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. 

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: