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17 July
These words are sometimes thought of in another connection.
In the context of Richard Sennett's lecture at The Aldeburgh Festival, although he did not ever seem to suggest (in addressing his topic) how a well-designed place for the performance of music or theatre could lessen it, it meant the fear on the part of either some of the performers or members of the audience that something would go wrong with the performance, a necessarily inhibiting feeling.
When listening to The Menuhin School Orchestra play Mendelssohn's Sinfonia No. 1, the fears were lesser than when they started to play the more rhythmically and dynamically varied Apollon musagète by Igor Stravinsky, but they need not have been present in either case: the pupils' musicianship, as conducted by Malcolm Singer, never appeared to be in doubt, and they brought off this second work to great acclaim.
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Monday, 16 July 2012
Saturday, 14 July 2012
Watch out for Louisa-Rose Staples ! : A report from Thaxted Festival 2012
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14 July (revised 13 April 2023)
Malcolm Singer, who introduced the performance by The Yehudi Menuhin School Orchestra of the so-called Four Seasons (one violin soloist per season), told me afterwards that each player had had the Concerto in question allocated to him or her – it had not been, as I imagined, a selection made between the younger musicians themselves, and, as Malcolm was at pains to stress, there had been group work by the orchestra and the teachers, as well as by him, in shaping what we heard for each season.
That said, the allocation had been, as he suggested, on the basis of what would suit the individual violinist, and the result, in this first half, was a varied quartet of Concerti, whose character had not just been directed by an unchanging soloist. (A contrast, for me, with Adrian Chandler giving a unified performance with La Serenissima, this work’s last outing.)
Quite a clever approach, because, although we all know that recordings of this famous 'work' (considering it as a whole*) differ enormously, we do not think, say, to mix and match Mutter’s Spring with Heifetz’s Summer, and so on. We were asked to applaud each departing soloist, and greet the new one, with all four taking to the stage at the end. To hear the same string orchestra (plus harpsichord) sound so differently nicely brought out the instrumentalists’ adaptability as an ensemble, as well the variation that came from each soloist’s interpretation.
Although there was not one of the soloists whom I did not enjoy hearing, I have singled out Louisa-Rose Staples, because she played the second Concerto (Summer) with great poise, and, though I might have guessed from her stature that she was the youngest (she was born in 2000), it was not evident from the expressiveness of her violin-playing : it gave me shudders down the spine, because her tone was so good, and she phrased everything so well.
Otoha Tabata, playing Spring, seemed more integrated into the sound of the orchestra, to be emerging from it and then falling back into it, than Tanja Roos, who, as Winter, came last : Tanja seemed to make more of her Concerto as a virtuoso piece, and to feel apart from the rest of the texture, whereas Otoha used her fluency and technique within a different range. With such relatively new performers, although many of them have been playing since three, it is necessarily hard to know how much was direction from Malcolm and the other staff.
For example, the well-known opening of Winter (I believe that I am thinking of Winter, not Autumn) had a spiky angularity to the orchestral string-playing, which I do not recall having heard before, and which transformed not only the impression, but how the notes within the chords appeared to interrelate. In Autumn, which Sao Soulez-Lariviere seemed to have moulded into another different sound-world, not least in a central movement in a quite slow tempo, it was the overall shape of the Concerto that was laid bare, in a way that many a recording might not dare to do.
I have no idea what is ahead of all of these musicians (we had the benefit of four double-basses, and there must be competition), but, if she maintains her self-assurance as a performer with age and puberty, I would still tip Louisa-Rose Staples as a star for the future, though not to suggest that her fellow soloists might not be ones, too.
End-notes :
* The Concerti were, at least, published as a set of twelve - others will know better by far about the history of performance-prcatice.
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Watch out for Louisa-Rose Staples ! : A report from Thaxted Festival 2012
14 July (revised 13 April 2023)
Watch out for Louisa-Rose Staples ! : A report from Thaxted Festival 2012
Malcolm Singer, who introduced the performance by The Yehudi Menuhin School Orchestra of the so-called Four Seasons (one violin soloist per season), told me afterwards that each player had had the Concerto in question allocated to him or her – it had not been, as I imagined, a selection made between the younger musicians themselves, and, as Malcolm was at pains to stress, there had been group work by the orchestra and the teachers, as well as by him, in shaping what we heard for each season.
That said, the allocation had been, as he suggested, on the basis of what would suit the individual violinist, and the result, in this first half, was a varied quartet of Concerti, whose character had not just been directed by an unchanging soloist. (A contrast, for me, with Adrian Chandler giving a unified performance with La Serenissima, this work’s last outing.)
Quite a clever approach, because, although we all know that recordings of this famous 'work' (considering it as a whole*) differ enormously, we do not think, say, to mix and match Mutter’s Spring with Heifetz’s Summer, and so on. We were asked to applaud each departing soloist, and greet the new one, with all four taking to the stage at the end. To hear the same string orchestra (plus harpsichord) sound so differently nicely brought out the instrumentalists’ adaptability as an ensemble, as well the variation that came from each soloist’s interpretation.
Although there was not one of the soloists whom I did not enjoy hearing, I have singled out Louisa-Rose Staples, because she played the second Concerto (Summer) with great poise, and, though I might have guessed from her stature that she was the youngest (she was born in 2000), it was not evident from the expressiveness of her violin-playing : it gave me shudders down the spine, because her tone was so good, and she phrased everything so well.
Otoha Tabata, playing Spring, seemed more integrated into the sound of the orchestra, to be emerging from it and then falling back into it, than Tanja Roos, who, as Winter, came last : Tanja seemed to make more of her Concerto as a virtuoso piece, and to feel apart from the rest of the texture, whereas Otoha used her fluency and technique within a different range. With such relatively new performers, although many of them have been playing since three, it is necessarily hard to know how much was direction from Malcolm and the other staff.
For example, the well-known opening of Winter (I believe that I am thinking of Winter, not Autumn) had a spiky angularity to the orchestral string-playing, which I do not recall having heard before, and which transformed not only the impression, but how the notes within the chords appeared to interrelate. In Autumn, which Sao Soulez-Lariviere seemed to have moulded into another different sound-world, not least in a central movement in a quite slow tempo, it was the overall shape of the Concerto that was laid bare, in a way that many a recording might not dare to do.
I have no idea what is ahead of all of these musicians (we had the benefit of four double-basses, and there must be competition), but, if she maintains her self-assurance as a performer with age and puberty, I would still tip Louisa-Rose Staples as a star for the future, though not to suggest that her fellow soloists might not be ones, too.
End-notes :
* The Concerti were, at least, published as a set of twelve - others will know better by far about the history of performance-prcatice.
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Friday, 13 July 2012
Poem for a Vixen
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13 July
Poem for a Vixen
Regarding IKEA
(Not a native Idea),
I have some respect.
But I choose to reject
Going out on a date
Mixed with humping a crate.
© Belston Night Works 2012
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13 July
Poem for a Vixen
Regarding IKEA
(Not a native Idea),
I have some respect.
But I choose to reject
Going out on a date
Mixed with humping a crate.
© Belston Night Works 2012
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Tuesday, 10 July 2012
Music in London in the eighteenth century
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11 July
Thanks to talking to Nia Lewis, one of the Compagnia d'Istrumenti (who direct the University of York Baroque Ensemble), I now have a greater understanding of the potential for gut-strings to react to atmospheric influences during the course of a piece. As she observed, professional players are more used to the problem, and can more easily adjust for it.
This factor may momentarily have caught out some of the members of the ensemble, but, despite it, they did a very good job of creating a distinctive sound for each of the five composers whose music they featured in their hour-long programme. So, for example, the Symphony by William Boyce with which they opened was not only played very confidently, and with a solid bass-line*, but also sounded to be in its own world, a contrast with the different, and more extrovert, one of the Concerto Grosso by Handel that followed.
That ability is not something to be underestimated, as there are groups who are prone to bring everything down to the lowest common demoninator, so that what pieces have in common, rather than what sets them apart, comes to the fore. Then, everything tends to sound pretty much the same, and does not have its particular life - and joy (or sorrow).
In the Handel, the divided strings (led, respectively, by Daniel Edgar and Nia Lewis) brought the antiphonal nature of this music vividly into both visual and aural appreciation, and the programme notes (by Nia) usefully drew attention to Corelli's influence on the structure of the work. One could also believe that Handel, when in Italy, had learnt something significant from hearing music in St Mark's Basilica, and there was a real depth of feeling in the playing in this Concerto.
Nothing to do with the performance, but I am uncertain whether choosing a selection from King Arthur necessarily showed Henry Purcell to his best effect, but there were, of course, the limitations of a one-hour concert (rather than, say, two halves of forty-five minutes). Nevertheless, I particularly enjoyed the closing Chaconne, and was left wanting to hear more of Purcell's compositional intricacies.
The so-called London Bach, J. C., was amply represented by a Grand Overture, with strong forces in both parts of a double orchestra, twin flutes on one side (with the second violins), and a pair of oboeists with the first violins.
If my memory serves me correctly, there were also two horns in this piece, and, at times, their effect was reminiscent of the rich tones that Mr Handel has in the three Suites that make up his Water Music. As Nia observed in the programme, this member of the Bach dynasty favoured a 'steady harmonic rhythm', and the Ensemble, once again, brought out the individual colours and textures of his music.
We ended - and there would not have been time for more - with a piece by Arne that had, in a little act of disguise, been described as A Rousing Tune. And so was brought to a close an enjoyable time with these very good young musicians, showing the ensemble technique that, one hopes, may stand them in good stead, wherever the future gives them opportunities to make music.
End-notes
* Provided by instruments from double bass (Vanessa McWilliam) to cellos (Tim Smedley and Lucy Curzon), and, though I wouldn't now swear as to their involvement at this stage in the concert, bassoons (Ian Hoggart and Elspeth Piggott). (Other important textures were provided by Andrew Passmore and Masumi Yamamoto, both on harpsichord.)
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11 July
Thanks to talking to Nia Lewis, one of the Compagnia d'Istrumenti (who direct the University of York Baroque Ensemble), I now have a greater understanding of the potential for gut-strings to react to atmospheric influences during the course of a piece. As she observed, professional players are more used to the problem, and can more easily adjust for it.
This factor may momentarily have caught out some of the members of the ensemble, but, despite it, they did a very good job of creating a distinctive sound for each of the five composers whose music they featured in their hour-long programme. So, for example, the Symphony by William Boyce with which they opened was not only played very confidently, and with a solid bass-line*, but also sounded to be in its own world, a contrast with the different, and more extrovert, one of the Concerto Grosso by Handel that followed.
That ability is not something to be underestimated, as there are groups who are prone to bring everything down to the lowest common demoninator, so that what pieces have in common, rather than what sets them apart, comes to the fore. Then, everything tends to sound pretty much the same, and does not have its particular life - and joy (or sorrow).
In the Handel, the divided strings (led, respectively, by Daniel Edgar and Nia Lewis) brought the antiphonal nature of this music vividly into both visual and aural appreciation, and the programme notes (by Nia) usefully drew attention to Corelli's influence on the structure of the work. One could also believe that Handel, when in Italy, had learnt something significant from hearing music in St Mark's Basilica, and there was a real depth of feeling in the playing in this Concerto.
Nothing to do with the performance, but I am uncertain whether choosing a selection from King Arthur necessarily showed Henry Purcell to his best effect, but there were, of course, the limitations of a one-hour concert (rather than, say, two halves of forty-five minutes). Nevertheless, I particularly enjoyed the closing Chaconne, and was left wanting to hear more of Purcell's compositional intricacies.
The so-called London Bach, J. C., was amply represented by a Grand Overture, with strong forces in both parts of a double orchestra, twin flutes on one side (with the second violins), and a pair of oboeists with the first violins.
If my memory serves me correctly, there were also two horns in this piece, and, at times, their effect was reminiscent of the rich tones that Mr Handel has in the three Suites that make up his Water Music. As Nia observed in the programme, this member of the Bach dynasty favoured a 'steady harmonic rhythm', and the Ensemble, once again, brought out the individual colours and textures of his music.
We ended - and there would not have been time for more - with a piece by Arne that had, in a little act of disguise, been described as A Rousing Tune. And so was brought to a close an enjoyable time with these very good young musicians, showing the ensemble technique that, one hopes, may stand them in good stead, wherever the future gives them opportunities to make music.
End-notes
* Provided by instruments from double bass (Vanessa McWilliam) to cellos (Tim Smedley and Lucy Curzon), and, though I wouldn't now swear as to their involvement at this stage in the concert, bassoons (Ian Hoggart and Elspeth Piggott). (Other important textures were provided by Andrew Passmore and Masumi Yamamoto, both on harpsichord.)
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Sunday, 8 July 2012
Another The Hunter
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9 July
* Contains spoilers *
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9 July
* Contains spoilers *
This is one with Willem Dafoe, not Rafi Pitts (The Hunter (2010)), though there may be similarities.
We are shown, early on, that Dafoe's character, Martin David, is supposed to have traits of what is understood in film circles (e.g. As Good as it Gets (1997)) to be OCD. (I know someone about whom another thought that the acronym stood for her Obsessive Cleaning Disorder.) Thankfully, by now, Channel 4 - in its Channel 4 Goes Mad season - might have cleared that up.
Therefore we should not be surprised that, when he flies to Hobart and arrives at his base for his mission (the chaotic home of Lucy (Frances O'Connor) and her two children, near the settlement of Cascade), he is horrified by the state of the bath - and, suitably armed from the stores, blitzes it with feeling.
Moment of truth: As if Martin would choose to work where, all over the world, he is roughing it in the wild and not have come across similar squalor in the bases with which he is provided, but perhaps not have had any readily available means of clearing it up. (The novel from which this is taken might have explained, but it was written by Julia Leigh, the same Leigh who brought us what, for me, was a sterile experience in Sleeping Beauty (2011)...)
What is almost better is that the way in which the film is directed, much of the time, fails to spell things out (the link with The Hunter (2010)) , but then it does feel it necessary to leave hefty clues in mental-health territory (and this is a film all about Territory, a redeeming feature):
For example, an unmissable packet of Xanax on Lucy's bedside table, or her later* telling Martin about her missing husband's busy mental-life, and that she believed that her husband believed in what he was frightened of. That in addition to what we have been shown about a neurotically fastidious Martin, and the unspeaking Jamie** (Finn Woodlock), who, for some reason, was silent in the language of words, but not really (more later, when he does talk).
That said, Lucy's daughter, Katie (Sass, at just one point, but credited under that name by IMDb, and played energetically by Morgana Davies) and Jamie / Bike have informed Martin that there is an outside dunny, so God knows how he ever does deal with that! For he is shown, when first entering the bar (after the shock of the house and then seeking a room there instead), going there to use the toilet, but being required to pay for the first of two non-thirst-quenching drinks, which is so because he is greeted by the logger rednecks, champing to bulldoze down the forest.
That said, Lucy's daughter, Katie (Sass, at just one point, but credited under that name by IMDb, and played energetically by Morgana Davies) and Jamie / Bike have informed Martin that there is an outside dunny, so God knows how he ever does deal with that! For he is shown, when first entering the bar (after the shock of the house and then seeking a room there instead), going there to use the toilet, but being required to pay for the first of two non-thirst-quenching drinks, which is so because he is greeted by the logger rednecks, champing to bulldoze down the forest.
Whatever Martin does to satisfy his bodily needs, during and between his twelve-day forays (in the latter times, he returns to Julia’s house (bungalow?). Katie and Jamie initially encounter Martin when he has just opened the door of Julia’s room, and found her prone and asleep: at this moment, because of the time of day, it is clear enough that this is going to turn out to be the sleep of escape, and that Julia will be experiencing some mental-health issue.
They then regularly walk into his room without knocking, call his choral or operatic choices of music shouting, and nose around and ask questions. Love at first sight, in another moment of truth, as Martin comes to value Julia's family and family life. The fastidiousness seems somehow gone (submerged?), and we are meant to view this hardened loner as softened up - a Damascus moment, which informs the rest of the trajectory, but without any obvious road to it, or, otherwise put, any impelling reason to think that any of this can really be new, unlessgenuinely the scales have dropped.
This film, to be palatable, does rely heavily on the very well-done cinematography of beautiful landscapes, which distract us from the fact that we are otherwise just in Tasmanian forest and wilderness with Dafoe, and the little that he really gets up to is honestly not all that interesting (possibly because, unlike Bear Grylls, pretending to be alone, and telling us what 'you would' do, if you chose to be in the ridiculous scrapes with which he is involved, he has no need to tell anyone why he sets this or that trap, etc.).
Early on, he shoots a kangaroo, but doing so turns out not to be for food, however, as he throws the carcass away, and we then see what I took to be two of the Tasmanian Devils - which he is supposedly there, as his cover story, to study - eating it. Maybe he wanted them to eat that meat rather than his. (Later, we see him bait traps with parts of the organs from when he gutted the creature.) Somehow, though, the disparate acts do not match one's notion of a man surviving in the wild by his own wits - for all the haunted looks and stalking around, it was as if some alienation effect deliberately brought me back to the fact that this was Willem, not Martin.
As to Dafoe eating, we have a moment or two of him consuming something unidentifiable from a billy-can, but only forty minutes in. We know, actually, very little about his eating other than in one meal cooked by Julia, and one seemingly cooked by him, and it is not possible to say what he eats of what is on his plate. It is also not that he does not drink, as he twice orders non-beneficial beer (and it is impossible to say why he braves the loggers again to order the second one, except to set up a confrontation), but he refuses the Shiraz that Julia offers, and Katie says that Martin drinks tea.
All in all, for all that his principal, Redleaf (too much like red bush?), is made out to seem shadowy, what Martin does all the time seems patently mercenary, and Redleaf seems no more like a player behind the scenes than he a hunter than what he is searching for real. Again, all at a remove - maybe a clever remove, because, with Leigh's direction (and screenplay), I was bored to tears, but that is belied by sentimentality (not leastleading to and at the end):
Yes, predictably, Martin has one of those moments of hesitation. Unfortunately, because (in the implausible way in which such plots all too often unfold) he is (really for the first time, like Tom Baker in Genesis of the Daleks?), at the age of 55+, in a situation where he can no longer believe in what he has been hired to do...
This film, to be palatable, does rely heavily on the very well-done cinematography of beautiful landscapes, which distract us from the fact that we are otherwise just in Tasmanian forest and wilderness with Dafoe, and the little that he really gets up to is honestly not all that interesting (possibly because, unlike Bear Grylls, pretending to be alone, and telling us what 'you would' do, if you chose to be in the ridiculous scrapes with which he is involved, he has no need to tell anyone why he sets this or that trap, etc.).
Early on, he shoots a kangaroo, but doing so turns out not to be for food, however, as he throws the carcass away, and we then see what I took to be two of the Tasmanian Devils - which he is supposedly there, as his cover story, to study - eating it. Maybe he wanted them to eat that meat rather than his. (Later, we see him bait traps with parts of the organs from when he gutted the creature.) Somehow, though, the disparate acts do not match one's notion of a man surviving in the wild by his own wits - for all the haunted looks and stalking around, it was as if some alienation effect deliberately brought me back to the fact that this was Willem, not Martin.
As to Dafoe eating, we have a moment or two of him consuming something unidentifiable from a billy-can, but only forty minutes in. We know, actually, very little about his eating other than in one meal cooked by Julia, and one seemingly cooked by him, and it is not possible to say what he eats of what is on his plate. It is also not that he does not drink, as he twice orders non-beneficial beer (and it is impossible to say why he braves the loggers again to order the second one, except to set up a confrontation), but he refuses the Shiraz that Julia offers, and Katie says that Martin drinks tea.
All in all, for all that his principal, Redleaf (too much like red bush?), is made out to seem shadowy, what Martin does all the time seems patently mercenary, and Redleaf seems no more like a player behind the scenes than he a hunter than what he is searching for real. Again, all at a remove - maybe a clever remove, because, with Leigh's direction (and screenplay), I was bored to tears, but that is belied by sentimentality (not leastleading to and at the end):
Yes, predictably, Martin has one of those moments of hesitation. Unfortunately, because (in the implausible way in which such plots all too often unfold) he is (really for the first time, like Tom Baker in Genesis of the Daleks?), at the age of 55+, in a situation where he can no longer believe in what he has been hired to do...
Watch out for a blue flask and see it, if you can, as a totem, a sacramental vessel, a memory, but maybe just another bright visual cliché (you know the sort, if you try), which is actually a rather lazy linkage, meant to tie things up when the corresponding facts suggest more a Drive-type You can run, but you can't hide! form of resolution.
End-notes
* When Martin has cured her by the expedient (he's just off hunting again for the best part of two weeks) of instructing the children that she does not need this (and two other pill-boxes, whose contents remain unknown, but, just possibly, a sleeping tablet)).
** Or is his 'real' name Bike, as the credits suggest?
Noticed in York
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9 July
NOTICE
1. The drinking of Geneva & other liquors has destroyed thousands of His Majesty’s subjects.
2. Great numbers of others are by its use rendered unfit for useful labour[,] debauched in morals and drawn into all manner of vices and wickedness.
3. The selling of such liquors shall be restrained to people keeping coffee houses[,] ale houses and inn keepers.
1817 H. M Govt.
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9 July
NOTICE
1. The drinking of Geneva & other liquors has destroyed thousands of His Majesty’s subjects.
2. Great numbers of others are by its use rendered unfit for useful labour[,] debauched in morals and drawn into all manner of vices and wickedness.
3. The selling of such liquors shall be restrained to people keeping coffee houses[,] ale houses and inn keepers.
1817 H. M Govt.
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Friday, 6 July 2012
Stravinsky's Mass
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7 July
Inserted amid this reconstruction of a 13th century English Mass are two parts specially written by Gavin Bryars. The old and the new intermingle in the work of this stellar vocal ensemble.
This is what early music typically does just at the moment, e.g. Stile Antico, in their new programme of works from the times of all of the Tudors, having the Kyrie (and, maybe, the Gloria, too) of a Mass by Byrd followed by a work, say, by Tye before going back to the Credo of the Byrd, and so on.
However, since 'everyone' seems to be doing it, the words that I have lifted (above)* - from Trio Mediæval's CD A Worcester Ladymass - are describing a common approach, one that I did not want to hear applied the other night (on said Radio 3):
Stravinsky's simple, late Mass I know well, but it is never given a live outing. Unlike these fifteenth- or sixteenth-century settings of the mass, which it may be rather artificial to hear as concert works in one run and which may benefit from the contrast of another composer's style or another period's approach to help us focus on what it is that they are, his work is very compact and scarcely lasts more than fifteen minutes.
Whether it was the point of contrast for the earlier composer's music that was sung on this occasion, or it was thought necessary to allow entry into Stravinsky's sound-world by performing works that influenced him, I do not know. I simply wanted to hear his Mass, and then some other things, perhaps.
End-notes
* And which I could almost imagine Sean Rafferty saying (he who, for me, is the one and only true host of Radio 3's programme In Tune).
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7 July
Inserted amid this reconstruction of a 13th century English Mass are two parts specially written by Gavin Bryars. The old and the new intermingle in the work of this stellar vocal ensemble.
This is what early music typically does just at the moment, e.g. Stile Antico, in their new programme of works from the times of all of the Tudors, having the Kyrie (and, maybe, the Gloria, too) of a Mass by Byrd followed by a work, say, by Tye before going back to the Credo of the Byrd, and so on.
However, since 'everyone' seems to be doing it, the words that I have lifted (above)* - from Trio Mediæval's CD A Worcester Ladymass - are describing a common approach, one that I did not want to hear applied the other night (on said Radio 3):
Stravinsky's simple, late Mass I know well, but it is never given a live outing. Unlike these fifteenth- or sixteenth-century settings of the mass, which it may be rather artificial to hear as concert works in one run and which may benefit from the contrast of another composer's style or another period's approach to help us focus on what it is that they are, his work is very compact and scarcely lasts more than fifteen minutes.
Whether it was the point of contrast for the earlier composer's music that was sung on this occasion, or it was thought necessary to allow entry into Stravinsky's sound-world by performing works that influenced him, I do not know. I simply wanted to hear his Mass, and then some other things, perhaps.
End-notes
* And which I could almost imagine Sean Rafferty saying (he who, for me, is the one and only true host of Radio 3's programme In Tune).
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Thursday, 5 July 2012
What sort of beast is Dark Horse?
This is a review of Dark Horse (2011)
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5 July
This is a review of Dark Horse (2011)
One is not exactly left, as David Lynch arranged in Eraserhead (1977), with a feeling of being uncertain what, if anything, has happened, and it's not quite the ending-after-ending impression left by how the Lord of the Rings trilogy winds up in and with The Return of the King (2003), and yet both elements are there: the latter promises resolution, the former confuses such a notion with presenting, amongst other things, a head being turned into an adjunct for pencils.
As Lynch's film did, therefore, there is a questioning in Dark Horse of what 'a story' in a film is for, whether it is to satisfy and lead us, a bit like a classical sonata, from some sort of stasis into the turmoil of a movement in a minor key and back into the catharsis of the closing outer movement, or whether its roots are in the New Wave and before, which, in Buñuel's case, gave us, at the time time when the wave was breaking, the puzzle of The Exterminating Angel (1962).
Just about anything has been fitted into that pattern of things going bad and turning good again, from 10* (1979) to You've Got Mail (1998) or, as I recall, One Fine Day (1996). Much more interesting is when Scorsese gives us, in After Hours (1985), a film that takes us back to where we began, but with an amazing and satisfying - not from moral or plot point of view of - artistic resolution, in a whizz around Paul Hackett's office. Or Gilliam - when he could still be gutsy - with that sickening moment inside the cooling-tower at the end of Brazil (1985).
Subverting building up to an ending - or the expected ending - is one thing. Some view life as linear, and expect the beginning to be at the start. Others might prefer the sort of narration that Betrayal (1983), pretty close to the stage-play, gives us, and might relate more to a muddle of dream, day-dream, imagination, and sheer fantasy, such as, probably more convincingly than Dark Horse, films like Allen's Deconstructing Harry (1997) (or, for that matter, Stardust Memories (1980)) give us.
Though I do not think that writer / director Todd Solondz is aiming at that here: this is not Thurber's Walter Mitty gone slightly more wrong, but has, as it develops, really far more resonance with something very different, a sort of US Enter the Void, but without certain embellishments.
Rather implausibly, you might infer from trusting what I am saying, IMDb seeks to sum up this work in a sentence as:
Romance blooms between two thirty-somethings in arrested development: an avid toy collector and a woman who is the dark horse of her family
Hell, if that were what this film is about, it wouldn't deserve the time of day! These are superficialities, substituting for an appreciation of what the film implies about the creation and distinegration of personality, hope and desire. It is possible that reviews are more on target than what I have quoted, but I don't think that I want to trust having to wade through many opinions that will just criticize this film for not being what it is not - if, though, they were misled by IMDb's said 23-word snapshot (probably little worse than many a trailer), perhaps it is fair for them to air their grievances there.
Confused - probably stunned - as I was when I came out of Dark Horse and incoherently tried to formulate a response in talking to Jon, who was ushering, I gratefully received his affirmation of that feeling, and I shall, at some point, be following up his recommendation of Solondz's Happiness (1998)...
This review is dedicated to Jon, with thanks
End-notes
* Which, before Baywatch, might have been seen as exploitative (probably of Bo Derek), if it didn't arrive at a convenient moral ending.
Tuesday, 3 July 2012
Shall I compare thee...?
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3 July
I was writing this in Beverley, thinking myself so original, only to realize that the Internet is full of such parodies, and even with the same opening-line:
Shall I compare thee to a pile of trash?
Thou art more dirty and recyclable:
Rough Trade doth heat the stirring pangs of Lust,
And Clubbing's hours give all too short a night.
More some time...
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3 July
I was writing this in Beverley, thinking myself so original, only to realize that the Internet is full of such parodies, and even with the same opening-line:
Shall I compare thee to a pile of trash?
Thou art more dirty and recyclable:
Rough Trade doth heat the stirring pangs of Lust,
And Clubbing's hours give all too short a night.
More some time...
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Monday, 2 July 2012
The woman at the next table
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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2 July
She is talking in French - I know that - but I think that she is playing a private game, a bit as barristers do with patterns of words that they try to get past judges:
Ten minutes ago, she said crapeau, a word that anyone who studied the language to 'A' level seems destined to have been taught. (Probably, Eddie Izzard would know why.)
Then, a few minutes later, it was drapeau, and a sound-world was emerging, if not, for want of desire to follow this well-enuniciated French (unlike that rather throaty, self-swalowing kind of her interlocutor), which I think that I could, any obvious other connection.
I believe that there may be a word frap[p]eau* - will that leap out at me next?
End-notes
* Although, now that I check, Google thinks that I have got crapeau wrong, and wants to offer me crapaud instead - twice. As to frappeau, maybe not, but there's frappé, and even - with crapaud - grapaud.
Ô!
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2 July
She is talking in French - I know that - but I think that she is playing a private game, a bit as barristers do with patterns of words that they try to get past judges:
Ten minutes ago, she said crapeau, a word that anyone who studied the language to 'A' level seems destined to have been taught. (Probably, Eddie Izzard would know why.)
Then, a few minutes later, it was drapeau, and a sound-world was emerging, if not, for want of desire to follow this well-enuniciated French (unlike that rather throaty, self-swalowing kind of her interlocutor), which I think that I could, any obvious other connection.
I believe that there may be a word frap[p]eau* - will that leap out at me next?
End-notes
* Although, now that I check, Google thinks that I have got crapeau wrong, and wants to offer me crapaud instead - twice. As to frappeau, maybe not, but there's frappé, and even - with crapaud - grapaud.
Ô!
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Sunday, 1 July 2012
Beneficial exercise - or not going to the gym (2)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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1 July
What I seem to have failed to suggest in that earlier posting (although, really, it belonged there) is:
Exercise only does you any good if you're doing it because you want to do it
You can go through all the bench-presses and roiwng-machines in the world, but, if you don't do it with the love for what you are doing, there will be little or no benefit:
You will begrudge going to the gym, because it costs, hurts, makes you sweat, and, even, none of these claimed sexual encounters between gym-coaches and their trainees occur
All of these feed into a resentment at what is soon the chore of fitting in going to this place (where you have paid,or are paying) to do things that you don't enjoy on the pretence, probably no longer on yours, that it is doing - or will do - you some good
That resentment kills any possible benefit that could accrue to you, just as it would if you only had sex to lose how ever many calories the glossy magazines boast intercourse burns up*
These good things are by-products, by-products of doing something where you actually take pleasure in the exercise - if it is from rowing, then it would be from other things than just the mechanical motion replicated by the machine**, such as the people with whom you are rowing, the camaraderie with them before and after and exerting yourself with them, the river or canal where you row (of which, even if your concentration is focused, you will be aware), and, probably, the absurd pain of the hour of day at which you choose to do this
If I am a celebrity wanting to get my figure back after childbirth, unlike a mere mortal who does not have the resources, I will pay someone to urge me on, with psychological motivations picked for me to make what I doing pleasurable, if still a demand on me
I simply think that, forcing oneself to the gym (not least when one's increasingly infrequent or rushed visits are seen as something that one has or ought to do, not something that one really wants to do) is unlikely 'to deliver' what finding something like tennis or table-tennis or walking that one likes might
Which opinions I choose to sum up by suggesting that the spirit gives live, whereas the law kills
End-notes
* As if one can compare a marathon session of sexual pleasure, where your partner and you seamlessly adopt new ways of love-making (and build up a sweat because you are enjoying the intimacy of each other's body), with something perfunctory in the missionary position.
** Which, honestly, even non-stop MTV does not render palatable (or even renders less so).
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1 July
What I seem to have failed to suggest in that earlier posting (although, really, it belonged there) is:
Exercise only does you any good if you're doing it because you want to do it
You can go through all the bench-presses and roiwng-machines in the world, but, if you don't do it with the love for what you are doing, there will be little or no benefit:
You will begrudge going to the gym, because it costs, hurts, makes you sweat, and, even, none of these claimed sexual encounters between gym-coaches and their trainees occur
All of these feed into a resentment at what is soon the chore of fitting in going to this place (where you have paid,or are paying) to do things that you don't enjoy on the pretence, probably no longer on yours, that it is doing - or will do - you some good
That resentment kills any possible benefit that could accrue to you, just as it would if you only had sex to lose how ever many calories the glossy magazines boast intercourse burns up*
These good things are by-products, by-products of doing something where you actually take pleasure in the exercise - if it is from rowing, then it would be from other things than just the mechanical motion replicated by the machine**, such as the people with whom you are rowing, the camaraderie with them before and after and exerting yourself with them, the river or canal where you row (of which, even if your concentration is focused, you will be aware), and, probably, the absurd pain of the hour of day at which you choose to do this
If I am a celebrity wanting to get my figure back after childbirth, unlike a mere mortal who does not have the resources, I will pay someone to urge me on, with psychological motivations picked for me to make what I doing pleasurable, if still a demand on me
I simply think that, forcing oneself to the gym (not least when one's increasingly infrequent or rushed visits are seen as something that one has or ought to do, not something that one really wants to do) is unlikely 'to deliver' what finding something like tennis or table-tennis or walking that one likes might
Which opinions I choose to sum up by suggesting that the spirit gives live, whereas the law kills
End-notes
* As if one can compare a marathon session of sexual pleasure, where your partner and you seamlessly adopt new ways of love-making (and build up a sweat because you are enjoying the intimacy of each other's body), with something perfunctory in the missionary position.
