Serial

Have you heard Serial? If not, you should. It's an American podcast created by the people who made This American Life. (Note to self: listen to This American Life.) I discovered it last weekend, thanks to a lot of excited Tweets. The series is eight episodes in; I've caught up with them all. There's even a podcast about the podcast. I've caught up with that too. I'm hooked.

In Serial, a journalist is investigating a real-life murder case from the 1990s. She's interviewing people, picking through mobile-phone records, replaying the court case that ended up with a conviction and a life-sentence – and asking if they got the right man. The storytelling is superb; almost to the point that it feels uncomfortable to be so interested in something so horrible that really happened. Writer Linda Grant has described Serial as 'essential listening for writers' and a 'cultural phenomenon.' I'm trying to think if I've heard anything else like it, and I can't. Journalist David Hepworth reckons there is nothing else like it and that this podcast is doing something that radio just couldn't.

Reviews for BBC Music Magazine

I've been a bit quiet on my blog of late, but that's because I've been chattering away over at classical-music.com – and also learning how to bell-ring. More of this later.

Here's what I've been covering:

• Cape Town Opera's Showboat
• Lisa Batiashvili plays Bach at the Bristol Proms
• Britten's War Requiem at the BBC Proms
• Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 at the BBC Proms
• Last Night of the Proms 2014
• Reflections from Cremona
• Daniil Trifonov at the Royal Festival Hall
• Poet Andrew Motion on his favourite composers
• Christian Blackshaw plays Schubert at St George's Bristol

Become Ocean

 

Become Ocean is one of the most overwhelming pieces of new music I've heard in the last few months. I had the pleasure of interviewing its composer John Luther Adams for BBC Music Magazine. You can read what he had to say about his Pulitzer-Prize-winning piece here. And there's also a short clip you can have a listen to. Even 40 seconds gives a bit of a sense of this 42-minute seascape.

A long lunch…

I don't normally take the lift. Not since we moved from the panoramic heights of the 14th floor to the lowly fourth floor of our office block, where we have twice as much space and half as much light. But after nipping out to buy a sandwich a few Fridays ago, I got into the lift to head up to our eating area on the sixth. The doors closed, we started our ascent. Up, up and then… a lurch large enough to make me step forward, followed by an abrupt halt, final enough to make me swear.

This was my nightmare. Trapped. Seven years without getting stuck in those lifts. It had to happen one day, especially given the regularity with which they break. But, reassured the disembodied voice over the alarm intercom, someone would be with us soon. We had an air supply (hooray), we should stay calm and on no account should we try to open the doors.

Of course, worse things happen at sea. And once the initial shock of it had worn off, it didn't seem so bad. There was the comically awkward moment where we – five strangers, despite working in the same building – realised that we were going to have to talk to each other, and not play the game of silence normal in Bristol lifts and the London Tube. Because it turns out that a quiet group of people in a space narrower and shallower than it is tall is more disconcerting than working out what to chat about in a stuck-lift situation.

And enforced small talk is a refined art. Discussion of the building's flaws (the window pane that recently fell out on to the street below, the cup of coffee that caused health-and-safety alarm in a fire drill) seemed to fit in with the theme of the afternoon; informing the group that last time it had only taken ten minutes to solve the lift problem was generally welcomed. Mentioning films featuring lifts – Die Hard, The Silence of the Lambs, Terminator 2 – not so much. Wondering if the alarm bell that started ringing was a fire alarm? Total faux pas.

We were stuck in that humid, small metal tin for 70 minutes. At that point the lift company was giving us estimates of anything up to an hour for the engineer to arrive: he was caught in traffic. But someone outside forced open the doors on the floor above, we prised the lift doors apart from inside and scrambled up to fresh air, freedom and, oddly, the flood of fear that had been held back. Time for a cup of tea and that tuna sandwich. And, yes, from now I will be taking the stairs.

Airport novels

The thought of the airport bookshop might suggest cheap deals on throwaway page-turners, but I've got flights from Bristol and Belfast to thank for two utterly brilliant books I've recently read.

Strange Weather in Tokyo, by Hiromi Kawakami, is a novel from 2001. It's only recently been translated into English, in 2012, and, though I don't have the first idea what the linguistic nuances of Japanese are, it seems to me that Allison Markin Powell has done a brilliant job of retaining its essentially Japanese character while making it as natural in English as if that's the language in which it was conceived.

It's a love story. And a tale of loneliness. It's less quirky than the whimsical title suggests; in fact, its original title was The Briefcase. There's a strong sense of place, the reader's senses are tantalised with descriptions of the tastes of food and drink. At moments the tale is firmly rooted in real life, real emotions; at others it seems like a hallucination, an invention of the narrator's mind. It's not a long story, coming in at just 176 pages. But it is perfectly formed, in 17 sub-titled episodes. It's quiet, understated, beautifully observed and beautifully written. If you read one book this year, I couldn't recommend this more highly.

Coming in a close second is Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. I can't tell you what that's about, though, I'm afraid, as there is a jawdropping twist that makes the novel. Suffice to say it is a story about a family and what happens when it falls apart.

Reviews round-up

Over at classical-music.com, I've been doing a bit more reviewing:

• Mitsuko Uchida playing Schubert and Beethoven at St George's, Bristol
• Under Milk Wood from Music Theatre Wales
• Brahms Symphonies Nos 1-4 performed by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Kirill Karabits at Colston Hall
• Schoenberg's Moses und Aron at the Wales Millennium Centre, with Welsh National Opera
• The Fall of the House Usher: Getty and Debussy, also in Cardiff and performed by Welsh National Opera
• Puccini's Manon Lescaut, a cinema screening from the Royal Opera House

Photo: Stephen Cummiskey

Steve Coogan meets Strauss

There's the spectacular Italian scenery. The impressions of famous actors. The delicious-looking food. And then there's the music. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's The Trip to Italy has been credited with getting Alanis Morisette's first album, Jagged Little Pill, back into the album chart. It's the only CD the Italy-trotting pair have in the car, so it's the soundtrack to their drive from restaurant to restaurant. But there are two other bits of music that keep popping up throughout this second series, Richard Strauss's 'In ambendrot' ('At Sunset') from his Four Last Songs and Mahler's 'Ich bin der Welt' (I am Lost to the World), one of his Rückert Lieder.

The Mahler tends to be played at the start of episodes, as real-life concerns melt away. Brydon and Coogan are 'lost to the world with which I used to waste so much time'. But it's the Strauss that really makes an impression, accompanying a boat at sail, a shot of a dramatic coastline, the closing sequences of several episodes. It's always the start of the song we hear, majestic and glistening. Twinned with these stylish images, it seems to evoke a golden age of luxuriousness, a sense of wallowing in the glories of summer, a taste of how good life can be, even with its bittersweet moments.

It left me yearning to hear the whole song, and the three others that make up the set. It also made me ponder just how Strauss makes such an impact in just a few bars. What's his secret?



Here are a few thoughts. The first chord begins loudly, a blaze of E flat major sunshine that sounds more like an ending than a beginning. It is sustained but instantly softens, piereced by horns and bassoon, before growing into a singing line. Strauss grabs our attention, then holds us in suspense. The harmony doesn't change so we feel something is going to happening, but what? And while he holds us there, there's a chance to take in the grandeur of his orchestra: from the double basses playing the lowest note octaves and octaves below the stratospheric violins, flutes and piccolos. It's on an arresting scale. And it's capped off by those top instruments playing the third of the chord – the third is the all-powerful note that makes a chord sound major or minor – which somehow creates a sense of shimmering optimism.

That block of E flat major continues for five bars, before a shadow crosses the sun, and we get tinges of a minor key. And then the harmony starts to shift and dance, before, a good few bars later, we end up back at E flat major for the first entrance of the voice. The music never then reaches the same heights of that opening, never dazzles us in the same way. By the end, the violins are two octaves lower than at the start, the double basses an octave lower. The music is marked pianissimo. The brilliant sun has faded, and the sunset is poised to give way to night.

While I remain unsure about the self-indulgent nature of the series, the countless cultural references  – Roman Holiday, La dolce vita, Byron, Keats, Shelley, The Italian Job, The Godfather, the list goes on – give it, if not real depth, at least the impression of depth. And I'm sure the music was chosen carefully for its meaning. The 'script' (though a lot is improvised), after all, is so self-aware that at one point while the Strauss is playing, one of the secondary characters, describing a film, says: 'There's that incredible bit of music that keeps playing all the way through, it's romantic and then it kind of gets annoying.' Strauss even went on his own tour of Italy, visiting Rome, Pompeii and Capri, among other places.

So what is this music meant to mean here, if anything? It's a song, so there is, of course, a text. It's by Joseph von Eichendorff. His sunset is not just a time of the day, but a time of life. He takes us to a 'quiet land' where 'two larks soar upwards dreamily into the light air' (here flutes flutter upwards) and there's 'a vast, tranquil peace so deep in the evening's glow'. Is this, asks the poet, 'Is this perhaps death?' In this indulgent Italian idyll, all fine meals and stylish scenery, the two characters are on the edge of life, in a kind of limbo. There's both uncertainty and acceptance in Eichendorff's question, which somehow mirrors the spirit of The Trip to Italy. The series ends on an unanswered question, with Brydon poised between two choices. And, just as in Strauss's song the two weary wanderers contemplate the final sunset, here the final scene is a sun-bleached silver shimmer of sea, with a lone boat and a bird flying across. There's a sense of sublime peace, a sense of reconciliation with the fact that we'll never have all the answers.

