The Real meaning of Live : Kathryn Tickell, Martin Carthy, Eliza Carthy and Norma Waterson broadcast live from Robin Hood's Bay on Radio 3's Music Planet

The Real meaning of Live : Kathryn Tickell, Martin Carthy, Eliza Carthy and Norma Waterson broadcast live from Robin Hood's Bay on Radio3's Music Planet (Tweets in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
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New Year's Eve 2022

The Real meaning of Live : Kathryn Tickell, Martin Carthy, Eliza Carthy and Norma Waterson broadcast live from Robin Hood's Bay on BBCRadio3's Music Planet (Tweets in progress)

The felicities, candour and happenstances of live - ably and courageously, @kathryntickell broadcasts live from Robin Hood's Bay on @BBCRadio3 Music Planet :

All love, strength and wonder to @elizacarthy and Martin Carthy, beautifully remembering and celebrating Norma Waterson !

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 31, 2022

Lovely - partly as so unfamiliar* - to hear Martin Carthy, accompanying himself, in a different version of the tune to 'Scarborough Fair' ! :)

* And so, most importantly, we need not be distracted from *the words*, these puzzlingly parabolic words... :)

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 31, 2022

More to come...




































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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Live-Tweeting from The 2020 Proms : London Sinfonietta in 'A programme of pulses'

Live-Tweeting from The 2020 Proms : London Sinfonietta in 'A programme of pulses'

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
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1 September

Live-Tweeting from The 2020 Proms : London Sinfonietta in 'A programme of pulses'

We're still buzzing from last night's performance! Thank you to everyone that tuned in!

If you missed it you can still watch it on @BBCiPlayer 👉https://t.co/S4RseaVyb7

Set your alarms for a special archive broadcast of our 2000 Prom with Jessye Norman at 7pm on Sunday! ⏰

— London Sinfonietta (@Ldn_Sinfonietta) September 2, 2020

Prom programme-notes* are here ! :https://t.co/hijs3dErC3

I'd rather have heard a segue from the texturally engaging featured reed-sounds of the Philip Glass to Julia Wolfe's high-energy toccata crescendo, but @Ldn_Sinfonietta players need peer-applause !

* Track-listing...

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 1, 2020

Harder, perhaps, than the preceding works, because both neon (by @tansydavies) and Edmund Finnis' in situ (to follow) are relatively looser than those more explicit pulsations, they are harder to assimilate at first blush, and so will blossom more clearly with further hearings...

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 1, 2020

With this CD (somewhere !) chez Apsley, it will be interesting to compare the live version with that known from the recording ! pic.twitter.com/Jzd6YBdU5G

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 1, 2020

Not bravura per se, but an able and welcome demonstration of how it need not be electric guitar*** whose sound-production is bent and moulded in the actual playing.

*** Which we also associate with Reich, because, for example, of Electric Counterpoint or Electric Guitar Phase.

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 1, 2020

A resonance of two occupied places in one that once were, and then those fell who could not get away when both fell, and those who saw and mourned and witnessed those who had fallen (some here, in the work, via tape) - resonating with this place, emptied by death, filled by music

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 1, 2020

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Michael Berkeley's Private Passions on Radio 3 - with Ken Loach (work in progress)

Michael Berkeley's Private Passions on Radio 3 - with Ken Loach

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
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10 November

Comments on film, music in film, and film-making from Michael Berkeley's Private Passions on Radio 3 - with Ken Loach (work in progress)

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Un cane e il cuore ?

This is a Festival review of Heart of a Dog (2015)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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12 November (Tweets added, 19 December, 26-28 May 2016)

This is a Festival review of Heart of a Dog (2015)

This is a review, resulting from a screening at Hyde Park Picture House (@HydeParkPH), Leeds, during Leeds International Film Festival (@leedsfilmfest, #LIFF29)

Before seeing Laurie Anderson's Heart of a Dog (2015), it had been heard from, too, on @BBCRadio3 #LateJunction : https://t.co/7YC6i8kP5Z

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 19, 2015

Heart of a Dog (2015) is personal, but universal, and Laurie Anderson provokes us to examine our thoughts and feelings about the mortality of others, and that of ourselves. What we have to know in her film, we will - over time - be told, but we most need to give ourselves over to its visual aspects, which, for some, might be a testing fifteen minutes or so of confusion, unless they learn to be able to yield to the purely cinematic nature of what is to be seen*. For, although there is a narrative to this work, it is not just or even the one that we may take it to be, and images and words are allusive in ways at which we can only later begin to grasp, maybe not whilst still in the cinema.

