Prom 60

Much of the audience at last night's Prom got only half as much Martha Argerich as they had expected. She was originally scheduled to play two pieces with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the second being Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 1. But illness reportedly stopped her from rehearsing the Prokofiev as much as she wanted to, and so she played only the first piece, Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major.

Fortunately, that one piece was worth the ticket price. Ravel isn't a composer I've ever had much time for -- perhaps because I associate him mainly with Bolero, the quintessential piece of classical music for people who don't really like classical music -- but this concerto was a pleasant surprise. The first and third movements were playful and almost jazzy, but the emotional depth of Argerich's playing meant that this was far more than light music. The second movement, the Andante, was astonishingly poignant -- I have rarely found myself so completely absorbed in a piece of music. This was simply the best piano playing I've ever heard in concert.

We had a good view of Argerich from our seats, and I was struck first of all by how much she seemed to interact with the orchestra -- not something all pianists do -- and secondly, by the number of times she lifted a hand from the keyboard to sweep back her long thick hair. We did get a bit more of her than the programme had promised, since after the concerto she played a brief solo encore, which unfortunately I didn't recognise.

Argerich's performance had been preceded by the UK premiere of Orion, an orchestral work by the Québécois composer Claude Vivier, who was murdered in 1983 at the age of 34. Although Vivier himself seemed like a sympathetic figure, I'm afraid I just found this piece irritating. The only aspect that interested me was hearing how Vivier, who travelled extensively in Bali and Java, used gongs and bells to create a gamelan-like sound at certain points.

The Prokofiev concerto was replaced by the crowd-pleasing Love for Three Oranges suite, which the RPO played with appropriate verve. The final item on the programme was Ravel's orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Programming the orchestral version of this work in a concert that also included a great pianist seemed like a cruel tease. For me the definitive version of Pictures will always be Sviatoslav Richter's recording from his 1958 Sofia recital -- wrong notes, coughs and all. I think of the orchestral transcription in much the same way I think of the dance remix of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" that we'd heard in a restaurant earlier that evening. It was well played, though, and the audience seemed to enjoy themselves.

In Sebald's footsteps

I finished reading Vertigo yesterday. The publisher's blurb rather ridiculously suggests that all the various threads Sebald discusses will be tied together in the end, like the solution of a murder mystery. They aren't, of course -- not in that way, anyway -- but Sebald's head is a more pleasant place to inhabit than most people's, and I enjoyed the book a lot.

All Sebald's work deals with travel of one kind or another, and lately I've been tempted to recreate some of the journeys he describes. (I'm not the first to have thought of this: there's a now-dormant blog, Stalking Sebald, devoted entirely to the topic.) A trip to Antwerp, which is described so memorably in the opening pages of Austerlitz, particularly appeals. But I think I'm going to start with something more modest and closer to home, from the final pages of Vertigo.

I made my way back from the National Gallery to Liverpool Street station on foot. As I did not want to walk along the Strand and then down Fleet Street, I negotiated the labyrinth of smaller streets above these busy thoroughfares; Chandos Place, Maiden Lane and Tavistock Street took me to Lincoln's Inn Fields and from there, via Holborn Circus and the Holborn Viaduct, I reached the western perimeter of the City. I cannot have covered much more than three miles, yet I felt as if I had never walked so far in my life on that afternoon.

Weather permitting, we're going to take the same walk this afternoon -- but backwards, as that suits our other plan better. At the National Gallery, I'll have a look at Pisanello's The Virgin and Child with Saints -- the painting Sebald went to see, now promoted from the Gallery's basement -- before going on to this evening's Prom.

Another chance to see

I may risk having my British citizenship revoked by saying this, but I've never been wholly convinced by Stephen Fry. I might like him better if I'd been exposed to him in smaller doses, but his sheer ubiquity can be wearing. There's a particular grim inevitability about the way he gets drafted in to replace well-loved celebrities who've died. First he became one of Humphrey Lyttleton's replacements on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, and now he's taking the place of Douglas Adams in the BBC's remake of Last Chance to See. Mind you, I was never fully convinced by Hitchhiker's Guide either, so maybe it's fitting.

Fry and his co-presenter Mark Carwardine will re-visit four of the six species featured in the original radio broadcast. Only four, because for two of the animals seen by Adams and Carwardine, the "last chance" prediction proved to be all too accurate. The world's last four wild Northern White Rhinos were killed by poachers in June 2008; eight remain in captivity but are unlikely to be able to save the species. The fate of the Baiji, or Yangtse River Dolphin, was even grimmer. In 2007 it was declared extinct altogether, a victim of pollution, electric fishing and the Chinese government's lethargy.

On the bright side,the Kakapo, a flightless parrot from New Zealand, has tripled in numbers since the original series was made, thanks to an intensive conservation programme. I first learned about this from a David Attenborough programme a few years ago, and it's an inspiring story.

Whatever doubts I may have about Stephen Fry, hopefully his presence in this programme will encourage people to take an interest in conservation.

No one wants to swap sandwiches with me

The other day a work colleague couldn't decide what to have for lunch, and decided to seek guidance by asking everyone in the office what they were going to eat.

"I brought a sandwich from home", I said when she got to me.

"What kind?" she said.

"Erm ... peanut butter and plum."

"What?"

Suddenly I had become the most interesting person in the office.

"Well", I said, trying not to meet any of the pairs of eyes focused on me, "in America we eat peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches ...."

"Jelly?" Several noses wrinkled.

"No, not gelatine -- that's what Americans call jam", I said, oversimplifying. The noses didn't unwrinkle. "So I figured instead of using jam, I could cut up fresh fruit, and --"

It was no use. Ever since, my colleagues have shot suspicious glances at the bag I keep my lunch in. People concerned about the Americanisation of British culture can take heart.

Here's one I prepared earlier

Exactly one month ago I wrote a post that I couldn't publish here. Too much was still up in the air, and Chris didn't think it would be a good idea to publicise the events discussed, even to my tiny audience.

Now that the situation's been resolved, the post is less topical, but I'm presenting it here because I think it summarises pretty well the thoughts and feelings one* experiences at such a time. (Plus, I went to the trouble of writing it, and I'm too lazy to think of new stuff when there's perfectly good old stuff lying around.)

Since we work for the same company, Chris and I can take advantage of our workplace's instant-messaging system. Needless to say, we ordinarily use this for vital business purposes, such as spending a dull afternoon comparing our favourite types of lemur (he's a traditionalist who favours the ring-tail; I'm partial to the Alaotran gentle lemur). So when he began a conversation this morning with "We've just had a meeting ..." I knew there was trouble.

He and his colleagues had been told that two people in their department would be made redundant. They didn't know yet who it would be. The managers were now calling each member of staff in for an individual discussion.

I tried to keep chatting while Chris waited his turn, but my mind was racing. How long would it take to find a new job in this economy? We had savings, but how long would they last? How many of our everyday expenses could we give up? Should I withdraw from my writing course and get the tuition fee back -- if I could still get it back? I thought, too, of the extra expenses I'd been allowing myself lately -- a new book here and there, trips to interesting places in London -- because I felt I'd been living in a cocoon of self-denial for too long. Had I unknowingly been frittering away the money we would need to survive?

Even after Chris was called into the room and told that his job was most likely safe (in theory, one of the people facing redundancy could challenge him for it, but that's a remote possibility) our situation seemed far more precarious than it had when I'd left for work this morning. And of course, I can't forget that six of his colleagues have been told their jobs are in immediate danger, and in a few days' time, two of them will know that they'll soon be out of work. They and their families will be asking the same questions that went through my mind, but for real.

The outcome, by the way, was that two of Chris's colleagues who had been thinking of moving on anyway volunteered to take redundancy, and the company (slightly surprisingly) allowed them to do this. I suppose that was the best possible outcome in the circumstances.

* By "one", of course, I mean "me and people like me".

Lower primates

Yesterday at London Zoo we went down to the nocturnal section to see the pottos, but they were nowhere to be found. Either the zoo is rearranging the exhibits or they've got rid of them altogether.

I did, however, see the Zoo's new breeding pair of slender lorises in one of the prime enclosures, so I went over to admire their delicate beauty. That was when I noticed a woman standing her small daughter on the bar designed to keep visitors a safe distance away and encouraging the child to press her hands against the glass. One of the lorises was becoming more and more agitated as it scrabbled to grasp the girl's fingers; several times it half fell off its tree limb, holding on with just one foot.

"That's right, Lucy," the mother cooed repeatedly. "See, it's trying to get your hand. Move your fingers and see what it does."

"I wonder if that could actually be causing the animal some distress", I said in what I hoped was a conversational tone.

"Yeah", she said vacantly, as she continued to watch her child pawing the glass.

I have never been big enough or brave enough for a fight. I stood there until the mother and child went away, only to see them replaced by a couple of Eastern European tourists who began thumping on the glass to get the lorises' attention for a photograph. Then I went back up into the light and walked almost without a pause through the rest of the zoo. On the way home I realised I had toothmarks inside my mouth where I had been biting down in silent fury.

Prom 52

Schnittke's oratorio Nagasaki faced difficulties from the moment of its composition in 1958. When the 24-year-old composer submitted the work as his graduation piece, he was accused of "forgetting the principles of Realism" in music and made to rewrite the ending to reflect optimism that Communism would eliminate the need for future wars. Even with these changes, the work was not played for radio broadcast until Shostakovich personally intervened on Schnittke's behalf -- and it was not performed live until 2006, in Cape Town. Last night's performance by the London Symphony Orchestra and London Symphony Chorus was the oratorio's UK premiere.

Nagasaki consists of five movements, each setting the text of a different poem. The first and last of these are good Socialist works by the Soviet poet Anatoly Sofronov, but the other three are by two Japanese poets, Eisaku Yoneda and Shimazaki Tōson (the programme wasn't clear on which one wrote which poems, and Google hasn't been much help). The first movement, "Nagasaki, city of grief", opens in a stately, almost Handelian manner, but soon breaks down into rattling percussion, shrieking strings, and warped blasts from the brass and woodwinds.

The text of the second movement, "The morning", appears to celebrate a new dawn of hope after the devastation. The sprightly opening, with its chiming celesta and harp glissandos, seemed cloying and almost Disneyesque to me, but it was soon undercut by the dark and ironic vocal melody. This proceeded without any break into the third movement, "On that fateful Day", which tries to recreate the explosion of the atomic bomb with an assault of percussion and instrumental cacophony.

The fourth movement, "On the Ashes", is a solo for mezzo-soprano, a setting of a touching poem by Yoneda and/or Tōson (bear in mind that this text has been translated from Japanese through Russian):

I walk quietly on this scorched land
cinders glow in the winter sun
green shoots of young grass
are sprouting over the ashen waste

I call my baby in vain
only the echo rolls down to the river
where he so often played

The river -- now beautiful again
through the clear water the riverbed can be seen
on whose banks my child would have grown

Oh my river, gladden me with your eternal beauty
you have not forgotten that awful day
even now in the setting sun, reflections of hell
like tongues of fire still dance in your waters

Yet the orchestral accompaniment for this isn't what you might think -- it's harsh and clamorous. At times it was hard for me to hear soloist Elena Zhidkova over the instruments, although that may have been partly because of where we were sitting. One interesting thing about this movement is that it featured a theremin, which I'd never seen played live before.

For the finale, "The Sun of Peace", we got to hear the Albert Hall's gigantic pipe organ in all its glory, though it was only played at full blast for a few minutes before quieting to a drone that accompanied the rest of the movement. This final movement is the one that was rewritten to please the Soviet authorities, and the apotheosis did seem rather forced.

The second half of the concert was Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony. Since I rarely find programme notes to be very illuminating, I was delighted that Gerard McBurney's notes for this work were an exception. McBurney is the musicologist who has recently devoted himself to restoring several of Shostakovich's "lost" works, such as the opera Orango and the orchestral suite Hypothetically Murdered. He put into words something that I've long felt about this symphony:

The entire work abounds in ideas that constantly remind us of other ideas, the most violently contrasted musical images suddenly startle us with an unexpected quality of similarity. A motif here, a chord there, sometimes a single note or instrumental colour, can make a connection in our memory with something that earlier we had thought to have been quite different. The cumulative effect is of the constant shifting of the ground beneath our feet. ... The curious feeling we have of knowing and yet not knowing where we are is one that occurs again and again throughout this piece.

Although I would not have had the musical vocabulary to express it, I think this explains why, when listening to the first movement in particular, I have often felt as I do in dreams: that the various events I am experiencing have some connection to each other, yet when I try to examine that connection closely, everything becomes indistinct and slips away. (That is, until the percussion comes in and leaves no doubt I'm awake).

McBurney was also able to explain how the second movement (the jazz scherzo, which always strikes me as sadly insistent) and the last movement seem quite similar in some ways and yet have very different effects on the listener. I had noticed it myself, but he told us how Shostakovich did it:

Both have the same tempo marking, Allegretto, and nearly the same metronome mark. The second movement is in a march-like 4/4 that keeps dancing into 3/4; the fifth begins and ends in 3/4, but slips back several times into a 4/4 march rhythm. And the parallels don't end there. There is a whole mass of thematic resemblances between the two movements, above and apart from the general tissue of cross-references, that holds the whole symphony together. In fact this last movement suggests almost an attempt to rewrite the second movement, but to do so in the light of all the other music that has intervened; it is like reliving an earlier experience but with a new understanding.

If only all concert programmes added this much to our understanding of the music. I don't think I'll listen to the Eighth in quite the same way again.

To Ostatnia Niedziela

Sophie Solomon's album Poison Sweet Madeira came out three years ago, but I only just discovered it last week. I don't think it was a particularly big seller, so with luck it will be news to some readers too. I was particularly taken with a track called "Burnt by the Sun", featuring guest vocals by Richard Hawley. I had a vague idea that this was a translation of an old Russian song, so I did some research.

It turns out that the song was originally Polish, not Russian -- a tango called "To Ostatnia Niedziela", written in 1935 by Jerzy Petersburski. The title means "Last [as in final] Sunday", and the original lyrics were about the separation of lovers. Google provides a partial translation (anyone know what "rozejdziemy" means?). Wikipedia claims that the song was nicknamed the "Suicide Tango" because it prompted so many heartbroken listeners to take their own lives, but this may have been marketing hype like that surrounding the near-contemporaneous "Gloomy Sunday".

Soviet performers began covering the tune shortly after its success in Poland. Several different sets of Russian lyrics appear to have been written, but it was a version called "Утомлённое солнце" (Weary Sun) that became a massive hit. Nikita Mikhalkov used a pun on this title for his 1994 film about the Stalinist purges, Утомлённые солнцем (Weary from the Sun), which was translated into English as Burnt By the Sun. (I'm embarrassed to say that I saw this film at university but remember almost nothing about it.)

A YouTube user has uploaded a number of different recordings of "To Ostatnia Niedziela" from the 1930s, including Polish versions by Marian Demar and Mieczysław Fogg, and Russian ones (with different sets of lyrics) by Klavdia Shulzhenko and the Riazanov Quartet. It still seems to be a popular song for modern bands to cover in Poland -- see this ska-punk version by Cała Góra Barwinków, for example.

Solomon & Hawley's version seems to have an entirely new set of English lyrics, rather than a translation (I downloaded the album, so I can't refer to the liner notes, but I doubt that any of the Russian versions referred to a "Prozac cocoon"). It's also pitched lower than most other versions, to suit Hawley's range, and omits a sung introduction that's included in some of the '30s recordings.

Cricketing disaster

No, I'm not taunting my Australian reader (I would have to actually care about the Ashes in order to do that). One of my favourite guitarists, Richard Thompson, has broken his finger:

I sustained this playing cricket last weekend. I thought it was just bruised, but by Wednesday the pain wasn't going away, and I had an x-ray.

For the technically minded, it was a non-displaced spiral fracture of the middle finger of the right hand.

It's hard to think of many other rock musicians who would injure themselves in that way.

