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. 

When Rachmaninov met Walt Disney

Here's a great photo I came across the other day, of Sergei Rachmaninov, Walt Disney and Vladimir Horowitz. Shame it's so grainy but you get the idea. It seems that Rachmaninov went on a tour of the Walt Disney studios in 1942 with Horowitz, both pianists being a fan of Disney's films.

I wonder what they were talking about here? Answers on a postcard please.*

Perhaps one of the topics they discussed was Rachmaninov's famous C sharp minor Prelude, the dramatic piano piece of 1892 for which audiences clamoured, and which the composer himself came to detest. Why might they have been talking about this? Well, I came across an anecdote in a book by Ivan Raykoff about the Sergei-Walt-Vladimir encounter: 'In Walt Disney's early animation short The Opry House (1929), Mickey Mouse performs Rachmaninov's famous Prelude. "I have heard my inescapable piece done marvelously by some of the best pianists, and murdered cruelly by amateurs," the composer reportedly told Disney, "but never was I more stirred than by the performance of a the great maestro Mouse."'

Here is that performance. Perhaps Rachmaninov had a twinkle in his eye behind that famous scowl after all...

Festive hillside

Just in case you were wondering, the bus-stop-to-nowhere is looking festive:

A penguin and a bagpiper

Readers of this blog might recall that I have a bit of a soft-spot for penguins (here too). And for Antarctica, and unusual photos in that snowy wilderness. Bagpipes, well... In any case, here's a fantastic picture of a penguin and a bagpiper in Antarctica. Really. I love the way the penguin is standing to attention. This picture was, I believe, taken in 1902 or 1903 during William Speirs Bruce's expedition. As a bit of a sideline, the ship's bagpiper (this story sounds less and less likely as I write it) decided to see how the penguin reacted to different sorts of traditional music. Apparently, he was indifferent. As for the bagpiper, I hope there's some warm underwear under that kilt.

'Neither rousing marches, lively reels, nor melancholy laments seemed to have any effect on these lethargic, phlegmatic birds; there was no excitement, no sign of appreciation or disapproval, only sleepy indifference.'Reports of the penguin's reaction.

Bach from Murray Perahia

There's no one quite like Bach. Every time I hear the Aria from his Goldberg Variations – a keyboard masterpiece written, so the story goes, to soothe an insomniac Russian ambassador – I feel myself pause and forget whatever I've been doing. It's music of the most beautiful serenity. Here it is performed by the superlative Murray Perahia.

The Summit

We start to walk at midnight. It's cold but, for once in my life, I don't feel it. Probably because I am wearing two pairs of thermals, trousers, waterproof trousers, inner socks, outer socks, a thermal vest, a long-sleeved thermal top, a fleece, a fleece gilet, two pairs of gloves, walking boots, a down jacket, a fleece scarf and a hat. And my big rucksack and a head torch. In the bag I have put another large fleece. I'm not taking any chances. My camera battery is in an inside pocket to keep it cosy, and my water bottle and camelbak – a sort of pouch with drinking tube – are wrapped up tight to stop them freezing. We've all been instructed to blow into the camelbak's tube after drinking in order to push all the water back inside, or at your next drink you'll be greeted with ice.

It's the day before the full moon. It's almost as if it's watching over us, choosing to light our way. We almost don't need the torches as we start our long trudge to the top. The aim is to reach Gilman's Point, at the edge of the crater, for sunrise. If you imagine taking one step, counting to three, then taking another, that's about the pace we went at. We were only going gently uphill – the crater sides are offputtingly steep but we're zig-zagging – yet we're all out of breath, huffing and puffing as if we were running a marathon. I can make out another group ahead of us, slowly moving dots of light. There's a small frisson of gloating as we overtake them. But at our first break, it's clear some people are already feeling the strain. I munch a couple of the sugary biscuits I've been given as a snack, while others eat their Dairy Milk chocolate. It gives them energy but seems to make everyone feel ill; for once I'm glad that I have to have the non-dairy option. It's too cold to loiter, so we're soon on the move again.

The guides start to sing. A solo voice sings a line, the rest respond. It's unexpected, magical and completely surreal. Am I really here, climbing up this mountain in the early hours of the morning, with the moon and music?

The combination of painful effort and nausea remind me that, yes, indeed, I am really here. Someone tells us a story about one of his friends who is an ultramarathon runner. When you run a regular marathon, he says, you start to question why you're doing it, why you're pushing yourself through such gruelling pain. In an ideal world, you come through that stage on a new high, full of positive energy ad belief that you are on the right path. When you run an ultramarathon, the questioning is commensurately more profound: you start to question your existence, what you're doing with your life, are you in the right job, the right relationship, doing the right thing? I reckon you can see it as raw honesty with yourself or self-torture. Either way, it's an exposed place to be. And it's not somewhere I really want to go, psychologically speaking, while I'm on this mountain.