Hearing excerpts of the soundtrack, through the ministry of Fiona Talkington’s (@fionatalkington’s) recent fortnight on Radio 3’s (@BBCRadio3’s) Late Junction (#LateJunction), had created a little apprehension about what watching Heart of a Dog (2015) - what might it be like, and was it going to be any good ? However, what had been heard was a pale shadow of the film itself, but it did usefully preview some of its meditative and authorial traits, as well as introducing the characteristics of Anderson’s composed sound-world. This film is in the league of complete works of art, which meant that what had been broadcast proved somewhat misleading about the strength of the whole : if one knows Psycho (1960), Herrmann’s score may be divorced from it and evoke its scenes with success (or, for that matter, the soundtrack could – as Scorsese suggests in Hitchcock / Truffaut (2015) – be removed without affecting the power of, and story contained in, Hitchcock’s shots).

Anderson’s principal presence is in a voice-over, which takes a while to materialize, and is sometimes silent for periods at a time. (Perhaps because of an issue with the DCP, or with the audio-system, that emanation did not seem altogether seamless ?) Again, it makes this film hers, but it does so quite without forcing it or her beliefs on us. Although she consults her spiritual teacher, and reports what her teacher told her, this is not even in the nature of confession, or of imparting immutable truth, but as one wanting to understand what it might be for another to die – and, thus, for Anderson herself to die – and to present that as a matter for consideration and enquiry.

-> Not to be reminded that Laurie Anderson had been married to Lou Reed (who died in 2013), but because it's an undivided Gesamtkunstwerk.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 27, 2016

That other may (initially) be a dog, and Anderson and others who know Lolabelle may have been guided to decisions with which some might take issue (i.e. as to what was right or clinically best for her), but we should not be put off by that : the question of this death and dying is not an isolated, maudlin one, but opens out to ask what we perceive of life, and what it and reality could consist in. When Anderson talks to us, she is gregarious in this role, and willing to share – whether it is through her wry humour, or by expressing her pain or uncertainty, that is what she wants to convey, rather than any claim to insight or to observations with which we cannot find a relation.

In some moments, where Anderson is choosing to be sparing with spoken words, she lets other aspects of the film talk to us : the richness comes through in a sort of surrender, in which one senses that she probably surrendered her own preconceptions about what this film was to be, along with artistic judgements of a highly conscious kind, to the organizational forces within memory, pattern, and illusion. The images, and recollections as to their shifting shape, colour, and formation, are what remain with us after this film – the strong sense of an artist engaging deeply with issues about our relations with each other, and what, in them and in us, make us who we feel ourselves to be.

-> Of course, as well by such aspects of her score, photography, cinematography, and in the editing, choice of footage, and the film's arc

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 26, 2016

-> Using camerawork that refuses to re-create scenes with some pristine 'reality', Anderson acknowledges the tugs of memory and forgetting

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 28, 2016

End-notes

* One can read, in the comments on IMDb, the horribly literal expectations of Leviathan (2012) that it is accused of having disappointed…


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What a puzzling thing to assert !

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8 October

If, @CatherineJBott, you have only heard the so-called Kegelstatt trio K. 498 once before, you mistake in thinking it obscure on @BBCRadio3.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 6, 2013

If one has researched something (and somehow one's research was misguided), whether or not on one's own behalf, that is unfortunate.

However, the Kegelstatt Trio is no rarity (although Catherine Bott's interlocutor, from The London Conchord Ensemble, calmly treated it, in his response, as if it were), but it seems as though Miss Bott had never heard it again, after being on a judging panel that awarded a prize to performers of the piece, until now (Live in Concert from Champs Hill, Sussex, from 7.30 on Sunday evening).


I surely cannot have been alone in wondering why she was suggesting it recondite, when the very 'composed in a skittle-alley' claim (on which point she observed that the programme-writer miserably stated that there is no documentary evidence to support this account) draws one's attention to it at every time that Radio 3 bills it.

As it is, asking a question based on the premise that an unusual work had been unearthed, just made the interview appear an exercise in folly for the radio station as much as the questioner : as soon ask why Piano Concerto No. 22 is so infrequently played to lose credibility !


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Robin Holloway's Gilded Goldbergs are given a rare live performance (Radio 3)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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15 October

Pretty nauseating if for you have any feeling for The Goldberg Variations BWV 988, but probably meant to be, to hear Huw Watkins and Ashley Wass, who are no doubt engaged in an exercise of stripping away the veneer, playing what Robin Holloway has done to the piece with two pianos, a plastic carp, a buoy and 80m of fishing-line (after all, Cambridge, Faculty of Music, etc., etc.).

From what I judge, the effects, when not simply those of subverting the harmonic structure, are such that any imprecision juts out like a promontory, since these ones sound like performance errors - full marks to Holloway for making himself seem admirably postmodern, but why couldn't he (despite his peeling away layers) have chosen something else to get his treatment?

Why not even get a poor piece of music and arrange for trombone and walking-stick if you like, but get the thing to work, rather than maul Bach in a way that, all the time, makes you wish that you could only hear the original? Or is it like getting an image of the sun on your retina, but it bizarrely makes what you've taken for granted look better...? If I spin Richard Egarr's two-CD Harmonia Mundi set on harpsichord, will it seem dazzlingly more alive, after the ritual slaughter - like Aslan, bigger and better for submitting himself to a night on The Stone Table?

Nearly done, with the aria being mangled as if by Les Dawson, in what are better called Gelded Goldbergs, which make Mahler mucking around with Beethoven symphonies seem almost laudable. Our reward, seemingly, to hear the Aria (after the repeat of the Aria chez Holloway) unbuggered, but it may just be an excuse for a final raspberry..., which it is, in terms of RH now prettifying the texture with adornments from some quite other age, now thankfully over.

Twaddle to close from presenter Tom Redmond, and, thanks to him, I can rest happy that RH, at least, looked absolutely delighted with having heard his own burning, I mean gilding.


STOP PRESS A review, by the fetching entitled Jed Distler (who is surely an anagram), of a recording of this work...


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Snippets of Shakespeare (with thanks to Radio 3)

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29 April

Some responses to hearing (part of - my fault, not Radio 3's!) the new radio production of Romeo and Juliet to-night


1. What are we to make of Friar Lawrence?

Not really what Prokofiev did in that singing melody that he gave to him in the ballet (and the piano suite that derived from it - at least, until I check, I think that it was in that order (not that the piano writing was fleshed out for orchestra)).

I have little idea whether it is still fashionable to call Shakespeare plays such as Measure for Measure (and All's Well that Ends Well) by the name 'problem plays' (or who originated that term), but the Duke's ethics in MfM seem no more dodgy than the friar's!


2. Whisky in Shakespeare

Not that it was called that in this play, but that is, essentially, what the acqua vitae* that is called for when Juliet's body is found, after she has taken the friar's concoction and so appears dead (but might be capable of being revived).


3. Overacting in Shakespeare

As the scene unfolded, it may have been the performance, but the reactions - in particular of Juliet's father - seemed overblown (and even ridiculous) in an age much more used to mortality at any age (Juliet's certainly being no safeguard) than ours.

For me, almost reminiscent of Lady Macbeth's awkwardly incriminating interjection, roundly put down as inappropriate given that the king has been killed, to the effect not in our house!


4. Sun and Moon

For those who have read - or dare to read - Lunch on the moon?, my own lines needfully do not bear comparison with:


Arise fair sun and kill the envious moon
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou her maid art far more fair than she

(Act 2, Scene 2)



5. Another link with Macbeth

Macduff, when he enquires after his wife, is told that she is 'well' (meaning, as used, really that she is at rest), and only comes to the realization about 'all my pretty chickens and their dam' a few lines later.

Here, with the economy that we will see below when Juliet kisses Romeo, Romeo introduces the word, in its usual sense:


How doth my Juliet? That I ask again,
For nothing can be ill if she be well.


To which Balthasar, his servant, directly replies:


Then she is well and nothing can be ill.
Her body sleeps in Capels' monument,
And her immortal part with angels lives.



6. The apothecary

Since the seeming source, in Brooke's Romeus and Juliet (1562), not only narrates the story, but gives characters speech, it should be possible to see how much invention there was in Shakespeare's Act 5, Scene 1, when, 60 lines in, Romeo procures poison**...

That said, before he does so, the Act opens with 11 lines' worth of a dream, in which Romeo begins by questioning the 'flattering truth of sleep', but also showing that, maybe, he is tempted to credit it, and, in any case, feels better for it (until the question in line 15, quoted above, to Balthasar):


My bosom's lord sits lightly in his throne
And all this day an unaccustom'd spirit
Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts


The purchase of the dram of poison, such soon-speeding gear / As will disperse itself through all the veins, put me in mind of a similar transaction in The Canterbury Tales, in the tale told by the Pardoner of the three young men who boast that they will seek out the villain Death to punish him - and find him.


7. The kiss

Brooke's narrative has Juliet kiss*** Romeus, but very differently from Shakespeare's portrayal of the touch of lips:

A thousand times she kist his mouth as cold as stone


Shakespeare's kiss is not only more tantalizing (as Romeo is clearly not long dead, and so might more nearly have been alive****), but there is a telescoping of several elements in barely more than half-a-dozen lines:


What's here? A cup clos'd in my true love's hand?
Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end.
O churl. Drunk all, and left no friendly drop
To help me after? I will kiss thy lips.
Haply some poison yet doth hang on them
To make me die with a restorative.
Thy lips are warm!