Thompson had to cancel a festival appearance this weekend, but hopes to be healed in time to start a two-month tour of the U.S. in October. Having been lucky enough to have seen him live, I strongly encourage my Stateside readers to catch one of the shows if they can.

Playing the Building

On Wednesday we went to David Byrne's sound installation at the Roundhouse. The bare performance space was surprisingly attractive. A small old church organ sits in the centre of a circle of black pillars, the space lit only by sunlight coming through the cupola. At the back of the organ, wires connect each key to a different part of the building. Some keys cause beams to vibrate, some force air through the pipes and some strike pillars with mechanical clappers (all the mechanisms are fully on display).

As for the "music" produced by this keyboard, I found it far less irritating than a lot of modern experimental music. People were playing the organ constantly for the 45 minutes or so we were in the building, and the whirrs, clacks and whistles didn't once become grating. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the sounds produced were beautiful, but they did have a certain fascination.

Needless to say, we took our own turn. It was a lot of fun, especially forcing air through the building's pipes like a giant set of woodwinds. I could have gone on for longer than I did, but I was mindful of the long queue behind me.


Chris takes his turn at the organ.

We also had a very minor celebrity sighting while we were there: Natalie Merchant, formerly of 10,000 Maniacs, wandered in, apparently to check out the venue for a concert. It was mildly amusing to hear the German man in front of us, who also recognised her, trying to explain to his companion who she was. Still, In My Tribe is a great album.

Prom 46

Years ago I went to a Prom whose first half consisted of a standard from the classical repertoire (Beethoven, I think) and whose second half was a new work by Hans Werner Henze. Pretty much the only entertainment during the Henze piece was watching the audience, most of whom had come for the Beethoven, gradually trickling out of the hall. We gamely stuck it out for as long as we could before joining them.

The Proms' organisers apparently learned a lesson from experiences like that, because they now put new pieces at the beginning of the programme or wedge them between two favourites. Such was the case with Shoreless River, the composition by Detlev Glanert whose UK premiere opened last night's Prom by the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

It's easy to be snarky about contemporary music, but I'll be honest: I didn't hate this. It did what (according to the programme) it set out to do, which was to conjure up images of water, and especially of a storm at sea. The piece uses a lot of percussion (which is presumably why it was programmed along with Shostakovich's 11th), and I found myself watching one musician who stood over his gongs and drum with a tender, almost anxious care -- quite in contrast to the racket he eventually let loose. At the end of the performance the composer came onstage and seemed quite overwhelmed by the applause.

The next piece was Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Everyone knows the 18th variation (trust me, even if you don't think you know it, you do), but the other 18 are equally delightful: Paganini's Caprice interspersed with Dies Irae, played in a jazz style. It captures Paganini's "diabolical" reputation but delivers it with sardonic wit. The pianist, Denis Matsuev, played with fittingly demonic frenzy.

After the interval was Shostakovich's 11th Symphony. This is a piece I've listened to frequently this year, thanks to Vasily Petrenko's recording on Naxos. The opening is one of my favourites among Shostakovich's symphonies, and I must admit to having uncharitable thoughts about the person whose watch alarm went off during the hushed first bars.

My only real criticism of the BBCSO's performance is that the climax of the second movement (which purportedly depicts the Tsarist slaughter of protesters in 1905, but which Shostakovich told friends was really inspired by the crushing of the Hungarian Uprising) was played too triumphantly: it sounded more like a military victory than a massacre. But the orchestra redeemed itself in the third movement, where its poignant rendering of "You Fell as Victims" put a lump in my throat.

Perhaps still under the influence of the Glanert piece, I found myself paying an unusual amount of attention to the percussion. I was struck by how the timpani -- sympathetically miked, or milked, in this performance for sure -- are played softly and delicately in the quiet of the first movement: not the first sound I would have associated with them. And the symphony ended with three musicians flinging themselves bodily across the bells to quieten them.

(The concert is available to listen to here for the next week.)

Prom 44

Last night was, apparently, the first time Prokofiev's Overture on Hebrew Themes had been performed at the Proms. The Budapest Festival Orchestra took advantage of the audience's unfamiliarity with the piece to play a practical joke. They sat down before conductor Iván Fischer came out and, instead of tuning up as normal, launched into a mournful theme that stunned the crowd into silence.

The Overture itself turned out to be cheerier stuff, with plenty of klezmer-like phrases and an excellent performance by principal bassoonist Dániel Tallián. Although a work by a Soviet composer on this subject naturally (to me, at least) raises comparisons to Shostakovich's From Jewish Folk Poetry, the genesis of the two works was very different. Prokofiev composed his overture in 1919, while living in the United States. An ensemble of former classmates was trying to raise money for a conservatory in Jerusalem and needed a new piece to play at their benefit concert. In its optimism, Prokofiev's overture is quite different from Shostakovich's song cycle, which was composed after the Holocaust and in the face of official Soviet anti-Semitism.

The next piece on the programme was more familiar to Proms audiences: Bartók's Second Violin Concerto. Bartók apparently wrote this in part "to show Schoenberg that one can use all 12 tones and still remain tonal". I could hear definite similarities to Schoenberg in the piece, although overall it struck me as more humane than Schoenberg's work (which I probably don't appreciate as well as I should). During the first movement, it seemed as if the beautiful, delicate phrases for solo violin (brilliantly played by Leonidas Kavakos) were being chased and nearly swallowed up by a heavyweight orchestra; the programme told us that Bartók was more experienced at writing for small string ensembles than for full orchestra, and this fact didn't surprise me. Towards the end of the movement, though, the violin acquires a frenzy of its own, and in a long solo passage it seemed to fill the Albert Hall with its fury.

The second movement is a set of variations on the same theme -- some quivering, some sparkling, some almost martial. The final movement brings back all the themes in the first movement, although the mood seems almost to be inverted. It's a remarkable piece that I hope to hear again.

Finally came Dvořák's Seventh Symphony. Dvořák, like most Romantic composers, can sometimes leave me cold, but I found myself really enjoying this: lots of sound to get lost in, charming themes from Czech folk music, and a breathtaking scherzo. The orchestra ensured that the music never became merely pretty, even in the slow movement.

The audience were extremely enthusiastic -- all except the fellow sitting next to us, who spent the entire concert reading a Stephen King novel. We demanded, and got, an encore: a piece by Johann Strauss whose name I didn't catch, complete with vocal accompaniment.

The concert should be available to listen to here, but for some reason it isn't at the moment; it might be worth a try later.

Ernst Herbeck

It was through an essay in Sebald's Campo Santo that I first heard of Ernst Herbeck. Now I've started reading Sebald's novel Vertigo, in which the author (or his alter ego) takes Herbeck on a day trip to Klosterneuburg in Austria.

Herbeck was an unskilled factory worker when, in 1940, he first began showing signs of mental illness. Shortly after the end of World War II, he was committed to a psychiatric hospital, where he would remain for 34 years. Encouraged by his psychiatrist, he began writing poems -- over a thousand in the course of his hospital stay. Their language can at times be beautiful and at other times simply bizarre, as these examples translated by Gary Sullivan show:

Der Morgen.

Der Morgen ist kühl,
die Vögel sind stier.
Die Affen allein—,
auf den Bäumen zu sein.

(Morning.

Morning is cool,
the birds transfixed.
The apes alone—,
to be in the trees.)

Frühling

Der Herr Fäller war im Wahld
und sie der Bauer war im Wald
und sah er wie im Wagen rollte
wo das Herz im Herzen Holz schlug.
tik targ wo auch ein Knorr zu
hören war
und hielt sie ganz wunderbar
ihm Frühling.
über’s ganze Jahr.

(Spring

Mr. Cutter was in the whoods
and she the farmer was in the woods
and he saw how her wagon rolled
where the heart in the heart wood struck.
tik targ where also a gnarl was to
be heard
and held her wholly wonderful
in spring.
o’er the whole year.)

I haven't read Sebald's whole account of their visit yet, but this passage struck me (and is a good example of the novel's style so far):

A dog leapt at a green-painted iron gate, quite beside itself, as if it had taken leave of its senses. It was a large black Newfoundland, its natural gentleness broken by ill-treatment, long confinement or even the crystal clarity of the autumn day. In the villa behind the iron fence nothing stirred. Nobody came to the window, not even a curtain moved. Again and again the animal ran up and hurled itself at the gate, only occasionally pausing to eye us where we stood as if transfixed. As we walked on I could feel the chill of terror in my limbs. Ernst turned to look back once more at the black dog, which had now stopped barking and was standing motionless in the midday sun. Perhaps we should have let it out. It would probably have ambled along beside us, like a good beast, while its evil spirit might have stalked among the people of Kritzendorf in search of another host, and indeed might have entered them all simultaneously, so not one of them would have been able to lift a spoon or fork again.

Sullivan has a blog devoted to his English translations of Herbeck, though it seems to be dormant, and there's a collection of 12 translated poems here.

Hypothetically Murdered

Exciting news from Audiophile Audition, which reviews the first recording of a recently discovered Shostakovich score:

Gerard McBurney reconstructed this orchestral suite from confusing piano scores and sketches that he discovered. The Soviet Union was going thru much upheaval at the time and the young composer hooked up with a celebrity vaudeville and jazz performer named Leonid Utiosov, who was big in light entertainment in the USSR for four decades. Together they cooked up what was described as “a Light-Music Circus Entertainment in 3 Acts.” ... The plot mixed comedy and slapstick with serious political issues - some of it a very Russian style of dark satire. The plot revolves around a civil-defense practice, with one of the characters scheduled to play a hypothetical casualty of war, but this character - played by Utiosov - refuses that role. The big production involved a leading choreographer, two popular actors, and even a performing German shepherd named Alpha (who critics complained barked all the way thru the premiere).

More information on the recording -- and sample clips -- at the Signum Records site. Gerard McBurney, by the way, is the same scholar currently working on the score of another of Shostakovich's lost works, Orango.

The imam fainted

The Turkish aubergine/eggplant dish Imam Bayildi must have one of the oddest names in the culinary lexicon. Stories vary about just what caused the imam to faint. Some say he swooned at the deliciousness of the dish, others from overeating, and still others claim he passed out when he learned how much expensive olive oil had been used to cook the meal. One of the more elaborate legends says that after the imam's new bride presented him with the dish, he bought her a storehouse full of oil and asked her to make it every day until the oil ran out. He fainted when he discovered that the oil only lasted a few days.

It's true that aubergines have a spongy structure that causes them to soak up oil like mad. While some cookbook writers claim it will release the oil again eventually, it's hard to resist the temptation to add more to the pan.

