A small, sad goodbye

I’ve tinkered with it; I’ve changed the batteries (twice) and shaken it hard, and left it alone for a while in case that would help.  But it’s dead.  My dear old Sony Walkman has passed beyond the veil and is no more.  I’d had it since January 1986, so it has given good service over many years, and what piece of hi-fi can do more?

The problem is, this means I can’t play any of my cassettes any more.  I am anally careful with stuff, probably because I had a lot of experience of having not much stuff at all (and no likelihood of replacing it) as a child of a singularly broke family.  So a lot of my music collection is still on cassettes.  

I have bootlegs, godammit.  I know they’re illegal; well, now they’re useless as well.  I have things recorded off the radio; my “Winterreise”, for example, is a radio bootleg.  I have lovely compilations my brother Steve put together for me – rocky stuff to paint with or dance to, mellow late-night stuff to chill out to with a cold beer and my feet up.

Then I have things that were perfectly legit recordings in their day, but that simply aren’t available any more.  

Research online in my lunch break shows that a surprisingly large amount of my beloved early eighties prog rock etc can be bought on cd, often as re-releases with bonus tracks, even - but not all of it.  I have some pretty obscure recordings of Irish fiddle music.  Kevin Volans’ work isn’t terribly easy to get hold of, either; and one of my favourite albums of my teenage years, “Paradise Moves” by Airbridge, is only available as an LP from vintage vinyl specialists, at extortionate cost – and I don’t have a record turntable or any of that hoohah, anyway.  This is great music I'm losing, and it will leave a hole in my life.

Horsesh*t and a pile of it.

The last of Cardiff Singer (& possibly the last of the summer, too)

Cardiff Singer is over for another two years, and I am bereft. For a whole week I have had the chance to listen to a bunch of talented young opera singers every night. Some of them were good, some were very good and some were really great. Some were absolutely wonderful. I now have bad withdrawal symptoms.

What a feast of glorious music it has been, and what a pleasure all those hard-working young people were, with their fine voices and their hopes for the future writ large on eager faces. I feel very dull and rather old when I listen to a twenty-four year old with more musical talent in their little finger, and more self-discipline and determination to succeed, than I have in all five foot nine and fourteen stone of me; but I also feel privileged to get to see them in action, so early in their careers, these kids. They are so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and full of delight in everything they do.

The Moldovan soprano, Valentina Nafornitsa, won the Grand Final. My favourite, the Ukrainian baritone Andrei Bondarenko, won the Lieder Prize. I would have given him both prizes, but then I do love my baritones. Mr Bondarenko’s song recital was a sheer wonder from start to finish; effortlessly beautiful singing full of subtle, unforced sincerity and dramatic nuance, and with that incredible feeling of intimacy that a great recitalist can bring even to a big concert hall. At last Favourite Baritone has a worthy successor.

I’m going to see if by some miracle I can get a ticket to Glyndebourne next year – he is singing Marcello in “La Boheme” and I go slightly fluttery inside at the thought. As my late father used to say about certain sopranos, “Gulp, I think I’m in love”.

Despite the vital but restrictive necessity of being in for all the Cardiff broadcasts, I managed to get a good deal done this weekend, too. On Saturday I visited a lovely exhibition of modern Australian prints at the BM, and had a mooch afterwards in the minor Greece and Rome rooms – the ones with real things from real people’s lives and homes in – then spent a happy hour in an art materials shop (& didn’t buy anything stupid – just a few sensible things like a new sketchbook) and then in a sale at HMV on Oxford Street (& only bought one thing, a Dvd of “La Fille mal Gardée”), and had lunch out, and listened to a very good Hungarian band busking outside the church of St Martin’s in the Fields, and bought some concert and ENO tickets for the autumn.

On Sunday I sewed; I finally finished the poppy-print top, then cut out, pinned and tacked two more jobs, a plain straight summer frock in panels of two shades of blue, and a blouse I need to let out. Opening the under-arm seams and piecing in extra fabric on either side is a miserable, fiddly job, but I just relax, listen to the radio, and tell myself I am channelling my grandmothers’ spirits. To throw away a favourite blouse, in silk patchwork in shades of chestnut brown and burgundy, that always looked good, simply because I’ve put on so much weight, offends me. Realistically, I’m unlikely to lose the weight, and the sewing practice is good for me, so I’m going to let it out and get some more use out of it rather than beating myself up about getting stout. With the really twiddly parts, the cutting out and fitting and pinning and basting, all done, it’s just a question of mindlessly plying my needle now, and I can do that peacefully over the next few weeks while I watch tele or listen to music.

It’s just started to pour with rain; now that I can go home, it does this. Guess who didn’t bring an umbrella today? Really, after all these years living in my dear wet native land, you’d think I’d be more Great-British-summer-savvy!

I am officially in love...

...with Nikolai Lugansky (again). By damn, he is brilliant.

He gave a recital at the Queen Elizabeth hall on Tuesday night and it is hard to put into words just how beautifully he played. Ravishingly wholehearted romanticism and absolute technical clarity and precision, held together in a perfect balance... It was simply stunning.

I know I tend to wax lyrical at the drop of a hat - my enthusiasm for performing artists I admire is probably rather comical, looked at from the outside. But Mr Lugansky reduced me to tears (and that was with the Brahms, which is quiet and introspective music in comparison with the far more obviously emotional Chopin and Liszt that made up the rest of the programme). I do not think I'll hear finer piano playing for a long time. The holy art of music is well-served in this man.

My "Private Passions" playlist

I've been working on this for a while; a little bit of fun. I don’t think I can cope with the eight-disc limit of “Desert Island Discs”, though, so I am insinuating myself into the far classier (& more flexible!) format of "Private Passions" instead. .

I’ll start with rock music and related areas:

Jazz/Folk: Spiro “Lightbox”. Just lately I cannot seem to get enough of this. Magical and mad, jazzy serialist versions of traditional tunes on traditional acoustic instruments - dancingly light yet rich music.
Jazz/Folk/Rock: Rodrigo y Gabriela “Rodrigo y Gabriela”. This is astonishingly high octane wow! stuff – hard to classify, though. Marvellous, rocky, acoustic Spanish guitar duets (+ a smoking arrangement of “Stairway to Heaven”); gutsy, grabbing music, totally energising and dynamic.
World/Blues: Ali Farka Touré “Red & Green”. Simply a classic. The late great AFT could do amazing things with that old steel-string guitar of his.
Rock: Channel Light Vessel “Automatic”. This is one of those “Soundtrack of my life” albums – especially it conjures a winter college field trip to Paris; sketching in the biting cold wind along the Seine, drinking cheap Sauvignon Blanc with friends in a scruffy spit-and-sawdust bar in Montmartre, and of course the miles and miles of rainy motorways in the Pas de Calais, seen from the window of the coach.
Rock: The Icicle Works “The Icicle Works". Just superb; rocking, poetic, dramatic. The crême de la crême of the eighties Liverpool scene.
Rock: Pink Floyd “Dark Side of the Moon”. Another classic album, full of wonderful tracks that still hit the spot years after composition. “Wish you were here” comes a very close second, but is somehow, for my money, too personal; too visibly about the band themselves and their feelings for Syd Barrett, and hence in a way tangential to the listener. Whereas “Dark Side of the Moon” is rock truth for all of us.
Rock: Hawkwind “Quark, Strangeness and Charm”. There’s really nothing like the driving insanity, stunning rhythms and general bonkers wonder of this great, great album. Every track is terrific. And it has a song based on a Roger Zelazny novel. And jokes about Einstein. Visceral and yet intellectual, this is the album where Hawkwind got the balance between metal, sci-fi, pomp, psychodelia and straight-forward guitar-and-drum-driven rock absolutely right. My first ever rock concert was a Hawkwind gig; Maidstone Art College, 1979…
Rock (single): U2 “All I want is you”. Richly lifting lyrical guitar riffs, soaring and shifting; a lovely piece of complex simplicity, and great, honest, evocative lyrics.
Rock (single): Dexy’s Midnight Runners “Come on, Eileen”. A bit of a frivolous addition, but any time I hear this it makes me smile. This was the soundtrack to my sixteenth summer. Need I say more?

On to classical music.

I wish, incidentally, that the two classes of music (“classical” and popular/vernacular/rock) weren’t shut apart like ferocious beasts that would devour one another if they every made contact; it is rather like the Humanities/Sciences ne’er-the-twain-shall-meet thing, only worse, despite being on a smaller scale and within just the one art.

Chamber: The three Brahms Violin Sonatas. The G major sonata especially is a piece of music I could not live without. Oh, and I’ll have the Josef Suk and Julius Katchen recording, thanks.
Chamber: Schubert String Quartet in D minor “Death and the Maiden”. Another piece of music I simply couldn’t bear never to hear again. The first variation in the second movement is heartbreakingly beautiful. Brilliant simplicity; in fact damned close to perfection.
Piano: Janacek “On an Overgrown Path”. This makes me cry. Solo piano music, and it makes me cry.
Orchestral: Stravinsky “The Rite of Spring”. Preferably in a recording coupled with “The Firebird”. The “Rite” is stunning music, as passionate as life itself, and gives me a rush like a drug with its sheer wizardry and dazzledom. A world without Stravinsky would be a bitter, dull, tingle-less place.
Orchestral: Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto. This is an incredibly tough one, actually; would I rather have the Barber, or the Walton, or the Stravinsky? Or the Sibelius? Or Elgar? Or Beethoven? Or should I ask for the Walton Violin and Viola concertos? On balance I’ll plump for the Barber, because I adore it, and because if I can have Joshua Bell’s recording then I’ll get the Walton and Bloch’s “Baal Shem” as well…
Orchestral + soloists: Mahler “Das Lied von der Erde”. Another very, very tough choice. Can I have a boxed set of all the Mahler Symphonies, plus a selection of the Des Knaben Wunderhorn songs, please? If not, with tears in my eyes I will let the rest go, though 2, 3, 6 and 9 will have to be torn from my clutching hands; but I’ll hang on to the “Song of the Earth” even if you hit me. The Klemperer recording, please.
Choral: Vaughan Williams “A Sea Symphony”. Choosing one big choral work is hard, too; if I have this, I lose the “German Requiem”, all the other requiems including the “War Requiem”, the “Glagolithic Mass” (this hurts), Beethoven’s Ninth, and “Messiah”, and “The Dream of Gerontius”…
Honestly, this process is like chopping my fingers off one by one.
Choral: Rachmaninov “Vespers”. Okay, it will have to be two big choral works, because this is indispensible. Different kind of choral, though; unaccompanied liturgical singing, in Russian, with harmonies to make your hair stand on end. You can’t praise god any finer than this.
Opera: Janacek “The Cunning Little Vixen”. (I won’t even try to write the original Czech name – it’s full of x’s and z’s even before you get to the diacritical marks). One of the greatest, saddest, most beautiful and humane of twentieth century operas. I had to have an opera, and it is hard to choose, but since I can’t download my memories of great performances I’ve been at, my brain not being a computer, I’ll go for one of my all-time favourite recordings. The last scene of this is another of those things that makes me cry my eyes out. “From the House of the Dead”, also by Janacek, comes a very close second, but I think that final scene, and the love scene between the vixen and the fox, swing it for me. Also this is a fairy tale where the main character dies, and that is unusual; and it is probably the quietest, most realistic death in the whole of opera. She gets shot, she dies; two bars at most. I’ll have the Mackerras recording, please.

Salonen the Golden, or, The Joy of Having Specialist Interests

I know the autumn has really begun when my Philharmonia subscription starts. Last night was the first concert I’d booked this year (I can’t afford to go to every one but I try to do six or eight in a season). It was a stunner. What with this and “Don Carlos” last week, my cultural life has restarted with a marvellous bang after the sluggish hiatus of summer.

I’m a big fan of the Philharmonia; partly for sentimental reasons – my father and my godmother both sang in the Philharmonia Chorus in their younger days – and partly because I happen to think they are a cracking good orchestra. Last night was a perfect case in point. Apart from being a breathtaking performance of three terrific pieces of music – two huge favourites of mine and something new that knocked my socks off – it was a concert marked by a rather unusual event, namely a power cut.

The band, as they say, played on.