Two-and-a-half lines later, Juliet has stabbed herself, not having time for the long speeches and decisions of Brooke's narrative, as she does not want to be prevented from following Romeo in death when she hears voices.

No time for any more kisses than one, no time for farewells, but, more affectingly, the affectionate rebuke of her dead lover, and the conceit of wanting to share the means of death (with all its overtones) in that kiss.



End-notes

* Revd E. Cobham Brewer's delightful A Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, in an old edition that I have, reassuringly tells us, in the entry before, about Aqua Tofana:

A poisonous liquid containing arsenic, much used in Italy in the 17th century by young wives who wanted to get rid of their husbands.


Fair enough, one might think, but the entry puzzlingly continues (and concludes):

It was invented about 1690 by a Greek woman named Tofana, who called it the Manna of St Nicholas of Bari, from the widespread notion that an oil of miraculous efficacy flowed from the tomb of that saint. In Italian called also Aquella di Napoli.


** Which sounded like a woman, on Radio 3, not a man, make of which change what one will...

*** Sure a Freudian slip, I typed 'kill' just now!

**** I am reminded of Leontes, at the end of The Winter's Tale, kissing what he thinks a statue of his dead wife Hermione, and finding it warm to his lips' touch.


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True Stories (1986)

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2 March

Not (essentially because, ironically, of the story) much of a film (and I doubt that I would revisit it to be sure*), but it gave rise to what should be admitted is a great album (some people might like to say the same about The Mission (1986), released the same year, but I think that is probably unfair).

My best friend from school, for reasons that were quite hidden to me, had - probably still has - a great liking for Martinu's** music. A few years ago, and a few years on from then, he played me some favoured orchestral composition of his when we were at university, and, admittedly not intending to be complimentary, said that it sounded like film music to me. (He found, I seem to remember, some way of interpreting the comment that questioned whether that was actually a bad thing.)

I vaguely heard the concert in the first part of to-night's Through the Night announced by the very safe voice of Susan Sharpe (on the night shift yet again!), but it was only when what turned out to be Martinu's Symphony No. 1*** was playing that it struck me that it could be accompanying some action that I probably wouldn't want to pay to see at the cinema (not my sort of film), and I went to www.bbc.co.uk/radio3 to be sure that this composer was on the bill of fare.


End-notes

* Even if a whole load of Garrison Keillor (and Bill Bryson's take on small-town America) has flowed under the bridge since then. (And, yes, I do know that this is Texas, not the mid-West!)

That said, I notice (which is the reason for all this) that I missed a film last year about and showing David Byrne in live performance, and have added the DVD to my basket - somewhere - for when I feel like spending a fiver...

** Radio 3 doesn't bother with the accent on his name on its web-page, so I am not troubled to go somewhere else, only to find that I cannot reproduce it anyway (or is that the one on his Christian name?).

*** Elsewhere (work in progress) I shall be asking about how we refer to kings and queens.

In the meantime, this convention of calling works by titles such as 'Concerto No. 3' (which no one respects when talking about them - but, then, we live in a world where Tracy Chevalier made up a name for a painting and got away with it) suddenly seems very odd.


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That damn' Derham attitude!

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11 February

It's not exactly an oral swagger, but an over-hasty, confidential familiarity - no, an overfamiliarity - from one who is making quite clear who's boss in the presenter / listener relationship, IF you let her (which she wants you to do, and almost assumes that you will).

Yesterday, she said as if it were an expletive, or, rather, admiration of someone's bum, Gorgeous piece!, then whiffled off into some - perhaps more scripted (and, to be honest, I do not know whether these presenters write their own material) - string of information. As ever, briskly, with almost unnecessarily precise diction, which reinforces the message I know what I'm talking about, you should listen to me.

Unfortunately, it's so forced, almost so desperate to be liked and to make ad libs full of her own opinions and 'personality', that, for me, it is an unsubtle stamp of would-be trustworthiness, not remotely the sort of underlying reassurance that is just inherent in, say, the style of Fiona Talkington.


Yet this Derham attitude is not her unique phenomenon, for Radio 3 seems 'to have bought into' this feminine style of clipped authority: to my mind, Suzy Klein is almost indistinguishable, save that she is the only person that I have heard using the word 'please' in such a barked way* that it is quite out of place in asking a performer being interviewed to answer whatever he or she is there to talk about:

It had echoes of a child begging for something that he or she knows is forbidden (or, at least, it's time has not yet come), but delivered not in quite such a wheedling way, but as if to ingratiate on some other level, but, not on her own behalf, but as the servant of the listening audience: it's as if she is a Jesus, pleading with the Father for forgiveness for the sinners on their knees before the cross - give them, I beseech thee, but the answer to this question in your almighty mercy...