** Which, honestly, even non-stop MTV does not render palatable (or even renders less so).
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Saturday, 30 June 2012
Meditations on John
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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29 June
This is a companion-piece to Meditations on Matthew
For the performance, I shall dwell on the positives, as the lack of separation of voices in the choral singing did not make, for me, for clarity in to-night’s St John Passion. With such a large work, not everything is likely to be totally to one’s satisfaction, and it is the overall feeling with which one is left that counts.
First, the variations in power and expression that David Shipley brought to the role of Christus made it a joy: not that joy has much part in the Passion, and sadness came to the fore, with tears, when he told his mother that the disciple whom he loved was her son, and to the disciple that she was his mother.
As to what holds the passion together, Mark Wilde’s recitative as Christus was beautifully sung, and the effect of the narration, in tandem with that of the chorales was truly thought provoking, stimulating identification, reflection, and, amongst other things, an imtimate sense of how what The Evangelist is saying brings the story close to us.
More to come...
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29 June
This is a companion-piece to Meditations on Matthew
For the performance, I shall dwell on the positives, as the lack of separation of voices in the choral singing did not make, for me, for clarity in to-night’s St John Passion. With such a large work, not everything is likely to be totally to one’s satisfaction, and it is the overall feeling with which one is left that counts.
First, the variations in power and expression that David Shipley brought to the role of Christus made it a joy: not that joy has much part in the Passion, and sadness came to the fore, with tears, when he told his mother that the disciple whom he loved was her son, and to the disciple that she was his mother.
As to what holds the passion together, Mark Wilde’s recitative as Christus was beautifully sung, and the effect of the narration, in tandem with that of the chorales was truly thought provoking, stimulating identification, reflection, and, amongst other things, an imtimate sense of how what The Evangelist is saying brings the story close to us.
More to come...
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Thursday, 28 June 2012
Down the Elephant and Castle for a lark
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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28 June
Well, I probably have many reasons to be grateful to Wikipedia®, some of which cannot be wisely publicized, but I am very pleased by this:
A common misconception is that the term "elephant and castle" is a corruption of "la Infanta de Castilla"
Not the sort of misconception that you would have because you dreamt it up, in the way that someone did a few well-touted (pseudo)statistics (such as inspiration v. perspiration and how much is in the words), but only because some factotum droned on, prefacing the whiffle by Of course as if it were all self evident, and wanted to get you to believe it. On some basis, there would be those who did, and who might then have passed it on to chums, family and colleagues with It's not really, you know.
The entry is an entertainining little piece, with even a Shakespearean reference, and tells you about such delights as Hannibal House (someone with a sense of humour in the planning department for Southwark? - no, I didn't mean that Hannibal!).
But forget what they tell you about the origins, and think giant chess (not necessarily in the spirit of Ron Weasley): the game was very popular in the outdoor form that we know from the seaside and the like, and this far before The Blitz, and a showman amazed onlookers with his chess-playing elephant.
Curse though I am for spoiling the story, but the elephant was just very good at following its human companion's instructions (for he was the real brains behind the outfit), and he would communicate moves to it, for execution with its trunk. The castle part came from the elephant's apparent fondness for employing the piece to get to check-mate (either that or from the sign used to advertise the attraction).
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28 June
Well, I probably have many reasons to be grateful to Wikipedia®, some of which cannot be wisely publicized, but I am very pleased by this:
A common misconception is that the term "elephant and castle" is a corruption of "la Infanta de Castilla"
Not the sort of misconception that you would have because you dreamt it up, in the way that someone did a few well-touted (pseudo)statistics (such as inspiration v. perspiration and how much is in the words), but only because some factotum droned on, prefacing the whiffle by Of course as if it were all self evident, and wanted to get you to believe it. On some basis, there would be those who did, and who might then have passed it on to chums, family and colleagues with It's not really, you know.
The entry is an entertainining little piece, with even a Shakespearean reference, and tells you about such delights as Hannibal House (someone with a sense of humour in the planning department for Southwark? - no, I didn't mean that Hannibal!).
But forget what they tell you about the origins, and think giant chess (not necessarily in the spirit of Ron Weasley): the game was very popular in the outdoor form that we know from the seaside and the like, and this far before The Blitz, and a showman amazed onlookers with his chess-playing elephant.
Curse though I am for spoiling the story, but the elephant was just very good at following its human companion's instructions (for he was the real brains behind the outfit), and he would communicate moves to it, for execution with its trunk. The castle part came from the elephant's apparent fondness for employing the piece to get to check-mate (either that or from the sign used to advertise the attraction).
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Interview with Mark Brown: The New Mental Health (1)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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28 June
This is just a place-holder - stop-gap, temporary blog-content - until I can post my interview with the editor of One in Four* magazine, Mark Brown.
Mark will be answering questions about The New Mental Health, which, following an important speech that he gave about it at a conference in Perth in Western Australia, he has just announced has been launched.
One in Four is written by people, including Mark, who have mental health difficuties for people - whether or not they have those difficulties - who want to read about the experience of having them or the further difficulties to which they give rise. (One might include construing that sentence!)
End-notes
* Thanks to an underdeveloped keystroke, that nearly ended up as the rather different One in Fur!
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28 June
This is just a place-holder - stop-gap, temporary blog-content - until I can post my interview with the editor of One in Four* magazine, Mark Brown.
Mark will be answering questions about The New Mental Health, which, following an important speech that he gave about it at a conference in Perth in Western Australia, he has just announced has been launched.
One in Four is written by people, including Mark, who have mental health difficuties for people - whether or not they have those difficulties - who want to read about the experience of having them or the further difficulties to which they give rise. (One might include construing that sentence!)
As I have grown to like this page, I shall, now that I shall soon be in a position to give Mark's answers to my questions, post the questions here:
1. Mark, you've called this The New Mental Health - what are you hoping for from
that choice of name?
2. Was launching this new approach in your mind before your strong speech in Perth, Australia?
Was there a flow of energy, in both directions, with writing the speech itself and gauging how people related to you and to you giving it?
3. Your magazine, One in Four, seems to distance itself from whether 'mental health difficulties' arise from - and are the field of - medicine by using those words. For you, will that still be the preferred term in talking about The New Mental Health?
4. Providers of services in 'old' mental health are usually hospital trusts, and, although separately set up, are part of the NHS.
Do you think that the NHS links bring with them a tendency towards being averse to risk or to a truly creative input into services from those who receive them?
5. Conversely, and maybe potentially, how might The New Mental Health differ, and what innovations in services and how, where and when they are available are likely?
6. Other than money, and enthusiastic participants, what else do you think that The New Mental Health will need to thrive?
7. Do you also expect any opposition from entrenched old approaches, and, if so, do you yet know how to challenge it?
8. Yes, the dreaded question, but let's make it three years: what do you believe the place of The New Mental Health will be in providing services by then, and why?
9. Finally, what message have you, both for those excited by The New Mental Health, and for the sceptically minded, who might be mindful of the tale of the monarch and his fresh wardrobe?
Follow this link now for the full interview...
End-notes
* Thanks to an underdeveloped keystroke, that nearly ended up as the rather different One in Fur!
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Wednesday, 27 June 2012
Tamara Stefanovich is in love with Scarlatti (and Bartók)
An account of when Tamara Stefanovich re-created Béla Bartók’s recital in Aldeburgh
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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23 June
You could see it in her face (which I saw in profile) as she read the scores and came to passages that engaged and enchanted her. (She played the Debussy beautifully in the programme that she was repeating from Béla Bartók’s recital in Aldeburgh, and even gave an encore of his prelude Footprints in the snow, but the look wasn’t there.) There was a definite smile, and there was the sort of reaction as if she were studying details of a lover’s face and suddenly finding a new expression, or a new way of the light catching it.
According to the quotation from Diderot that Richard Sennett had read at his lecture two days earlier, if it had not betrayed immersion in the communion between the composer’s score (between her and that of these three male composers), making faces during a performance would have been a bad approach to playing. As for me, I liked it, seeing her light up, sometimes even surprised (at a score that she also played yesterday), because she was obviously so much at one with what she was playing.
With Bartók, I noticed that she relished passages with cross-rhythms, the more declamatory statements of a theme (as towards the end of the Romanian Folk Dances of 1915), and also had a fondness for the fay and fantastic, the swaying movement or the outlandish gesture.
I was paying less attention at the outset of the recital, which had three Scarlatti sonatas that I do not recall hearing before – not, then, so much good for Bartók in his choice (and, I gather, he had made an edition), as shame on us in this century (and the last) that we still play just relatively few. Nonetheless, it was clear that Stefanovich was delighted at the articulation of a new theme, and how the music developed in certain places.
With regard to the way that the programme itself built up, Bartók had made a selection that worked well. For example, his Three Burlesques (started in 1908) could have been written in the knowledge of Debussy’s Pour le piano (finished in 1901), and Bartók might, for that reason (or because he anyway thought that they would lead well into the other composer’s world*), have placed them where he did.
Likewise, the Allegro barbaro had space, before and after, just to be itself, not throwing the other pieces into relief, but providing a contrast. Stefanovich made this programme her own, seeming quite at home with it: playing the composers with equal conviction, and giving us the subtlest dynamic variations, after the liveliness of the opening Prélude, in Pour le piano. Debussy himself then seemed especially sure of the bewitching power his themes in the second and third pieces (Sarabande and Toccata).
Happening to speak to Tamara Stefanovich briefly later, I clarified with her whether she had seen her remit to recreate Bartók’s performance. She told me that, although she had listened to recordings of his playing and had noted how he varied his adherence to time, she had not set out to imitate him, but to interpret the music as herself in the light of what she had heard.
It was a very impressive and thoughtful recital of seventy minutes without a break (I imagine that a break would not have been feasible on the original occasion, with a schoolful of girls to be settled in the church hall). My only doubt was, when it was not – as it no longer exists – the church hall in which Bartók played, what point there was in having the recreation recital in somewhere not ideal.
In fact, the Yamaha grand piano dwarfed the stage, leaving little room, on one side, for the wonted upright, and, on the other, the performer: I simply do not know how authentic such a black beast would have been to a performance in a town in the 1920s. I suspect that Bartók’s music may have proved a bigger beast, because it was my perception that the piano went out of tune.
An addendum :
I have since belatedly read the entry for these events (Stefanovich had given the recital, at the same place, the day before, after the lecture by Malcolm Gillies about Bartók's visits to Britain), and I need to say that there had been a reason, although a slightly tenuous one, for using the church hall in Aldeburgh (rather than a room better fitted to the quality of both the playing and the programme). It turns out that this hall had been the former chapel of Belstead Girls' School, and had been re-errected for the parish as its church hall.
However, although Bartók's programme for the recital is known (in his lecture, I am fairly sure that Mr Gillies had not - whether he had one - displayed an original printed document that set it out), and also that Bartók had been invited to play at the school itself. The performance was mainly for the benefit of the girls (although others could pay to be admitted : Mr Gillies showed the document that advertised the concert, which specified no programme, only five shillings for a reserved seat, otherwise two and six).
The venue remains unknown : the advertising does not give it, and, although Mr Gillies had the chance to interview a pupil (part of which he shared with us), it appears that doing so did not shed light on the question. So it may may have been the chapel, now serving as the church hall, but it may not...
End-notes :
* I come back to what I wrote about Colin Matthews and his orchestrations, feeling again that – just as it does a hand – the Debussy fitted its instrument like a glove.
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23 June
An account of when Tamara Stefanovich re-created Béla Bartók’s recital in Aldeburgh
You could see it in her face (which I saw in profile) as she read the scores and came to passages that engaged and enchanted her. (She played the Debussy beautifully in the programme that she was repeating from Béla Bartók’s recital in Aldeburgh, and even gave an encore of his prelude Footprints in the snow, but the look wasn’t there.) There was a definite smile, and there was the sort of reaction as if she were studying details of a lover’s face and suddenly finding a new expression, or a new way of the light catching it.
According to the quotation from Diderot that Richard Sennett had read at his lecture two days earlier, if it had not betrayed immersion in the communion between the composer’s score (between her and that of these three male composers), making faces during a performance would have been a bad approach to playing. As for me, I liked it, seeing her light up, sometimes even surprised (at a score that she also played yesterday), because she was obviously so much at one with what she was playing.
With Bartók, I noticed that she relished passages with cross-rhythms, the more declamatory statements of a theme (as towards the end of the Romanian Folk Dances of 1915), and also had a fondness for the fay and fantastic, the swaying movement or the outlandish gesture.
I was paying less attention at the outset of the recital, which had three Scarlatti sonatas that I do not recall hearing before – not, then, so much good for Bartók in his choice (and, I gather, he had made an edition), as shame on us in this century (and the last) that we still play just relatively few. Nonetheless, it was clear that Stefanovich was delighted at the articulation of a new theme, and how the music developed in certain places.
With regard to the way that the programme itself built up, Bartók had made a selection that worked well. For example, his Three Burlesques (started in 1908) could have been written in the knowledge of Debussy’s Pour le piano (finished in 1901), and Bartók might, for that reason (or because he anyway thought that they would lead well into the other composer’s world*), have placed them where he did.
Likewise, the Allegro barbaro had space, before and after, just to be itself, not throwing the other pieces into relief, but providing a contrast. Stefanovich made this programme her own, seeming quite at home with it: playing the composers with equal conviction, and giving us the subtlest dynamic variations, after the liveliness of the opening Prélude, in Pour le piano. Debussy himself then seemed especially sure of the bewitching power his themes in the second and third pieces (Sarabande and Toccata).
Happening to speak to Tamara Stefanovich briefly later, I clarified with her whether she had seen her remit to recreate Bartók’s performance. She told me that, although she had listened to recordings of his playing and had noted how he varied his adherence to time, she had not set out to imitate him, but to interpret the music as herself in the light of what she had heard.
It was a very impressive and thoughtful recital of seventy minutes without a break (I imagine that a break would not have been feasible on the original occasion, with a schoolful of girls to be settled in the church hall). My only doubt was, when it was not – as it no longer exists – the church hall in which Bartók played, what point there was in having the recreation recital in somewhere not ideal.
In fact, the Yamaha grand piano dwarfed the stage, leaving little room, on one side, for the wonted upright, and, on the other, the performer: I simply do not know how authentic such a black beast would have been to a performance in a town in the 1920s. I suspect that Bartók’s music may have proved a bigger beast, because it was my perception that the piano went out of tune.
An addendum :
I have since belatedly read the entry for these events (Stefanovich had given the recital, at the same place, the day before, after the lecture by Malcolm Gillies about Bartók's visits to Britain), and I need to say that there had been a reason, although a slightly tenuous one, for using the church hall in Aldeburgh (rather than a room better fitted to the quality of both the playing and the programme). It turns out that this hall had been the former chapel of Belstead Girls' School, and had been re-errected for the parish as its church hall.
However, although Bartók's programme for the recital is known (in his lecture, I am fairly sure that Mr Gillies had not - whether he had one - displayed an original printed document that set it out), and also that Bartók had been invited to play at the school itself. The performance was mainly for the benefit of the girls (although others could pay to be admitted : Mr Gillies showed the document that advertised the concert, which specified no programme, only five shillings for a reserved seat, otherwise two and six).
The venue remains unknown : the advertising does not give it, and, although Mr Gillies had the chance to interview a pupil (part of which he shared with us), it appears that doing so did not shed light on the question. So it may may have been the chapel, now serving as the church hall, but it may not...
End-notes :
* I come back to what I wrote about Colin Matthews and his orchestrations, feeling again that – just as it does a hand – the Debussy fitted its instrument like a glove.
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Tuesday, 26 June 2012
Playing a hand with the Lord
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26 June
You know that your mind is not in quite the right place to listen to a petit motet, even if you've never heard one live before, when you start thinking certain things on seeing the line
speravit anima mea in Domino
Yes, maybe pizza, but equally that game with the spotted rectangular pieces! (Still a pub classic, in some areas, with the regulars having grudge matches, I believe.) Do we really get the name of dominoes from here?
If Wikipedia® is to be believed, though, favela has nothing to do with this other line, in the Dies irae, as set by Lully for the funreal (?) of Marie-Thérèse, wife of Louis XIV, meaning 'will deserve the world in ashes':
solvet saeculum in favilla
Odd, as a slum area would seem to have quite a lot in common with a world dissolved in ashes. Be that as it may, the real revelation comes towards the end of this text that he composed for:
flammis acribus addictis
This, translated as 'doomed to flames of woe', seems to shed some light on the nature of real addiction, of being doomed to do something: when the word 'addiction' came to mean what it does, was someone making a judgement, whether or not moral, on the power of the person to escape it?
Sounds like a fairly condemnatory appraisal to me, which does not allow for hope - or change. Its life-history is in line for being gtracked down...
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26 June
You know that your mind is not in quite the right place to listen to a petit motet, even if you've never heard one live before, when you start thinking certain things on seeing the line
speravit anima mea in Domino
Yes, maybe pizza, but equally that game with the spotted rectangular pieces! (Still a pub classic, in some areas, with the regulars having grudge matches, I believe.) Do we really get the name of dominoes from here?
If Wikipedia® is to be believed, though, favela has nothing to do with this other line, in the Dies irae, as set by Lully for the funreal (?) of Marie-Thérèse, wife of Louis XIV, meaning 'will deserve the world in ashes':
solvet saeculum in favilla
Odd, as a slum area would seem to have quite a lot in common with a world dissolved in ashes. Be that as it may, the real revelation comes towards the end of this text that he composed for:
flammis acribus addictis
This, translated as 'doomed to flames of woe', seems to shed some light on the nature of real addiction, of being doomed to do something: when the word 'addiction' came to mean what it does, was someone making a judgement, whether or not moral, on the power of the person to escape it?
Sounds like a fairly condemnatory appraisal to me, which does not allow for hope - or change. Its life-history is in line for being gtracked down...
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Monday, 25 June 2012
My new favourites
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26 June
Two new browsers, and both straight out of (old-style) Doctor Who:
Maxthon
Dalvik
Maxthon has to be a strange, deserted planet with a Dalíesque quality to it, telegraph-poles supported by what one won't look too closely at, mirages, weird constructions with boiled beans. Whereas Dalvik is - predictably - an evil genius, trying, by frantic calculation, to find the formula that makes everything implode on itself.
OK, hints of the last adventure, Logopolis, for Tom Baker, but it's late... And the residents of Logopolis were (till The Master got them), after all, performing calculations that sustained the fabric of the universe, and the loss of the mathematics, if it hadn't been for The Doctor employing The Pharos Project to reprogramme space - time (albeit too late to save Nissa's family on Traken), was what caused the destructive void to open up.
Class dismissed!
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26 June
Two new browsers, and both straight out of (old-style) Doctor Who:
Maxthon
Dalvik
Maxthon has to be a strange, deserted planet with a Dalíesque quality to it, telegraph-poles supported by what one won't look too closely at, mirages, weird constructions with boiled beans. Whereas Dalvik is - predictably - an evil genius, trying, by frantic calculation, to find the formula that makes everything implode on itself.
OK, hints of the last adventure, Logopolis, for Tom Baker, but it's late... And the residents of Logopolis were (till The Master got them), after all, performing calculations that sustained the fabric of the universe, and the loss of the mathematics, if it hadn't been for The Doctor employing The Pharos Project to reprogramme space - time (albeit too late to save Nissa's family on Traken), was what caused the destructive void to open up.
Class dismissed!
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This poem is not just about Connie Booth
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26 June
This poem is not just about Connie Booth
Connie Booth
Is so smooth
That it shows
Andrew Sachs
Had attacks,
I am told
Prunella Scales
Recited tales
Of the east
John Cleese
Fights disease
To the last
© Copyright Belston Night Works 2012
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26 June
This poem is not just about Connie Booth
Connie Booth
Is so smooth
That it shows
Andrew Sachs
Had attacks,
I am told
Prunella Scales
Recited tales
Of the east
John Cleese
Fights disease
To the last
© Copyright Belston Night Works 2012
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Stellen
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26 June
Stellen
Sane and serene
They seem
These lights
From places not there
Where they appear
And, in the north,
I will never see
For myself
What the south has
As its 'show'
The tilt of the earth,
That darkness
We call night,
At best the moon
Illumines
And all can see it,
If, at the poles,
Maybe eightfold
Like the sun
The overhead sun
Yet, midnight sun
Though it is,
Unsetting,
It tends to melt
Rather little
These pinprick cousins
At night
Melt less still,
But melt me,
Melt my heart
© Copyright Belston Night Works 2012
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26 June
Stellen
Sane and serene
They seem
These lights
From places not there
Where they appear
And, in the north,
I will never see
For myself
What the south has
As its 'show'
The tilt of the earth,
That darkness
We call night,
At best the moon
Illumines
And all can see it,
If, at the poles,
Maybe eightfold
Like the sun
The overhead sun
Yet, midnight sun
Though it is,
Unsetting,
It tends to melt
Rather little
These pinprick cousins
At night
Melt less still,
But melt me,
Melt my heart
© Copyright Belston Night Works 2012
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Tu es Petrus
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25 June
There may be others who remember an averagely diverting series about a gumshoe - if he wasn't a serving police officer - called Petrocelli. (Probably, I could find out, and even buy some DVDs on Amazon for old time's sake, but there's already too much else to watch.)
He made me think (remembering the name caused the thought) of petrochemicals and petroleum, as well as whether it was a plausible Italian surname, and that took me to what Jesus said to Peter:
Much theology wants to describe what happens when Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves Jesus (using different words for the verb 'to love', as C. S. Lewis and others have observed), and to call what Jesus then says to him the 'reinstatement' of Peter. Me, I don't know whether he was reinstated or not (i.e. whether he needed reinstating).
What I do know, as others point out, is the pun that comes out in the Latin version of what was said (presumably from the Vulgate, unless, at this point in the gospel (or is it in Acts?), Jesus utters the words in Latin), which is where we came from with these products and fuels derived from what is under the rock. That, and Jesus, referring to Peter as a foundation (taken as the basis for the authenticity of the Roman Catholic faith*) when he says that on him he will build his church.
