it's playground vocabulary now. It's more likely to be some of us from the generation that bought the Sex Pistols album that find it a bit unnecessary. In poems, at least.

The first poet on was Jack Uunderwood. Okay, I can see one having to use poems like his in a poetry magazine if there weren't poems available that did a bit more with language but Ian was intent on persuading us how the poets had all taken on board his own show's 'rules for writing' and how, as such, they were very much extending the language in their use of it as a vital tool to 'examine what it is to be human', 'to explore the inner and the outer' or 'to go beyond difference'. They aren't quotes from him. I've just provided examples of the sort of thing that passes for poetry appreciation when actually what we heard were for the most part vague, under-developed lines shuffled together and read by their authors in that slightly distracted way that poets (these days) seem to think they have to.

I listened on but by the fourth poet I knew they had no chance. They were precious. Even if somebody any good had turned up I was already set against them. Somebody quite good did turn up, Michael Symmons Roberts, but even he couldn't save the event since he was on next to last and on last was the winner, Joelle Taylor, whose poem of protest didn't say anything one could object to but was simply bad poetry and went on too long.

As far as I could tell, it all sounded like free verse. So meaningful are they that submitting their profoundness to the discipline of any sort of scansion or rhyme scheme would have been like a prison, perhaps the sort of prison that a libertarian tennis player might find himself in, had it not occurred to them that embracing some sort of discipline might make their poems more interesting, more admirable and a bit more like 'art', like the way that paintings don't go beyond the canvas they are painted on and music has staves and clefs to define it.

 

It's not for me to say it's no good. The applause for Joelle made it obvious that the audience adored her performance. Poetry has been a different thing, mutating with fashions over the centuries, in different periods, and I struggle with Spenser, Dryden, maybe even Pope, possibly these days Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg. But if the T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist represents the best of what happened in 2021, it isn't for me and I'm not convinced it would be for T.S. Eliot either.

Tony Blackburn's Sounds of the 60's this morning had its usual quota of at least half a dozen masterpieces. That's how old I am and I have to be glad I am because I can't see much that the poetry being written now is doing for me that the pop music of then still does.

Ronnie Spector

 Tony Blackburn said this morning that Ronnie Spector died on Wednesday. I'd missed that. The Prime Minister had buried the bad news behind even more of his own.

It doesn't get any better than this. Everything about it is tremendous.

Music Scholars from the Prebendal School at Lunchtime Live!

Music Scholars from the Prebendal School, Portsmouth Cathedral, Jan 13 

2022 is underway and the young musicians from Chichester brought in the new year of Portsmouth's lunchtime treats with a wide range of instruments and music. The sky outside was a clear Venetian blue that might have anticipated Vivaldi but a charming Miniature in D Minor by Gedike played by Inigo Abbott Barrington set a high standard to be followed by Caitlin Bailey's confident clarinet on a Prelude by Finzi which was as bright and clear as the weather.

One of a number of impressive aspects of the show was the number of scholars appearing twice on different instruments. Scarlett Gladman's singing on Homeward Bound, not Paul Simon but Marta Keen, was gentle on a folksy tune and she returned later to play Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring on the oboe with an authentically period reedy sound.

Isaac Hussey's cello performance on Berceuse by Amy Beach was well organized before he returned later to be equally capable on the piano and then the enterprising idea of jaunty jazz on tenor horn was made convincing by James Parker on Philip Sparke's Rhode Island Rag. James was to return to sing some Parry very effectively as his second offering.

It's not often I have fifteen names to mention and I can't mention some without paying tribute to them all and it turns out to be seventeen really so, with apologies, there's no hanging around or extraneous filler here today.

Cradle Song by Ni Hongin was captured from its dreamy beginnings to some awakening on piano by Matilda Stone and although I'm very much not going to nominate a highlight among such an accomplished cast of musicians, Dolly Vann's interpretation of With You, from Ghost, the Musical, was very moving and expressive. I'll have to look that one up as one of several pieces that were new to me.

Daniel Waldren's clarinet technique did well with the challenges of Fantasy Piece by Carl Nielsen which might have been one of the most difficult pieces played.

I've looked up to find a translation of Blaž Pucihar’s Z Eriko na igrišču from Flavta se igra and found it means 'at the playground with Erika', which makes sense given Matilda Wyatt's lively, lightsome flute.

Baroque is not an easy option but it was great to hear Joseph Youngs on the opening to the great Well-Tempered Klavier, there's plenty more of that to be getting on with, as well as Holly Eitel's famous piece of Purcell that caught its glorious upward surge. 

Inigo came back as a singer and used the sympathetic acoustic of the St. Thomas chapel with his top notes in Mozart's Benedictus from k. 220 and Caitlin added some Debussy piano to her earlier clarinet so that, as with the others, it wasn't possible to tell which was her 'first' instrument. If indeed any of them take priority over others but I understood that one begins to study a second instrument after reaching a certain level on one's first. 

Matilda came back on the oboe with a swing-along Italian Dance by Madeline Dring before we finished not with a bang but Daniel on piano with an impressionistic Lavender Field by Karen Tanaka.

I think that's the fifteen but special credit should go to Mr. Collings and Mr. Pilgrim, teachers not having given names by tradition in school, whose accompaniments were well-judged and it must be a pleasure for them to have such talent to worth with and encourage.

Some performances grew from uncertainties towards more confidence and others were self-effacing enough to dispense with taking a bow in their haste to get off. I can sympathize with all of that. If I don't have to read a poem in front of an audience ever again that will be soon enough for me. Perhaps such a concert is about development, promise and potential and perhaps there were future accountants as well as, obviously, musicians among the scholars but there's no time like the present and they're doing it now and there's nothing better than that.

I went into the Portsmouth Museum on my way home, it's just round the corner, but I either wasn't quite old enough or not of sufficient interest and they didn't have a place to exhibit me.