End-notes

* And unnecessarily using it, to impart some sense of God knows what! - counterfactual humility?


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Colin Matthews or Does the world need more orchestrations?

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3 February

I wonder what Colin Matthews would say if I commissioned another composer to orchestrate one of his very fine string quartets¹...

Presumably, to be consistent, Matthews would just have to go along with it, for, if he did not, what I heard on Radio 3 in mid-December would seem to be hypocrisy :

For the concert, in the Afternoon Performance slot, featured what the web-page describes as 'exquisite versions' of six of Debussy's preludes (three in each half), including such prominent ones as 'The Girl with the Flaxen Hair' ('La fille aux cheveux de lin') in the first part, and 'The Submerged Cathedral' ('La cathédrale engloutie') in the second. (Whether 'versions' is a choice of word that came from Matthews, I do not know.)

Now, I must have been very busy with what I was doing - and I was at work on something - or even asleep in my wakefulness, because, although I heard the concept announced (and marvelled, later, when told that all 24 preludes had been given the same treatment²), I failed to identify either piece that I have named (and I couldn't have missed them both). All that I actually registered was an inundation rather akin to that which did for the cathedral - it all sounded like some murky seascape, and did not sound unlike Debussy in that regard, but I cannot say that it added, for me, in a helpful to what Debussy wrote in 1910 :

Oh, the audience at City Halls in Glasgow seemed appreciative enough, but I do wonder what they had gained from the experience. For I cannot honestly say that, even in an exercise to challenge the too familiar³, these preludes are calling out to be listened to in a different way. (And, for that matter, maybe The Planets didn't need Matthews to produce a Pluto - although I believe that, since he wrote it, it is no longer deemed a planet.)

As it is, Mussorgsky's piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition may stand as part of the virtuoso repertoire (though one hardly ever hears it broadcast) and, I would equally argue, was in no need of embellishment, that ever-present arrangement by Maurice Ravel (in which, admittedly, 'The Great Gate of Kiev' is very powerful and stirring)⁴ is what many people probably only ever hear, and miss out on the beauties of the original suite.

Mussorgsky wrote it in 1874 as a tribute to his artist friend Viktor Hartmann. Without what Ravel did (and Henry Wood apparently withdrew his own orchestration, made in 1915, because he thought Ravel's version superior), many people would not know of this work, but do they ever, in fact, hear it, if they never come to a knowledge of the piano original ?⁵

Well, none of us chooses what he or she is remembered by - the successful writer, who had something like forty West End hits to his name, is thought of as having written Winnie-the-Pooh, after all.


Postlude³ :

He does the opposite of Colin Matthews in symphonic arrangements of Debussy, and one feels that one hears more in Gould's piano than from an orchestra - as against 'La fille aux cheveux de lin' and @the_halle / Mark Elder, closing yesterday's @BBCInTune ?https://t.co/4i4tFQQNAL

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 22, 2018

Or Symphony No. 6, in F Major, Op. 68 :https://t.co/hwHuNPEs4K https://t.co/y5rb8bmTYu

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 22, 2018

End-notes

¹ As, having heard it played live, Mahler rather pointlessly seems to have done with Schubert's String Quartet No. 14 in D minor (amongst other works) - he does not take liberties, thankfully, but what is gained by having more instruments to produce the sound, when that is not what the quartet, in my view, is about ?

(According to Michael Kennedy's book about Mahler, that arrangement, although one of two made in Hamburg, rankled with the orchestra in Vienna when he took up the baton, because they were viewed as complicit in what he had done with the likes of Beethoven and Schubert in these arrangements. I believe that some reckoned that Beethoven had known well enough how to orchestrate his Symphony No. 9, without an extra little beefing up here and there.)


² The Radio 3 web-page says that they were 'orchestrated for the Hallé Orchestra between 2001 and 2007.

³ And, to chip away the veneer on Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, I found Liszt's piano transcription very rewarding. His other such works, including the concert paraphrases, similarly endear themselves to me.

⁴ And there are at least twenty others, including one by Vladimir Ashkenazy (in 1982) that takes issue with what Ravel did (in 1922, commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky).

⁵ Even Night on a Bare Mountain is usually in the edition by Rimsky-Korsakov, and, for Fantasia (1940), Stokowski orchestrated it afresh.


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