As we plod closer to the top, though, it gets harder and harder to convince myself to keep going. I try to stop my thoughts. Huh. Harder than you think. I resort to counting from one to a hundred, over and over. It's dull, but it does the trick. I can see lights above us: are they path-markers, trekkers or stars?

The ground underneath has been dusty most of the way up but towards the upper reaches of the path it becomes stony and rocky. Our guide points towards the top, saying it's not far now, but it's so hard to tell whether there's more rock behind what we can see that I decide not to look or trust him and just keep on trudging. The rocks become bigger and bigger, and we have to scramble and climb. For some reason, it feels less difficult than it should do. Then I realise that I'm being given a helping push by one of the guys in the group. (Thank you!) As we near the top, our guide tells us it's just ten minutes away. None of us believe him and someone decides to have a bet with him. I've gone into a sort of semi-comatose state now. One of the Aussies chooses this moment to reveal he's actually scared of heights... It actually does feel pretty high up when I look - the jagged peaks of Mawenzi which have been towering over us the past days are now below us – and I start to wonder how we'll get back down.

And then we're at Gilman's Point. 5,681 metres up. We came round some rocks to find not, as before, more of a climb, but instead the flat edge of the crater rim and a big green sign congratulating us. We pose in front of it, taking photos. I'm frozen and exhausted. I feel like I should eat for energy but I don' have the appetite. All twelve of us have made it to Gilman's. The sun has risen, nature's great metaphor. We barely have any time before one of the guides is shepherding us on to get round to Uhuru, the highest point of Kilimanjaro. Now or never. At first, I think I can't do it. Sitting here now, writing this, I'm shouting at myself. You were going to go back down? After all that effort! Just keep going!

Four or five people have gone ahead, and I rush after them - deciding to give it a go. But the pace is fast, and after a few minutes I just feel so tired. I sit down and say I'm going to go back. Another woman in the group comes back, asks if I'm sick - I'm not – and says, forcefully: 'I'm not going to be the only woman in this group to make it to the top. You're coming with us'. That was possibly the best thing she could have said. (And thank you too!) One of the brilliant guides runs back to ask what's wrong, and when I say I'm tired, he says that's no excuse, takes my backpack, asks why it's so heavy (the fleece!) and then we're on the move again.

As we make our way round the crater edge, we start to see a few people coming back down from the summit. One young woman is stumbling and being supported by a guide. Up here, there's only half the oxygen you need. It feels like being drunk and hung-over at the same time. We make several stops to look at the fantastic views and rest. The two tallest men in the group seem to be suffering the worst. One curls up by the side of the path and is sick. Another keeps on collapsing on his bag, saying, with no small hint of melodrama, 'go on without me'.

We keep on going. Past Stella Point, until the path to Uhuru Peak is finally in view, clear ahead of us. It's a race to the finish (though who made it to there first is still being disputed). We've made it to the top! It is a fantastic feeling: looking out from the top of Africa, the summit of the highest free-standing mountain in the world. We are at Uhuru, which, in Swahili, means 'freedom'. It's gloriously clear: blue skies, warm sun. Photo-perfect.

We join the queue to take photos in front of the sign. It's quite busy. Three Italians push in front of us, causing one member of our group to tell them in no uncertain terms that we've got 'ill people here' and we have to take our pictures now. The slight exaggeration works. We get our photos, alone, in groups, with the various charity flags and posters people have brought with them.

Ten minutes or so is all you get at the top, and then the long journey back down begins. I start ahead of the group, and, actually, it's just a wonderful feeling walking through this incredible, alien landscape, white snow glistening under the peachy sun. There's a magnificent glacier to one side, the intriguing bowl of the crater to the other.

It takes between an hour and an hour and a half to get back to Gilman's, where the descent begins. If going up the mountain seemed tough, then going down the mountain is tougher still. The dust is nearly a foot deep, and slippy. I start to carefully pick my way down the path, but it's clear I'm going too slowly. One of the guides grabs my arm and we start to 'ski', sliding and skidding in giant steps, throwing up clouds of dust. We chat as we go: he tells me about his wife and children, we compare the price of food in England and Africa, he tells me about how he used to be a teacher but then became a guide. One day, he says, he'd like to be a chief guide. I am sure he will.

Nearly three and a half hours after leaving the summit, I arrive back in camp. I feel elated. I did it!

Time for a rest. Into the tent: my feet hurt, and I feel like I have pins and needles in my brain. No joke. It's not a comfortable sleep. And a little over an hour later, we're up again to eat before we have to start trekking to our next camp. People are returning one by one, at their own pace. When we sit down for lunch (only lunch! It feels like we've packed a week's worth of experience into the past twelve hours) some of us are feeling the sense of achievement (We made it to the top!), others are suffering. One trekker needs oxygen after his asthma starts playing up thanks to the dust. Another refuses to talk about it, saying it's both the best thing she's done and the most miserable day of her life.

After lunch, we pack and are on the move again. There's no drinking water at Kibo, so we need to get to the next camp down for the night. And to make away for any other groups arriving to attempt the summit. It's a fourish-hour walk back across the Lunar Desert, this time peeling to the right down the Marangu route. It's actually good to stretch out tired limbs with a walk over flat ground. And when we reach the next camp down, the air is already a little richer and the mountain top already looks like a distant reality. Food, cards, gossip, sorting out of the tips for the guides and porters, and it's time for sleep. I've been to the summit of Kilimanjaro. And I can't stop smiling.

This is my fifth post about my trip-of-a-lifetime climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and going on safari in Tanzania. I'm raising money for Water Aid so if you would like to sponsor me, please click here. So far I've raised £780. Thank you so much to everyone who was given money. It is going to a great charity.

Notes on Australia

• Verdi at Uluru and Sounds of Australia: my reviews of the two concerts at Uluru for BBC Music Magazine. And here are links to articles by two of my fellow Uluru journalists: Limelight Magazine; Vogue Italia.

• Just discovered this great website today, The Iron Ammonite. It includes amazing aerial photos taken from commercial flights. The photographer is Paul Williams, who works at the BBC's Natural History unit here in Bristol. On my flight from Darwin at the Top End of Australia (the naming is that literal) to Perth, down in the South West corner, I spent most of the time looking out of the window at the incredible red desert landscape, with its dried out river beds etched into the ground in snake-like meanders. Sometimes a brilliant flash would catch my eye, and a small pocket of water would be revealed – like a precious jewel buried in the sand. You can see Wiliams's Flickr set of photographs here, and I've posted his photo of Uluru from the air above.

• And, next weekend, I'm hoping to go to see the Australia exhibition at the Royal Academy, billed as the first major exhibition in the UK on the continent's art for 50 years.

Australia

Someone asked me yesterday what I'd been doing for the past week. Well, I replied, I went to Australia.

No, I'm not quite sure I believe it either, apart from that I've got the aeroplane ticket stubs to prove it. And the jet lag.

I was Down Under thanks to a serendipitous press trip to go and hear the first orchestral concerts at Uluru, which I'll be writing about in BBC Music Magazine for an upcoming issue. I'm reviewing them for the mag's website www.classical-music.com as well; and I'll be putting up some photos and observations here. What a place. What an adventure.

Breakfast with Lucian

The great artist Lucian Freud was famously protective of his privacy. So it seems ironic that one of his friends close enough to have been part of a weekly breakfast club has broken the first rule thereof and written a tell-all, anecdotal account of the late Freud (pictured in a self-portrait, above), based on their friendship. Good for readers like me who are utterly fascinated by Freud – most importantly by his art but also by the personality that made it – less good, perhaps, for upholding the values of friendship and for the privacy Freud so assiduously, near-on neurotically, created. Not that I'm cynical about the author Geordie Greig's motives, really....

Still, having not read the book yet apart from the tantalising section about Freud's seemingly countless number of children, serialised in The Sunday Times, it was interesting to hear Greig in conversation about his book at the recent Henley Literary Festival. The Mail on Sunday editor, fresh from Ed Milliband firefighting, was nothing like I expected. Fascinating his book might be, fascinating his speaking style is not. Funny, as at least one other account of Greig suggests he's a hugely energetic character. Perhaps those Milliband headaches were taking their toll. His painfully halting, flat delivery seemed at odds with the subject matter, but didn't completely destroy it – it'd be hard to when the conversation covered matters as racy as Freud's numerous lovers, his huge gambling debts and how he liked to drink Earl Grey with lots of milk. By the sounds of it, Greig has put his ability to network to good use, winning over and interviewing Freud's acquaintances in order to untangle the tightly woven veil the artist had drawn over his private life. It's had mixed but mainly good reviews, the main criticism seeming to be that this book is more about the man, than the art; when in fact the man was all about the art. Sometimes, though, you do just want to know how a great artist liked to drink his tea.

LS Lowry at Tate Britain

It's not often that I go to an art exhibition and come out liking the artist less than when I went in. But that's what happened when I visited Tate Britain's LS Lowry exhibition a couple of weeks ago.

It was the first exhibition solely devoted to the British artist's works, six rooms of his canvases, ranging from his first paintings of modern life to five large-scale views across industrial landscapes. As many newspaper articles have pointed out, this was a landmark exhibition. For years Lowry has been seen as an artist unworthy of gallery wall-space, for whatever reasons. The only previous show dedicated to him took place at the Royal Academy in 1976 just after his death.



It's certainly a superbly curated exhibition: plenty to see, but not too much; informative descriptions, clearly written; and, most importantly, Lowry's art is well contextualised. I'd never drawn a parallel between the portrayals of modern life going on in French art and what Lowry was doing. Paintings by Van Gogh and Pisarro, depicting the creeping sprawl of towns into the countryside, illustrated that new-found impulse to paint the city in all its ugly, smoggy, unforgiving reality, to document it in some way.

The exhibition has received rave reviews and has sold more tickets than any other Tate Britian exhibition. 'Riveting', says The Guardian. 'The most radical and exciting re-evaluation of a British artist I have ever encountered,' says the Financial Times. And I see their point of view. It's clearly a hugely important exhibition and if, like me, you're interested in 20th-century art, then it's one to go to. But did I enjoy it? I can't say I did. I've tried to pinpoint a few reasons why:

• Am I being a snob? One writer says Lowry had been the victim of a prejudice against overexposure, of snobbery. But actually I've always rather liked Lowry – he's a familiar part of British culture. His evocations of Northern industrial and urban landscapes are ingrained. Really, I couldn't care less whether I had seen his pictures on a place mat or postcard. I still like Vivaldi's Four Seasons. I just don't like hearing it while stuck in an infuriating telephone queue, but that's the fault of the medium not the music. But when you see the original art-work, surely it should be better than the postcard? And the so-called derogatory charge of him being a 'local artist' seems a bit irrelevant. Art rooted in a specific place can still be universal. Sibelius is hugely evocative of Finnish landscapes, but his music speaks universally.

• The Gloominess. Lowry's subject was chronicling the life of the working classes. There's a documentary feel to his work – he was capturing for posterity an age and place. It's a unrelentingly gloomy eye though: an empty house, an eviction, a funeral, a fever house. The apparent objectivity convinces the viewer that this must be reality. Without denying the importance of awakening Britain's collective social conscience to the misery of poverty, can I believe that there was no human warmth, no joy, no hope? I'm afraid not. Was Lowry himself limited in his artistic ability to capture a mood or feeling? It's interesting we rarely see faces and expressions in his paintings. And this objectivity only seems to me to be a half-truth. He rarely painted specific places, instead melding together locations and scenes he'd observed in Manchester, Salford and Stockport and elsewhere. That same distance from his subject – varied scenes all depicted in the same palette of colours, with the same distinctive matchstick figures, and using similar compositions – keeps the viewer at a safe arm's length from the gritty reality Lowry's purporting to portray. Would a great artist flinch from portraying a brutal truth?

• The repetitiveness. It's been described as a dogged loyalty to his subject. The same scenes, chimney towers, terrace houses, factories and mills painted over and over. Yes, the grimly repetitive nature of daily life comes across through this tactic. Monet, after all, painted his waterlilies over and over. Yet somehow, there's a searching quality in the French artist's work that is lost in Lowry. I didn't feel like he was a great artist searching to capture or communicate, merely that he was stuck in a rut. I could have picked pretty much any of the pictures on display and been happy to see just that one. Seeing a hundred or so on display felt like having to eat a whole packet of Jacob's cream crackers.

• Was he actually a good artist? I'm not by any means qualified to answer this, apart from that I like art and like to look at art. I'm sure for myself that he wasn't a great artist. I even wonder if he was a very good artist? His paintings seem flat, fixed, incapable of evoking an emotional reaction, un-yeilding to further interpretation. Unlike the recent Lucian Freud exhibition where you felt like you saw and understood more the more you looked; where the artist didn't merely observe but revealed; and where it was difficult to leave; LS Lowry en masse wore me down but didn't tell me much new about human life.

Funnily enough, while adding these pictures to my blog, I feel affection towards his art again. I can forgive its shortcomings when they aren't compounded through repetition. What I would like to see is a wider exhibition exploring the world Lowry was immortalising: a mixture of photography, art and writing, say Bill Brandt, LS Lowry and George Orwell.