I think that it it the word ecclesia that he would have used, from which we, in turn, derive Ecclesiastes and ecclesiastical law, but I really don't know what was meant: not, I suspect, a church as we have it to-day, even if a body of people (rather than a building), and also not, I suspect, the unbroken line of succession that is supposed to go back to Peter (as the basis for the Vatican and what foes with it)...
Funny where thinking about a detective's name takes you!
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25 June
There may be others who remember an averagely diverting series about a gumshoe - if he wasn't a serving police officer - called Petrocelli. (Probably, I could find out, and even buy some DVDs on Amazon for old time's sake, but there's already too much else to watch.)
He made me think (remembering the name caused the thought) of petrochemicals and petroleum, as well as whether it was a plausible Italian surname, and that took me to what Jesus said to Peter:
Much theology wants to describe what happens when Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves Jesus (using different words for the verb 'to love', as C. S. Lewis and others have observed), and to call what Jesus then says to him the 'reinstatement' of Peter. Me, I don't know whether he was reinstated or not (i.e. whether he needed reinstating).
What I do know, as others point out, is the pun that comes out in the Latin version of what was said (presumably from the Vulgate, unless, at this point in the gospel (or is it in Acts?), Jesus utters the words in Latin), which is where we came from with these products and fuels derived from what is under the rock. That, and Jesus, referring to Peter as a foundation (taken as the basis for the authenticity of the Roman Catholic faith*) when he says that on him he will build his church.
I think that it it the word ecclesia that he would have used, from which we, in turn, derive Ecclesiastes and ecclesiastical law, but I really don't know what was meant: not, I suspect, a church as we have it to-day, even if a body of people (rather than a building), and also not, I suspect, the unbroken line of succession that is supposed to go back to Peter (as the basis for the Vatican and what foes with it)...
Funny where thinking about a detective's name takes you!
End-notes
According to www.ewtn.com/jp2/papal3/holysee.htm, 'The Holy See consists of the Roman Curia and other offices and services which assist the Supreme Pontiff in the Petrine Ministry'.What is Pritter's Achilles' heel?
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25 June
Serious or not, I do not believe that it is any more possible to have a debate by Splatter/Twatter than by MSN Messenger: with the latter, because of the immediacy of seeing the other person's reponse, it's all too easy to feel the need to reply quickly (perhaps, more and more quickly) and, sooner or later, say something (or in such a way) that, if interpreted differently, gives rise to offence, defence and even reprisal.
In theory, if the visuals on Skype weren't such rubbish and not in synch, it would be better than a telephone-call. Still, with a conversation by telephone, there is potential for noticing and acting on such cues as inflexion, intonation, breathiness of the voice, involuntary ways of evincing surprise, shock, etc. - you know, all those things that go to make up the 92% in that standard iceberg cod-psychology diagram*, which purports to show how little of the meaning in a face-to-face conversation is in the words. (Oh yes, generalizing diagram? Just try saying 'You're fired!'(or 'Your mother is dead') to someone in a serious voice, and ask how little he or she took from your words!)
As to Pratter, with a character-limit similar to text-messaging's regrettable re-invention of the telegram's pressure on words to save charges, it should be no worse than text-messaging, except that there is an arena, a sort of Big Top: by which I mean that, if I send a text-message to Dr Paul, some time (which may be longer than one expects) it gets to his phone and, one hopes, he reads it and, in his own time, replies (if it needs a reply).
So much holds true for both: I can choose to expend money or time on an extended text-message, just as I can send a follow-up Tweet straight after. What remains (or results) is the fragmentary nature, not just of the correspondence, but also of the means of conducting it (especially on a handheld device), which has the potential, not least when other debates / conversations are going on at the same, for participants not stopping to check what the other person did say before letting go a broadside.
However, telecomms errors and hacking apart, a text-message doesn't go to anyone else's phone, for which read 'is publicly available on Witter - until I choose to delete it - for anyone who decides to do what is weirdly called following me' (sounds like licensed stalking ['Someone's following me' never sounded like a good thing before], but there we go. Here, though, with my debate with Dr Paul, which may involve misunderstandings, misrememberings, misconceptions, all this is (circus again!) being played out before an audience, even if it probably is an audience that couldn't care less, and glances - or scrolls - past**.
I believe that that element of 'dirty washing in public' changes things, both as to the things said, and the desire (albeit resistible) to say things back. Combine that with doing whatever it is in 140 characters, or multiples thereof, and what a mess results!
End-notes
* Which, as Tomkinson's Schooldays would possibly say, was seen by Potter Minor on a training-course, reproduced afterwards with slightly variant percentages and passed on to Venables, who couldn't read the scribbled figures, but had a guess, and delivered them in a lecture heard by Barnstoneworth, who told Eric Olthwaite...
** Unlike the rubbernecking that gives rise to those dangerous slow-downs on Motorways, as if either the pulled-over police-car with the flashing lights gives a screw about the other drivers' speeds just at that moment, or the sight of a vehicle on its side is inescapably edifying.
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25 June
Serious or not, I do not believe that it is any more possible to have a debate by Splatter/Twatter than by MSN Messenger: with the latter, because of the immediacy of seeing the other person's reponse, it's all too easy to feel the need to reply quickly (perhaps, more and more quickly) and, sooner or later, say something (or in such a way) that, if interpreted differently, gives rise to offence, defence and even reprisal.
In theory, if the visuals on Skype weren't such rubbish and not in synch, it would be better than a telephone-call. Still, with a conversation by telephone, there is potential for noticing and acting on such cues as inflexion, intonation, breathiness of the voice, involuntary ways of evincing surprise, shock, etc. - you know, all those things that go to make up the 92% in that standard iceberg cod-psychology diagram*, which purports to show how little of the meaning in a face-to-face conversation is in the words. (Oh yes, generalizing diagram? Just try saying 'You're fired!'(or 'Your mother is dead') to someone in a serious voice, and ask how little he or she took from your words!)
As to Pratter, with a character-limit similar to text-messaging's regrettable re-invention of the telegram's pressure on words to save charges, it should be no worse than text-messaging, except that there is an arena, a sort of Big Top: by which I mean that, if I send a text-message to Dr Paul, some time (which may be longer than one expects) it gets to his phone and, one hopes, he reads it and, in his own time, replies (if it needs a reply).
So much holds true for both: I can choose to expend money or time on an extended text-message, just as I can send a follow-up Tweet straight after. What remains (or results) is the fragmentary nature, not just of the correspondence, but also of the means of conducting it (especially on a handheld device), which has the potential, not least when other debates / conversations are going on at the same, for participants not stopping to check what the other person did say before letting go a broadside.
However, telecomms errors and hacking apart, a text-message doesn't go to anyone else's phone, for which read 'is publicly available on Witter - until I choose to delete it - for anyone who decides to do what is weirdly called following me' (sounds like licensed stalking ['Someone's following me' never sounded like a good thing before], but there we go. Here, though, with my debate with Dr Paul, which may involve misunderstandings, misrememberings, misconceptions, all this is (circus again!) being played out before an audience, even if it probably is an audience that couldn't care less, and glances - or scrolls - past**.
I believe that that element of 'dirty washing in public' changes things, both as to the things said, and the desire (albeit resistible) to say things back. Combine that with doing whatever it is in 140 characters, or multiples thereof, and what a mess results!
And who softened the blow / profile of all this under the cunning aegis of calling it all 'social media'? Pratter is a tool that has the potential to be a divisive medium, if not just a repository for endlessly spread links to Internet items or products whose actual worth or interest one cannot judge from the Tweet itself. This sheer advertisement and self-promotion might be better placed on t.v.
End-notes
* Which, as Tomkinson's Schooldays would possibly say, was seen by Potter Minor on a training-course, reproduced afterwards with slightly variant percentages and passed on to Venables, who couldn't read the scribbled figures, but had a guess, and delivered them in a lecture heard by Barnstoneworth, who told Eric Olthwaite...
** Unlike the rubbernecking that gives rise to those dangerous slow-downs on Motorways, as if either the pulled-over police-car with the flashing lights gives a screw about the other drivers' speeds just at that moment, or the sight of a vehicle on its side is inescapably edifying.
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Sunday, 24 June 2012
Knots in a whale
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24 June
When Kelly Ann Parsons became Kelly Brook, maybe no one had my inclination to try making Spoonerisms of everything – Belly Crook?
It could mean that she steals people’s stomachs, or, in the Australian sense, that a recent meal disagreed with her. (Either way, I wish that I could erase this thought and think of her name as I used to!)
But names are funny things, and have what the phrase calls a life of their own. How else would an NHS Trust come up with a title for a policy (‘P’ for policy) that spelt out CRAP? You could say that they were at least honest about the worth of the contents…
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Odd words (1)
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24 June
I happened to be thinking about Harry Potter, trying to remember the exact name of the listening-devices tellingly used by Hermione, Ron and him, and I ended up thinking about the word 'sneak' and 'to sneak':
As in 'sneaking a look', what the trio of friends do is to eavesdrop (another interesting word, I suspect) on what they should not be hearing. Likewise, creeping in somewhere, in the hope that others will be unaware, is 'sneaking in'*.
All well and good. If we turn to a person who tells others' misdeeds to those in authority, i.e. 'sneak' as a noun (also called a tell-tale), the illicit act is not (necessarily) finding out the information covertly, but in revealing what those people intended to be secret.
Which brings us back to the verb, the Peeping Tom / Lady Godiva aspect, of what was being done or discussed privately (because confidential), though, of course, the lady's act of riding a horse was rather more public. And what a shame that we remember not her civil disobedience at her husband's cruel measures, but this prurient element. In fact, whatever myth there may be, do we even know whether her opposition bore any fruit (other than the unwitting, negative one of Tom's downfall)?
End-notes
* There is the US past tense 'snuck', for 'sneaked', that t.v. and film have given us.
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24 June
I happened to be thinking about Harry Potter, trying to remember the exact name of the listening-devices tellingly used by Hermione, Ron and him, and I ended up thinking about the word 'sneak' and 'to sneak':
As in 'sneaking a look', what the trio of friends do is to eavesdrop (another interesting word, I suspect) on what they should not be hearing. Likewise, creeping in somewhere, in the hope that others will be unaware, is 'sneaking in'*.
All well and good. If we turn to a person who tells others' misdeeds to those in authority, i.e. 'sneak' as a noun (also called a tell-tale), the illicit act is not (necessarily) finding out the information covertly, but in revealing what those people intended to be secret.
Which brings us back to the verb, the Peeping Tom / Lady Godiva aspect, of what was being done or discussed privately (because confidential), though, of course, the lady's act of riding a horse was rather more public. And what a shame that we remember not her civil disobedience at her husband's cruel measures, but this prurient element. In fact, whatever myth there may be, do we even know whether her opposition bore any fruit (other than the unwitting, negative one of Tom's downfall)?
End-notes
* There is the US past tense 'snuck', for 'sneaked', that t.v. and film have given us.
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Saturday, 23 June 2012
Authenticity and the actual
Quitting Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI for Tamara Stefanovich
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8 July
Quitting Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI for Tamara Stefanovich
It was my big chance - hearing Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI - and, I had thought, a fitting end to a great few days of talks, concerts and even a film at Aldeburgh.
Only he and his three fellow musicians weren't a string quartet, but we were sitting in the same artificial hush as if they were, and we were hearing them play what was clearly, often enough, music for dancing, yet in a concert.
But, since we were in a concert, there was a mismatch that just didn't work for me any more than it does when people in a jazz-gig do not have a natural impulse to applaud - or even urge on - a striking solo.
The ancientness of one instrument that Savall was playing was patent in that it looked like a tree-stump, but I didn't know which of it was which and which the other, and the way in which the music was coming to us in this place seemed at odds with however accurate the performance-style and elaboration of each piece may have been : in more ways than one, I just could not believe that it was intended to be listened to or presented in this way.
Yes, maybe, if there had been dancers, it would have been different. I don't know what would have helped me feel that I was not in a sterile environment, trying to listen to the life in what was being played, but I just know that, however appropriately relaxed the musicians were, the resultant event felt stiff and unnatural.
I took the chance to write about Tamara Stefanovich's recital, and didn't go back for the second half :
For me, that helped to preserve (and not just in the form of a blog-posting) what I had related to in those few days, so that I could drive home happy.
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Thursday, 21 June 2012
Do you want to contract with me?
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22 June
The language of business is changing:
People no longer seem to want to talk about making or entering into a contract, but have - from somewhere - adopted this practice of talking about it not as a thing to be agreed, but as an action.
So the riposte to the line from the title is: No, you get smaller all on your own!
And the main issue is that no one seems to know how to say this bisyllabic verb, except that it cannot be the same as the noun. So, this most artificial of human activities sounds forced, and tense, and awkward, as maybe it should do...
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22 June
The language of business is changing:
People no longer seem to want to talk about making or entering into a contract, but have - from somewhere - adopted this practice of talking about it not as a thing to be agreed, but as an action.
So the riposte to the line from the title is: No, you get smaller all on your own!
And the main issue is that no one seems to know how to say this bisyllabic verb, except that it cannot be the same as the noun. So, this most artificial of human activities sounds forced, and tense, and awkward, as maybe it should do...
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The Unthanks and a film
This is a Festival review of A Very English Winter : The Unthanks (2012)
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21 June
This is a Festival review of A Very English Winter : The Unthanks (2012)
This was a cinema premiere of A Very English Winter : The Unthanks, a film made for t.v. (for BBC Four), introduced by the film-maker, who had perhaps prepared a little too much to say for such an occasion. Although Rachel Unthank and her sister Becky (Rebecca) were mentioned as clog-dancers as well as folk-singers, they had no opportunity to demonstrate the former skills, although they did take place in what was called a molly dance (which would originally have been to seek to raise funds for the ploughboys at the start of the traditional agricultural year) and one in which six dancers with swords came together to form a star.
Rachel and Becky ventured south to Lincolnshire, to Ramsey in Cambridgeshire, and Lewes in Sussex, but were not in the south-west at all, and otherwise in Yorkshire or nearby counties. The film ran chronologically and comprised six or seven events, starting with Hallowe’en and a mummer’s play, in which The Black Prince tried to attack King George. The prince was killed, but revived by a doctor with various potions, before Beelzebub put in an appearance and stole someone’s pint, which he impressively downed in one.
Whether quite, as the commentary by The Unthanks claimed, these various traditions such as lighting tar-barrels (carried on the head), parading through Lewes in costume and with huge numbers of fireworks on 5 November, and singing carols to lively melodies that had been written in the seventeeth and eighteenth century and banned by the church as too riotous showed adherence to beliefs other than wanting to do what previous generations had done (as was attested by cine footage) is perhaps doubtful: the anti-popery banners in Lewes turned out to be said to relate to an unnamed holder of papal power who, if he had been as bad, would have been one of the anti-popes anyway, and, although driving away evil figured in the mummer’s play, it was not obvious whether people did believe in ‘the embodiment of evil’.
As it is, I think that our traditions of writing and portraying evil on the screen do often show it as other, as the blacked-up Black Prince* was: we have a Lord Voldemort or a Hannibal to relate to and to wish for his undoing, even if life is maybe a little more complicated than that.
End-notes
* In truth, The Black Prince was an honourable knight, much loved and his death bewailed, as the glory of his tomb in Canterbury Cathedral shows, with all his ‘achievements’, i.e. his gauntlets, plumes, helm, etc., above him (these are copies, with the originals on view nearby), making clear that he was valued as the height of chivalry.
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Wednesday, 20 June 2012
Early Bartók
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20 June
A report from The Aldeburgh Festival:
The piano quintet by Bartók, apparently written 1903 to 1904 (and revised in 1920), is not even like the early string quartets in sounding like Bartók - except perhaps in the wicked dissonances of the second movement and, as it developed, its rhythmicity.
This piece, in four movements (the third and fourth linked), sounded initially as though the main influence had been Brahms, though it did not sound like Brahms, but another composer, aware of his piano quintet. As it progressed, though there were even vague hints of Chopin’s writing for orchestra and piano, and stronger ones of Dvorak (particularly the Dumky piano trio) and Tchaikovsky (Piano Trio No. 1), but the main person, perhaps, without whom this could not have been written was Liszt.
Obviously, in common with Dvorak, a composer who acknowledged folk music in his work, but, for me, the signs of Liszt at play were in the phrasing, the attack when the piano planted chords of its own as complement to that of the strings, and the sheer exuberance of cutting loose.
It would not have been, in true Lisztian style, for the piano to support the string texture so much, and supply it with patterns, motifs and melodies that the strings did not exactly took over, but maybe worked through with the piano, but I nonetheless see his thought-world in the making of this piece. Especially in one moment, I think in the third movement, where the piano doodles with some trills and a few related notes, and from this, as if magically (yet contrarily organically), a melody emerged.
Maybe there aren’t many recordings of this (I’d be surprised if there were), and maybe the magic of to-night’s playing by Tamara Stefanovich and The Keller Quartet wouldn’t be matched, but I shall be looking into this piece a little further – and not just to see if anyone else agrees with me about what was in Bartók’s mind and soul at the time!
Afterwards came a performance of the composer's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, admirably performed when Stefanovich was joined by Pierre-Laurent Aimard and by Daniel Ciampolini and Sawm Walton. It was a long time, too long to name, since I had heard this piece, and the first time to hear it live.
Infected though I was by what Richard Sennett had written in the programme about his lecture the following day to the effect that members of the audience, not just the performers, can be anxious that something will go wrong, I managed to put from my mind the notion that Ciampolini might come in at the wrong place or miss it altogether by concentrating on the pianists, and I had one the musical experiences of a lifetime, even confusing, though I was, the Piano Concerto No. 1 and even the Musi for Percussion, Strings and Celeste as to what came next.
The smile on my face said it all, and the rest of the audience were just as enthusiastic with their applause.
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20 June
A report from The Aldeburgh Festival:
The piano quintet by Bartók, apparently written 1903 to 1904 (and revised in 1920), is not even like the early string quartets in sounding like Bartók - except perhaps in the wicked dissonances of the second movement and, as it developed, its rhythmicity.
This piece, in four movements (the third and fourth linked), sounded initially as though the main influence had been Brahms, though it did not sound like Brahms, but another composer, aware of his piano quintet. As it progressed, though there were even vague hints of Chopin’s writing for orchestra and piano, and stronger ones of Dvorak (particularly the Dumky piano trio) and Tchaikovsky (Piano Trio No. 1), but the main person, perhaps, without whom this could not have been written was Liszt.
Obviously, in common with Dvorak, a composer who acknowledged folk music in his work, but, for me, the signs of Liszt at play were in the phrasing, the attack when the piano planted chords of its own as complement to that of the strings, and the sheer exuberance of cutting loose.
It would not have been, in true Lisztian style, for the piano to support the string texture so much, and supply it with patterns, motifs and melodies that the strings did not exactly took over, but maybe worked through with the piano, but I nonetheless see his thought-world in the making of this piece. Especially in one moment, I think in the third movement, where the piano doodles with some trills and a few related notes, and from this, as if magically (yet contrarily organically), a melody emerged.
Maybe there aren’t many recordings of this (I’d be surprised if there were), and maybe the magic of to-night’s playing by Tamara Stefanovich and The Keller Quartet wouldn’t be matched, but I shall be looking into this piece a little further – and not just to see if anyone else agrees with me about what was in Bartók’s mind and soul at the time!
Afterwards came a performance of the composer's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, admirably performed when Stefanovich was joined by Pierre-Laurent Aimard and by Daniel Ciampolini and Sawm Walton. It was a long time, too long to name, since I had heard this piece, and the first time to hear it live.
Infected though I was by what Richard Sennett had written in the programme about his lecture the following day to the effect that members of the audience, not just the performers, can be anxious that something will go wrong, I managed to put from my mind the notion that Ciampolini might come in at the wrong place or miss it altogether by concentrating on the pianists, and I had one the musical experiences of a lifetime, even confusing, though I was, the Piano Concerto No. 1 and even the Musi for Percussion, Strings and Celeste as to what came next.
The smile on my face said it all, and the rest of the audience were just as enthusiastic with their applause.
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Thursday, 14 June 2012
Beneficial exercise - or not going to the gym (1)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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14 June
A pill to motivate you to hit the gym?
Sounds too good to be true - but scientists think they have cracked it
The usual wittering of some sign-on page or other
If only there were a pill to motivate you to take that gym-motivation pill
And a pill to motivate you to take that one, &c., &c.
Or a pill so that such rot selectively just became invisible or did not attract the eye / mind / soul and wrap it up in the dross of ages past!
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14 June
A pill to motivate you to hit the gym?
Sounds too good to be true - but scientists think they have cracked it
The usual wittering of some sign-on page or other
If only there were a pill to motivate you to take that gym-motivation pill
And a pill to motivate you to take that one, &c., &c.
Or a pill so that such rot selectively just became invisible or did not attract the eye / mind / soul and wrap it up in the dross of ages past!
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Wednesday, 13 June 2012
Some poets
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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13 June
Passing for quirky observation, a string of abuse
At readings, some poets:
* Are just better at reading poetry - theirs or that of others (though not necessarily 'alike')
* Apologize for their poetry, in either of two principal ways
* Either explaining how it came to be written, or by saying - in more or less so many words - Here it is, for what it's worth
* Need to be told, in response, that it probably weakens hearing the poem to have it explained, and that, if they do not have confidence in their work, maybe they should not have had the confidence to say that they would take part
* After all, not even in his notes*, does T. S. Eliot, I think, apologize for quoting Wagner texts in The Waste Land, or otherwise, in the opening lines, suddenly introducing the German of Bin gar keine Russin**
* Forget that, as some have noted before, those listening just will not 'get' every reference (even if they study a text), and feel they need explanation
* Do not stop to realize that it appears curious to have put the references in, but still feel obliged to say what they mean, unless they are to be construed as boasting what they have seen, done, heard or read
* Read too quickly, not letting their words / lines / metre speak or sing
* On account of reading too quickly, and not allowing the reading to breathe, also underplay the end of each poem
* Maybe do not want to leave the final line hanging in the air, but there is little danger, as they are already finding the next book-mark, or starting with further words to introduce the next poem (whether its title or an explanation), and which mingle with the closing words
* Would, if they do not easily let each poem have a time just to be when read, benefit from applause between one choice and the next, which might slow them
* Might feel less frightened, and exude less fear, if they had the feedback of applause, although it seems sacrilege in poetry-reading circles
End-notes
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
13 June
Passing for quirky observation, a string of abuse
At readings, some poets:
* Are just better at reading poetry - theirs or that of others (though not necessarily 'alike')
* Apologize for their poetry, in either of two principal ways
* Either explaining how it came to be written, or by saying - in more or less so many words - Here it is, for what it's worth
* Need to be told, in response, that it probably weakens hearing the poem to have it explained, and that, if they do not have confidence in their work, maybe they should not have had the confidence to say that they would take part
* After all, not even in his notes*, does T. S. Eliot, I think, apologize for quoting Wagner texts in The Waste Land, or otherwise, in the opening lines, suddenly introducing the German of Bin gar keine Russin**
* Forget that, as some have noted before, those listening just will not 'get' every reference (even if they study a text), and feel they need explanation
* Do not stop to realize that it appears curious to have put the references in, but still feel obliged to say what they mean, unless they are to be construed as boasting what they have seen, done, heard or read
* Read too quickly, not letting their words / lines / metre speak or sing
* On account of reading too quickly, and not allowing the reading to breathe, also underplay the end of each poem
* Maybe do not want to leave the final line hanging in the air, but there is little danger, as they are already finding the next book-mark, or starting with further words to introduce the next poem (whether its title or an explanation), and which mingle with the closing words
* Would, if they do not easily let each poem have a time just to be when read, benefit from applause between one choice and the next, which might slow them
* Might feel less frightened, and exude less fear, if they had the feedback of applause, although it seems sacrilege in poetry-reading circles
End-notes
* Which, I am assured, were to fill up space, and not to be taken seriously, however fascinating the fisher-king.
** We have all heard of The Baltic States now, so Stamme aus Litauen / Echt deutsch that follows might mean more.
@TheAgentApsley
Monday, 11 June 2012
Of Cabbages and Kings
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11 June
To Chris Bell
Heat me, said the soup.
It was not, as fictional unwanted soup is, glutinous. It looked, smelt, tasty soup. That said, it was conciliatory cabbage, begging to be eaten.
But I hated cabbage and my former lover with it. When I used to do all the cooking, why did she think that I needed a bloody food-parcel ? Good soup, trying to say I love you, I want you back, but made with what I didn’t eat – what was I, Ivan Denisovich ?
I could just have dropped the pot in the bin, but I wanted to boil it dry, cremate it in the oven, and write huge offensive slogans with the residue. The saucepan had other ideas.
Hey, it said, I’m the reincarnation of Goering : treat me with some respect ! The author of The Blitz, demanding respect from me. I heated the soup. Ate it with silent rage. It was delicious.
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 June
To Chris Bell
Heat me, said the soup.
It was not, as fictional unwanted soup is, glutinous. It looked, smelt, tasty soup. That said, it was conciliatory cabbage, begging to be eaten.
But I hated cabbage and my former lover with it. When I used to do all the cooking, why did she think that I needed a bloody food-parcel ? Good soup, trying to say I love you, I want you back, but made with what I didn’t eat – what was I, Ivan Denisovich ?
I could just have dropped the pot in the bin, but I wanted to boil it dry, cremate it in the oven, and write huge offensive slogans with the residue. The saucepan had other ideas.
Hey, it said, I’m the reincarnation of Goering : treat me with some respect ! The author of The Blitz, demanding respect from me. I heated the soup. Ate it with silent rage. It was delicious.
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Madonna in Turkey
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11 June
There is a piece on MSN ('Why Madonna's made a right boob of it') about what Madonna did in her concert in Istanbul last week, flashing the nipple of her right breast during one song (Human Nature).
I tried to post a comment, but, for want of succeeding, here it is:
I don't see how, by calling women 'the fairer sex' (which is patronizing), this article does them any favours, because it simultaneously claims that Madonna has 'been a role model for women for nearly three decades' and that she always chooses to behave disgracefully and to trade on images of overt sex.
So is she a role model, championing sexual freedom, or is she an embarassment? Are women, lining the streets of our cities at night in precious few clothes, championing their sexual freedom or a disgrace? Would they flash a breast, if they felt like it?
I don't know who does claim Madonna as a role model, but there's no getting over the things that haven't been mentioned: appearing in Playboy, her explicit book Sex, and the film In Bed with Madonna, where she confronts another woman with a reference to their previous lesbian activity, so wouldn't that model have to include those undeniable matters, as I am not aware that she has recanted?
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11 June
There is a piece on MSN ('Why Madonna's made a right boob of it') about what Madonna did in her concert in Istanbul last week, flashing the nipple of her right breast during one song (Human Nature).
I tried to post a comment, but, for want of succeeding, here it is:
I don't see how, by calling women 'the fairer sex' (which is patronizing), this article does them any favours, because it simultaneously claims that Madonna has 'been a role model for women for nearly three decades' and that she always chooses to behave disgracefully and to trade on images of overt sex.
So is she a role model, championing sexual freedom, or is she an embarassment? Are women, lining the streets of our cities at night in precious few clothes, championing their sexual freedom or a disgrace? Would they flash a breast, if they felt like it?
I don't know who does claim Madonna as a role model, but there's no getting over the things that haven't been mentioned: appearing in Playboy, her explicit book Sex, and the film In Bed with Madonna, where she confronts another woman with a reference to their previous lesbian activity, so wouldn't that model have to include those undeniable matters, as I am not aware that she has recanted?
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Saturday, 9 June 2012
More about zoo animals - Harry Potter and the serpent
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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9 June
On that date, when I began this posting as a reminder to myself, we could read (on MSN) the caption:
Visitors to Rotterdam Zoo capture amazing footage of a submerged polar bear attempting to shatter his glass enclosure with a rock
Presumably, the vertical image of such a bear, not clearly doing anything (it could have been standing at a counter, waiting to order a drink), was - or was meant to be - that bear.
If so, as I have suggested, the choice of what to show was a poor one, if it was meant to exemplify the 'amazing footage', i.e. nothing very amazing about it, and a picture barely worth 10 words (This is a polar bear upright in water in Rotterdam zoo).
What is more amazing is the cunning, maybe subconscious, use of the word capture, for no bear would - unless bred there, with parents from the wild (itself, an awkwardly poor way of describing The Animal Kingdom where it is meant to live) - be in the zoo without having been captured. Our Let's capture this on tape! has the same thrill of the early explorers, and, in common with them, makes the chase more valuable than the rights or liberty of the thing to be caught.
Any story where an animal supposedly safely, i.e. we are safe from it, in captivity does something violent or dangerous is apparently newsworthy. I believe that I made a posting a few months back about a giraffe being attacked, which I shall endeavour to locate. Yes, thanks to the tag (and not a giraffe as such): Escaped lion kills camel at zoo (according to AOL®).
Which is where I come in with Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Whether it is Tom Riddle's snake Nandini, the basilisk, or the one in the zoo, there is something thrilling about the fangs, the venom, the glass disappearing, or the serpent otherwise making an unfriendly house-call...
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 June
On that date, when I began this posting as a reminder to myself, we could read (on MSN) the caption:
Visitors to Rotterdam Zoo capture amazing footage of a submerged polar bear attempting to shatter his glass enclosure with a rock
Presumably, the vertical image of such a bear, not clearly doing anything (it could have been standing at a counter, waiting to order a drink), was - or was meant to be - that bear.
If so, as I have suggested, the choice of what to show was a poor one, if it was meant to exemplify the 'amazing footage', i.e. nothing very amazing about it, and a picture barely worth 10 words (This is a polar bear upright in water in Rotterdam zoo).
What is more amazing is the cunning, maybe subconscious, use of the word capture, for no bear would - unless bred there, with parents from the wild (itself, an awkwardly poor way of describing The Animal Kingdom where it is meant to live) - be in the zoo without having been captured. Our Let's capture this on tape! has the same thrill of the early explorers, and, in common with them, makes the chase more valuable than the rights or liberty of the thing to be caught.
Any story where an animal supposedly safely, i.e. we are safe from it, in captivity does something violent or dangerous is apparently newsworthy. I believe that I made a posting a few months back about a giraffe being attacked, which I shall endeavour to locate. Yes, thanks to the tag (and not a giraffe as such): Escaped lion kills camel at zoo (according to AOL®).
Which is where I come in with Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Whether it is Tom Riddle's snake Nandini, the basilisk, or the one in the zoo, there is something thrilling about the fangs, the venom, the glass disappearing, or the serpent otherwise making an unfriendly house-call...
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Is Professor McMillan for real?
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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9 June
I'm sure that he's real, but is his every word on The Verb for real?
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 June
I'm sure that he's real, but is his every word on The Verb for real?
As I have said in a Tweet or two, great though it is to have the programme, has Professor Ian's geniality begun to wear a bit thin? That and the attempt to shock, inspire and amuse - I know it's the cabaret of the word, but cabarets don't always have the same Master of Ceremonies, and I don't get:
* Asking me to listen as if I were missing a layer of skin (in the last programme)
* Never having anything critical to say, although the occasional provoctaive question
* Even why there are so many regulars, given commissions or challenges
I have no regrets: without The Verb, I would probably not have heard Janice Galloway, written two pieces that I submitted to its competitions, encountered Paul Griffiths as (contrary)novelist (about which I have blogged elsewhere), etc., etc.
But would the next series of the programme benefit from giving guest hosts a turn, which worked well with Have I Got News For You? when Angus fell from grace.
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Friday, 8 June 2012
Spot the film
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9 June
No, I didn't mean 'Spot, the film', or anything to do with fictional dogs!*
Take a look at this:
A drama critic learns on his wedding day that his beloved maiden aunts are homicidal maniacs, and that insanity runs in his family.
What springs out about this as a one-sentence synopsis (taken from IMDb)?
* Is it the pointless specificity of giving Cary Grant's occupation (or calling)?
* Likewise as to when in his life the revelation takes place?
* The banality of the tone in which the message is conveyed? As if the text read
An accountant learns on his way home that his beloved maiden aunts are going on a long journey, and that a liking for travel runs in his family.
* Or is it this? That whether objectively the sisters are killers, who are acting under a delusion, they believe themselves to be sisters of mercy, saving those whom they despatch from further suffering
End-note
* This pointless gibe at the writings of one Lynn Truss was sponsored by a major Plc.
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9 June
No, I didn't mean 'Spot, the film', or anything to do with fictional dogs!*
Take a look at this:
A drama critic learns on his wedding day that his beloved maiden aunts are homicidal maniacs, and that insanity runs in his family.
What springs out about this as a one-sentence synopsis (taken from IMDb)?
* Is it the pointless specificity of giving Cary Grant's occupation (or calling)?
* Likewise as to when in his life the revelation takes place?
* The banality of the tone in which the message is conveyed? As if the text read
An accountant learns on his way home that his beloved maiden aunts are going on a long journey, and that a liking for travel runs in his family.
* Or is it this? That whether objectively the sisters are killers, who are acting under a delusion, they believe themselves to be sisters of mercy, saving those whom they despatch from further suffering
End-note
* This pointless gibe at the writings of one Lynn Truss was sponsored by a major Plc.
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