If music be the food of love…

This week I've been writing a piece for Shakespeare Magazine on the theme of Shakespeare and classical music. It's such a huge and fascinating subject – he inspired composers as varied as Purcell and Goehr, Schumann and Britten – and it was a lot of fun to relisten to some fantastic music.

It's also exciting to watch a new magazine coming to life: Shakespeare Magazine was recently launched, on what would have been, as far as any of these dates are ever certain, the Bard's 450th birthday. It's free and published online, as a digital magazine that's put together just as if it had been printed-on-paper. Hard to believe, but it seems there aren't any other magazines out there dedicated to William Shakespeare. So, go on, have a look at the first issue:

http://issuu.com/shakespearemagazine/docs/shakespeare_magazine_01

International Dawn Chorus Day

It's International Dawn Chorus Day on Sunday. 4.30am isn't a time that I'm best friends with when it comes to being awake, although the idea of hearing the birds singing in the early morning does sound rather magical. Over at BBC Wildlife Magazine, they'll be up and about with sound recorders and cameras and are asking people to join in and share their experiences. Here's my own musical contribution to the avian celebrations, published on the BBC Music Magazine website: six of the best pieces inspired by birdsong.

Stravinsky and a koala bear

Was the modernist Stravinsky just a big softie really?

One of my favourite photos on the tumblr Composers doing normal shit (excuse my French).

Beethoven, Britten and Brahms

Over on www.classical-music.com, I've been doing some reviewing. Beethoven from the Elias Quartet, Britten's Paul Bunyan from English Touring Opera and Schumanns – Robert and Clara – and Brahms from Imogen Cooper.

Kalinnikov's First Symphony

Kalinnikov's First Symphony. Some good tunes for Sunday evening. Also for driving back to Bristol from Cardiff on Friday evening - I nipped over to Wales to hear John Metcalf's new opera Under Milk Wood.
And here's a short video introduction to it from the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

High Flight

Thanks to Radio 3's Words and Music – a wonderful programme that does exactly what its title suggests – I discovered this beautiful poem by John Gillespie Magee, Jr – High Flight.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of --Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew --
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

You can hear it here, read by Will Howard as part of a Words and Music episode exploring mankind's yearning to fly. Magee, an American pilot and poet, was killed at the age of 19, in 1941.

Thought for the day

The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition. WH Auden

Hic

A funny little conversation took place in my French class yesterday. It all started with the word 'hic', used in French to mean a 'snag', in the same way that we use 'hiccup' (or 'hiccough', though not sure my teacher was convinced by the spelling from the pronunciation). But it's not short for 'hiccup', that's an English word, after all. Instead it apparently comes from the Latin, hic, meaning 'here'. Which seems a bit strange as in the sentence 'Voilà le hic', that's the job of 'Voilà'. Anyway. *Gallic shrug*(If you know otherwise about its etymology, let me know.) So, the French word for 'hiccough' is 'hoquet', or perhaps that should be the other way round, as I think we took the word from them. Still, that in turn has another, musical meaning – hoquet or hocket is when a melody alternates between two voices in, I suppose, a kind of hiccupy way. But surely 'hoquet' doesn't come from the Latin 'hic', but from the onomatopoeic sound of a hiccup. How strange then that both hic and hiccup have come to mean the same thing. Or is that too much of a coincidence and a muddle?

Peter Grimes

Just back from seeing Britten's Peter Grimes at English National Opera. Only time to scribble a few notes about this superb production by David Alden, first staged in 2009 and revived this year. There was the fresh tang of sea salt in the orchestral playing, which captured every mood of the unforgiving water, from the glitter of waves to the powerful dark undertow to the unstoppable force of the tide. Conductor Edward Gardner and his ensemble rightly drew uproarious cheers from the audience.

Stuart Skelton triumphed as a Grimes as wretched as you can imagine: lonely, troubled, vilified by the no-less strange inhabitants of The Borough. It was impossible not to feel pity for the broken man presented at the end of the opera, only able to shuffle off, at the order of Captain Balstrode, to drown himself in his boat at sea. In the pared-back set for this final scene, with its grey colour palette suggesting perhaps the Suffolk landscape, where nature seemed to be confronting man; or perhaps the urban world that was taking over in the 1940s when this production was set. Or was that eerily empty space some kind of limbo between life and death? The bleakness of the scene and situation was underscored by the turning-off of the subtitles.

With its cast of villagers packed with people as undermined by their own weaknesses – laudanum, young girls – as Grimes was by his, Alden throws into the relief one of the work's main themes – the individual versus society. Who was truly responsible here for the death of Grimes's two apprentices? Are the Borough residents as culpable as Grimes? Did the abused/bullied become the abuser/bully?

It comes across a twisted place. The thought of life in this harsh, judgmental community, ruled by religious righteousness, is hard to imagine. Truth is what the community says it wants; but in reality the truth is what they are most afraid of. Moments of Britten's score seemed to have a glazed, hypnotic quality, as if the villagers were zombies, unable to escape the force of mob mentality or to think for themselves. The sense of menace was strong and unsettling. The brilliant lighting added to it all: dark shadows stalked the stage, seemingly doubling the size of the crowd, while creating the sense of strangers lurking in our midst.

And the force of that crowd, the chorus, was staggering, nowhere more so than in the hammer-blow calls of 'Peter Grimes' near the end. Even more overwhelming perhaps was the silence that came between those cries, that unremitting, unforgiving silence.

Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues

Shostakovich's 24 Preludes and Fugues: a mighty piano cycle written by the Russian composer in homage to JS Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. It's abstract, strange, beautiful, unforgiving music. Its complex web of contrapuntal lines has to be spun seamlessly, and light allowed to shine between the individual strands. Not so many pianists take on that challenge, and not all that do manage to pull it off.

But these Preludes and Fugues have become a calling card for the Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov, who has performed them around the world. He recorded them for the record label Harmonia Mundi; that recording was named one of the 50 Greatest Recordings of All Time by BBC Music Magazine in January 2012. His performance of the second half of the set at the Wigmore Hall last Tuesday was an occasion to remember.

I was reminded of the darkness of Schubert, the mercurial nature of Prokofiev, the earthy-peasant moments in Musorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibtion; all this character and more distilled into the miniature world of the Preludes and woven into the strict – and Shostakovich was very strict about it – form of the fugue. Like a spiderweb, a fugue starts with a single thread, and is built up layer by layer. As its architecture grows, so do its beauty and strength. Until, somehow, it becomes more than the sum of its parts.

Listen to Alexander Melnikov's Shostakovich recording here:

Reader versus book

I've just finished reading Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. Fantastic. Also fantastically heavy. At 771 pages, my hardback copy definitely qualifies for the doorstop/bar of gold/brick category of books. It joins fellow heavyweights Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (650 pages) and Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate (855 pages) on my bookshelves. These I'm yet to finish, not least thanks to their sheer bulk. 

Reading large tomes is by necessity an at-home-only pleasure; as I found out through experience, The Goldfinch is not a book to lug around on a train. That can be frustrating with a book so compelling, so gripping, that you just want to keep reading in any spare snatch of time you can find.  

Yet there's something wonderful about the lure of a book that you have to rush home for, whose words and characters are only available in one place. It's the antidote to the Kindle. The untransportable book. You have to make the effort to read it, to set aside time at home to immerse yourself in its world.

Some of those resolutions

New Year's Resolution time again.


Back in 2012, I resolved, if that's the right word in this instance, to get better at Scrabble. Still working on that one. 

Last year, the list included: 

1) Stop being a compulsive book buyer. Done, more or less. I've used my local library a lot more and only bought the really necessary books. Necessary, I say. That resolution went hand in hand with a vow to finish all the unread books in my house. That's still work in progress. 

2) Learn to do front crawl properly. Check! 

3) Blog more often. Erm, variable. 

4) Savour the outdoors. Yes, although the current rain isn't doing much to help that. 

5) Be more adventurous. I haven't tried sashimi, but have had a taste of steak tartare (so much better than I expected), and have climbed a mountain! And visited both Africa and Australia for the first time. I think that counts as adventurous.


So, what is 2014 going to bring? Well, I'm not one for making too many resolutions, especially ones which seem to encourage you to give up things, but here are three, hopefully which will all add something worthwhile to day-to-day life :


1. Start practising the piano again.


As an enthusiastic amateur pianist, I used to practise a couple of hours a day. And practised properly, rather than just playing through stuff every so often. Then I started a full-time job and somehow my time at the piano dwindled... But when I was in Italy back in May, I started playing again every day – just for an hour, but an hour of working on music in detail. Beethoven and Chopin. It was all very Room with a View. Once I got back to work, I stopped again. Time to get back to it!


2. Spend more time near the sea.

The wonderful sound of waves, the tang of salt in the air. Oh I've missed the sea this year, somehow only managing to spend a few short minutes in its company. This year: some clifftop walks, some boat trips, and some time lounging in the sun with the sea nearby are all on my to-do list.


3. Savour the outdoors.

OK. This is a cheat as I made roughly the same resolution last year. But in the spirit of living a richer life (however do-good-er that sounds) I want to carry on keeping my eyes open to this country's wildlife, and try to learn a bit more about it.