They were only in total darkness for a few seconds, but prior to that the lights had spent about ten minutes flickering on-and-off, then dimming and brightening again, dropping to fifty-per-cent strength, and generally mucking about. Then suddenly boom! – pitch blackness. Right in the middle of “The Firebird”. After a moment, someone somewhere switched to a different lighting circuit, bringing on a very cold harsh light just on the stage and leaving the rest of us in Stygian gloom, instead of the normal soft warm ambience throughout the whole hall, and the concert finished under those conditions.

The orchestra were so unfazed one would have thought they rehearsed in darkness just for the discipline of it. I almost wonder if Esa-Pekka Salonen even noticed. I mean, he must have done; but on the other hand, he always gives the impression of being totally physically immersed in the music to the last fibre of every muscle, all of his energy swept into this one wondrous goal. Watching him on the rostrum is like watching someone dancing in a very confined space.

I’m a big fan of Esa-Pekka Salonen. Everything I’ve ever heard him conduct has come out as if new-minted; revelation after revelation. It’s thrilling. I don’t know enough about music from a technical point of view to know what it is he is doing, but he hits the spot for me. He just has the golden touch; he seems to be able to bring to everything he does that combination of perfect lucidity - so that the whole piece is explicated with absolute clarity and I sit there thinking “Of course, how wonderful; that’s how it’s put together and that’s how it works!” - with an equal and heartfelt measure of passionate feeling. That capacity to explore both structure and emotion, the interlayered play between tensioned forces, is one of my biggest delights. So many great performing artists are either great technicians or great stage animals, but not both at once. Those who are both are my big heroes.

I know, I know - it isn’t just him; there’s a big group of people down there, all of them highly skilled and at the top of their game, working with him. It’s just that the conductor is easiest to single out, for obvious reasons. To work as a united force is a significant part of being an orchestra; the conductor is the unifying factor, the wire through which all their multifarious energies are fused (not a good metaphor, excuse me). The musicians all come on quietly, and take their seats quietly, and quietly they tune up – that lovely stage when one is sitting in blissful anticipation – then suddenly this slender man with beautiful hands and hair the colour of manuka honey springs onto the rostrum, looking like a slightly wild hobbit in a suit, and everything just takes off.

Sorry, bad attack of the purple prose there. I have a bit of a crush, you will gather; if the man weren’t a) happily married and b) several inches shorter than me, it would be a huge crush, but these two useful limiting factors keep it to manageable proportions – small bureau rather than double wardrobe, size-wise.

I’m attracted to genius; and that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

Anyway: They played “Sinfonietta”, with half the brass section up in the choir stalls to make the fanfares really ring out. I adore Janacek (why can I never find the right diacritical marks for Czech words? Grr…), and in particular I adore “Sinfonietta”. The end, when the fanfares and timps return, everything melding together like a triumphant yet yearning heaven, pulverises me, and this time I just gave up on being a True Brit, and sat and cried. It was wonderful. Then they played a new piece by Magnus Lindberg. I’m not familiar with his work and had come hoping not to be depressed by half an hour of atonal screeching; I was in luck, it was dramatic and lyrical and full of lovely open spaces – I think he was using a lot of very deep and very high sounds layered around the clear place between – I don’t know how to describe it, or indeed exactly what I am trying to describe – but it was one of those pieces of contemporary music that make one want to cheer and stand on the seat. And the text was lovely – Latin graffiti from the streets of Pompeii, everything from crude abuse through cries of “I love so-and-so!” and lists of market days to scribbles of incorrectly-remembered Virgil.

Then the whole of “Firebird”; absolutely gripping, dazzling, revelatory. The genius of Stravinsky, so complex, so subtle, simple and yet showy, brilliantly precise yet full of huge wallopping showstopping moments.

And with this wonderful example of group sang-froid when the lights went out, at one of the stillest and most delicate points in the score, the evening was altogether an absolute joy.

Yep, classical music may be a specialist interest, but I love it. Here’s to a good autumn. Next week I am going to “Wozzeck”; gulp. My Favourite Baritone is singing Wozzeck, and E-P S is conducting, so although I may need to take a few deep breaths, if I can cope with being harrowed halfway to hell and back it should be an impressive evening.