The recipe I followed for tonight's dinner -- from Arto Der Haroutunian's Vegetarian Dishes from the Middle East -- cuts down on the olive oil somewhat by using it only in the filling, and having the aubergines themselves (which remain whole) cooked in plain vegetable oil. This may detract from the romance of the dish, but the aubergines tasted fine. Like many Middle Eastern dishes, Imam Bayildi is served at room temperature, which was handy because I could cook it ahead of time and then spend this beautiful afternoon in the park.

I was wondering whether Imam Bayildi is the only dish whose name is a complete sentence. The only other possible candidate I could think of was the diabetes-inducing Pennsylvania Dutch dessert Shoo-Fly Pie -- if "shoo-fly" is taken as an imperative addressed to the fly, that is. Chris, however (who's never even eaten the stuff) argues that "pie" is an essential part of the name and that this therefore won't work. Any other suggestions?

Assumption

This evening I went to the vigil Mass for the Feast of the Assumption. The weather, which had been changeable, was bright and clear by the time I went out, and the flower gardens I passed on the way looked particularly brilliant in the sunshine. Behind the stained-glass window over the main altar, the shadows of two butterflies played for some time.

All this reminded me of Hopkins' lines from "The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe":

Again, look overhead
How air is azurèd;
O how! Nay do but stand
Where you can lift your hand
Skywards: rich, rich it laps
Round the four fingergaps.
Yet such a sapphire-shot,
Charged, steepèd sky will not
Stain light. Yea, mark you this:
It does no prejudice.
The glass-blue days are those
When every colour glows,
Each shape and shadow shows. ...
So God was god of old:
A mother came to mould
Those limbs like ours which are
What must make our daystar
Much dearer to mankind;
Whose glory bare would blind
Or less would win man's mind.
Through her we may see him
Made sweeter, not made dim,
And her hand leaves his light
Sifted to suit our sight.

Sleeping States

Markland Starkie of Sleeping States isn't the only rock musician out there with an interest in W.G. Sebald*, but he does seem to be the one who's publicised it most. His admiration for the author seems to be mentioned in every review, which means that the band invades my Google news alerts on a regular basis.

So today I finally caved in and had a listen to (I think) their next single, "Gardens of the South". I was fully prepared to like it, but my honest reaction was: Meh. I suppose the Beach Boys-style backing vocals are a mildly interesting touch, but it didn't take long for them to become annoying. The tune itself didn't make much impression at all; maybe it would grow on me if I gave it a few more listens. Also, I had to scroll away from the video because it was making me seasick.

Still, it's nice to see Sebald getting some publicity, and I'd encourage anyone who's interested to check the band out for themselves.

* I would recommend this band instead, but I'm not an impartial observer.

String 'em up

I said most of what I had to say about the Baby P case last autumn, so I'll just add these two comments about the latest "developments":

1. If a child raised by these people had lived to grow beyond the "cute" stage, and if (as seems likely, given his background), he had turned to a life of petty crime and violence, the same tabloids that are now howling for blood over his killing would have denounced him as subhuman scum.
   
2. It's disgraceful that this has received at least ten times as much coverage as Aung San Suu Kyi's latest conviction.
   

Moths and butterflies

With the weather finally warm enough for us to open our windows most days, we've been finding the usual little transient population of moths in our flat. Most of these are fairly plain white or brown specimens that have defied my attempts to identify them further. (Some of the white moths -- such as the one that settled contentedly on my shirt the other day, apparently not disturbed by my movements -- actually prove to have a rather pretty faint gold pattern when examined closely. But UKMoths' otherwise excellent keyword search brings up nothing with both "white" and "gold", so either I'm seeing things or the official guides call the colour by another name.) This morning, though, I found one that was easier to identify -- a beautiful Brimstone Moth, a deeper yellow than the one on the website, moving delicately along the bathroom wall.

To complement our indoor moths, there's been a proliferation of butterflies outside. It's sometimes hard to look anywhere without seeing a pair of little white butterflies -- mainly Green-Veined Whites, I think -- flying together and circling one another in turns. In gardens they look like petals that have blown away and come to life.

Meanwhile, some parts of the UK are reporting a massive influx of Painted Ladies. I've not seen any myself, but I was recently reading about their more colourful cousins in the Southern Hemisphere, the Australian Painted Ladies. Wikipedia tells us that in the 19th century, this species used to migrate in such massive numbers that Australian trains could not run because of butterflies resting on the tracks. (It's hard to imagine anyone complaining about being late for that reason.) Like many other species, they have declined significantly in number for reasons that aren't wholly clear.

So saying, Johnny Oxford pointed his finger at --

Two of my work colleagues both fell asleep Sunday evening and missed the ending of Poirot. I pointed out that they could watch the rest online, but they said that was too much trouble, and preferred to take the easier and more accurate option of stopping random people who passed their desks and asking if they'd happened to see the programme. When that didn't work, they started searching the Web for synopses of the book the episode was based on, and finally one of them rushed out to W.H. Smith on her break to see if they had a copy (apparently they had all the Poirot novels except that one). I don't know whether they ever found out whodunit.

A certain group of my readers will inevitably be thinking of this:



That clip also reminds me of a recent conversation I had about advertisements in books. A friend complained that he'd found an advert for savings accounts in an old copy of a Nabokov novel, and I said I didn't remember ever seeing a non-book-related ad in a book. (Adverts for books by the same author or publisher, yes, and I think Dell Yearling books used to advertise some kind of children's book club). But the Hancock episode, and Chris's collection of old British paperbacks, have reminded me that it used to be fairly common in the UK. Maybe it was never as popular in America, which would contradict some stereotypes.

Nowadays you sometimes see chick-lit being advertised through tie-ins with chocolate companies or travel agents, but adverts inside books (or at least the ones I read) seem to have disappeared. As Chris says, this would make books one of the few media that contain less advertising than they used to.

In kitchen cups concupiscent curds

The Mass today was celebrated by my least favourite priest, a pompous and unsmiling man who has given homilies scoffing at the "doomsayers of climate change" and who persists in saying "Pray, brethren ..." where all the other priests have been saying "brothers and sisters" for years. (He's a former Anglican priest who converted; so many of them seem to behave like this. Whether it's a cause or an effect of their switching sides I don't know.)

His homily was about concupiscence, a word I don't believe I'd ever heard spoken aloud before. As always, it reminded me of the opening of Wallace Stevens' poem "The Emperor of Ice-Cream"*:

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

This meant I was able to spend the rest of the homily quite pleasantly, thinking about poetry (particularly the volume of Auden's collected poems I bought yesterday) and ice cream (of which we have none at the moment, sadly).

Midway through the sermon the woman in front of me remembered that she had forgotten to switch off her mobile phone. As she pushed the buttons, though, it started making those annoying chimes that phones make when you switch them on (there's probably a name for those, but I don't know it). With panicked movements, she finally silenced it and stuffed it back in her handbag -- only to have the same sounds start issuing from the bag a few minutes later. She grabbed the bag and clutched it against her as if to physically smother the noise, while looking around anxiously at her fellow churchgoers. I grinned at her in what I hoped was a sympathetic way, but I don't know if it helped.

* This poem makes more sense if you know that homemade ice cream was traditionally served at wakes in Key West.

Medals of Dishonour

Medals of Dishonour, the British Museum's latest free exhibition, explores an art form I'd been unfamiliar with before: satirical medals struck to comment upon political issues. After a couple of medals gloating over the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the museum has a large selection from the 17th century, when (for reasons that aren't fully explained) the Dutch turned out scores of medals in response to events elsewhere in Europe.

More interesting than these, though, were the British medals made during the French Revolution by both supporters and opponents of the revolutionaries. One anti-revolutionary medal showed Thomas Paine being hanged for treason, while the inscription on the reverse expressed the wish that "the Tree of Liberty might exist to support the last of Tommy's friends". Later medals commemorated the Old Price Riots over the cost of Covent Garden Theatre tickets -- a fascinating bit of history that I hadn't heard of before -- and the Peterloo Massacre. All this made me realise just what a tumultuous place Britain was during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, something that I think tends to be forgotten.

The 20th-century section had several examples of the work of Karl Goetz, who made a notorious medal after the sinking of the Lusitania, showing the passengers ignoring warnings as they bought their tickets. The British government found replicas of this medal to be very effective anti-German propaganda. Goetz didn't redeem himself with a later work pouring scorn on "The Sleepwalkers of Gallipoli", or with an obscene and racist medal about alleged sex crimes committed by black troops serving in the French military. More palatable were the anti-war medals by Ludwig Gies, who 20 years later was persecuted by the Nazis as a "degenerate artist".

The final part of the exhibition consists of new medals commissioned from contemporary artists. The museum wisely put these in a separate room from the others: I've been to exhibitions and concerts where modern-day works were annoyingly mingled with classic ones, to keep audiences from simply skipping them, I suppose. Most of them were pretty sophomoric (oh, a medal calling Blair and Bush war criminals, how daring and original), but one of them, Greed Envy Rage by the South African artist William Kentridge, was rather more interesting than the others. Kentridge's name rang a bell, and I realised I'd read an article about him a few months ago, when he was commissioned to design film projections for next year's Metropolitan Opera production of The Nose.

Campo Santo in French

There's a little review in Libération of Campo Santo, W.G. Sebald's posthumous collection of essays and travel writing, which has just been published in French. Here's my rough translation (quotations from the book are taken from Penguin's English-language edition, translated by Anthea Bell).

The human inclination of W.G. Sebald

Sebald was a traveller who, among others, surveyed Corsica. This posthumous collection, filled out by essays on Handke, Chatwin and Kafka, opens with four rambles that make one lament what his book about the island -- or on the occasion of it -- could have been if an accident had not killed the author in 2001. Here Corsica is the cradle of reflective observations on the consciousness of nature and the human inclination toward destruction. Things seen and read blend, as always, with sinuous discretion. During the hunting season, "I repeatedly felt as if the entire male population were participating in a ritual of destruction which long ago became pointless. ... Unshaven, carrying heavy rifles, menacing in their manner, they look like those Croatian and Serbian militiamen who destroyed their native land in their deranged belligerence". On returning to his hotel, the author of The Emigrants finds an old Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of Flaubert that has been left behind in "the drawer of the bedside table" -- what a coincidence! -- and reads The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller, "that strange tale in which an insatiable passion for hunting and a vocation for sainthood do battle in the same heart". The manner in which Sebald uses Flaubert's sentences in forming his own sentences, as one slips a picture into one's own tapestry, informs us about the writer's craft, or in any case about this particular writer. He is the silent and sensitive gardener, grafting here or there if necessary, in the uneasy peace of a glance, a gesture or a tone.

