Lincoln lights

The Lincoln Center: New York's home to dance, opera, theatre and music - and lots of lights.

Halloween, a la New York

Berio's 'Aldo'

The dynamic, inventive Aurora Orchestra hit Bristol this Halloween weekend. Their evening of what might be best described as 'concert theatre', called Thriller: Automatic Writing, was a great idea – intersperse music for varying numbers of chamber musicians with excerpts by a top horror writer to create an evening of spooky unease. I'm not sure it quite hung together – more of which later – but one of the musical gems included was Luciano Berio's 'Aldo' from Duets for Two Violins. Its hushed whisperings speak with a poignant simplicity. This is one of the only videos of it I could dig out from YouTube - the Aurora's players conjured a bit more magic - but it gives you a sense of it:

Voici que la saison décline

Voici que la saison décline,
L'ombre grandit, l'azur décroît,
Le vent fraîchit sur la colline,
L'oiseau frissonne, l'herbe a froid.

Août contre septembre lutte ;
L'océan n'a plus d'alcyon ;
Chaque jour perd une minute,
Chaque aurore pleure un rayon.

La mouche, comme prise au piège,
Est immobile à mon plafond ;
Et comme un blanc flocon de neige,
Petit à petit, l'été fond.

Victor Hugo

Last night in my French class, we read a beautiful poem by Victor Hugo. I can't find a translation online but, even if you don't speak French, just read it out loud. Each word has a wonderful sound, each line a telling rhythm, which come across irrespective of meaning. It's a three-verse gem full of evocative images: the shadows (l'ombre) are getting longer, the grass (l'herbe) feels the cold. A particularly well-crafted line, as another in my lesson pointed out, opens the second stanza: 'Août contre septembre lutte'. The lutte – struggle – is encapsulated by a line that's tricky to say, that rushes towards the word 'septembre', itself full of sonorous stiles to climb over.

Options

On the London tube yesterday, I looked down a row of seated passengers. Four of them, all next to each other. One was playing Solitaire on his phone; one was reading on a Sony eBook reader; another had their head in a free Metro newspaper; the final one had a paperback book. All enthralled by the written word (ignore the Solitaire), all choosing different mediums. Which would you go for?

Gorilla invasion

Bristol has been invaded by gorillas. All around the city, there are primates – lurking, guarding buildings, looking across the river, acting as bridge sentries. You name it, they've got it covered. They're chunky, powerful and pretty tall.

Perhaps I should point out at this point, if you hadn't already guessed, that these gorillas are statues. Decorated in a variety of colours and gaudy designs, the West Country gorillas – no relation to Liverpool's lambananas – are here to celebrate the 175th anniversary of Bristol zoo.

But, suddenly, after seeing Project NIm – the film about a misguided 1970s experiment to find out whether chimps could learn language and communicate with human beings (conclusion: yes, they can sign language; no, they can't say a lot more than 'I want berries', 'I want to drink', 'I want to play') – their presence here has taken on a slightly more ominous hue. I'd better not watch Rise of the Planet of the Apes then…

Gorisambard

Meet the suavest gorilla in town: Gorisambard.

Wedding bells

At a wedding in a gorgeous old church buried in the English countryside this weekend, there were some beautiful readings and some uplifting singing. Here are two of my favourite moments: a touching piece by American writer Raymond Carver, and William Harris's luxuriant setting of a text by Edmund Spenser.

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.

And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Raymond Carver

Faire is the heaven

Vive le carrousel!

Why is it that so many French cities have carousels in their centres? Lyon has one in the Place de la République, Paris has them aplenty, including in the Jardins de Plantes and Les Tuileries, while Aix-en-Provence has one at the foot of its Champs-Elysées – the Cours Mirabeau. Is it a necessary bureaucratic requirement? A tradition passed on from merry-go-round-loving parent to child? A way of sprucing up a town centre? Enchanted by the touch of magical whimsy it adds to a city, I thought I'd try to find out a bit more. Turns out the merry-go-round has a long history in France: while it was probably invented in Italy, when Louis XIV was in need of some entertainment for a lavish party, he ordered his engineers to build a carousel. It hid gilded chairs for women, and horses and swans for the men. Merci Louis, et vive le carrousel!

The gorillas have arrived

The long wait for lunch…

Back to blogging

Blog silence over! A new job and a new house has added up to little more than some unpublished blank pages. Oh, I've had a few things to blog about (I say this with certainty only because I seem to blog about this, that and nothing in particular in any case), but somehow I haven't managed to put, if not pen to paper, finger to keyboard. But, as with everything, once you get back in the habit, there's always time. More to follow…