A common mistake, I'm sure

Since I haven't explicitly renounced my American citizenship, the IRS can still claim me, and don't think they don't know it. Most recently they've sent me a survey (it's only slightly shorter and less dense than the 1040 form, but have no fear, expats can clear up any questions they have by calling a California phone number between 10 am and 6 pm U.S. Central Time) to help improve their service to Americans living abroad. For example, we can tell the IRS whether we prefer to receive tax instructions in English, though the survey doesn't say when this service might become available.

I'm pleased by the compilers' attention to detail, though. When asking which tax information resources we're aware of, the survey lists the "IRS.gov Web site", but then specifies, "to actively locate information, not for casual browsing". I can imagine how skewed their results would be if they didn't make that distinction.

Never such innocence again, until you hit Rewind

Poems produced to commemorate current events are rarely any good. Just look at Auden's third-rate poem about the Moon landing, or the dismal verse read out at American presidential inaugurations, or produced by Britain's poets laureate on official occasions.

"Last Post", Carol Ann Duffy's poem in honour of Henry Allingham and Harry Patch, has been said by some critics to buck this trend. But I'm sorry, I've read it half a dozen times now and each time I am only more struck by how dreadful it is. First of all, it's based on the hackneyed and tasteless conceit of running time in reverse, like a film, so that the war dead are brought back to life. Kurt Vonnegut used the same idea in Slaughterhouse-Five, but that was a satire; Duffy seems to be in earnest.

Secondly, the alternative future she imagines for her "lines and lines of British boys" consists purely of trite and sentimental images: "kiss the photographs from home —/mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers ... love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food". Other lines, too, are outright cliché ("the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings"), and those that are original are just plain awful ("watch bled bad blood/run upwards from the slime into its wounds"?!).

Finally, Duffy's poem says nothing about the war except that she wishes it hadn't happened -- a sentiment we can all agree with, I'm sure, but is it really worth 30 lines? But I suspect the poet genuinely doesn't have any more to say: the whole thing does sound like the work of someone who was asked to produce something of Great Significance to a very tight deadline.

By contrast, a tribute I like very much is Radiohead's song "Harry Patch (In Memory Of)", released today as a download on the band's website. The track costs £1, with all proceeds going to the Royal British Legion; if you want to hear it first, you can listen to the whole thing and read the lyrics on the Today programme's site (I don't think many other bands would have their song's first airplay on Radio 4). The gorgeous string arrangement is suitably elegiac, but within the sorrow is a hint of menace at the certainty of future wars: "the next will be chemical but they will never learn" (the lyrics are taken directly from an interview Patch gave to Today in 2005). I find it genuinely moving in a way that Duffy's poem fails to be.

It seems entirely possible to me that Thom Yorke is a greater artist than Carol Ann Duffy. But I'm sure it's also significant that Radiohead's song wasn't written out of professional obligation.

Wrens

As we enter late summer, the garden behind our flat has become a bit quieter in the mornings. The blackbirds' breeding season is over. Around the neighbourhood, too, we see fewer robins and blue tits than we did a few weeks ago.

One bird has become more visible, though, and that's the wren. Every morning I've been seeing one feeding in the underpass where someone puts old bread. It usually has a dozen or so pigeons to compete with, but it darts confidently around them, not seeming to mind that they are many times its size.

I'm not sure what brings the wrens out into the open this time of year, but I'm glad to see them. I always have to stop and look again: they seem too tiny and delicate to be real.

The wren has an interesting place in British folklore. It was once believed that all wrens were female and all robins were male, and that the two were each other's mates -- hence the old poem "The Wedding of Robin Redbreast and Jenny Wren" and the 16th-century saying, "The robin and the wren/are God Almighty's cock and hen". But I think my favourite poetic reference to the wren is in Blake's "Auguries of Innocence": "He who shall hurt the little wren/Shall never be beloved by men".

Utz

I had high hopes for Bruce Chatwin's novel Utz, which I finished at the weekend. I wouldn't say it was a complete disappointment, but I didn't enjoy it as thoroughly as I'd expected. Perhaps I'm just missing something, but it seemed to me that Chatwin took an unexpected detour two-thirds of the way through, so that a book which had seemed to be about one thing turned out to be about something else. This can sometimes be an interesting tactic, but in this case I was left wondering either what the point of the novel's ending was, or what the point of the previous 80 pages had been.

Having said that, Chatwin is a very vivid writer -- his description of Utz's funeral at the beginning of the book will stay with me for a long time -- and creates sparkling and often very funny dialogue, particularly in the scene where Utz, the narrator, and the palaeontologist Orlik lunch at the "Trout" restaurant (which has no trout).

Chatwin's work has obvious similarities to W.G. Sebald's. But in Austerlitz Sebald's narrator/alter ego gives the title character almost complete freedom to speak for himself, and rarely intrudes into the story (we never do find out what's wrong with his eyes*). Chatwin's narrator, by contrast, is far quicker to give his own interpretation of events and pass judgement on the characters he describes. I found this slightly jarring, but that's probably just because I've been so immersed in Sebald this year.

* Nick has since corrected me on this: the narrator has central serous retinopathy.

Keats House

I went to Keats House today mainly intending to take some pictures of the gardens, but it turns out that most of the area in front of the house was taken up by a hilariously overacted open-air play about Keats and Fanny Brawne. The male lead delivered the angriest-sounding "Ode on a Grecian Urn" I'd ever heard, while stomping up and down the path in bare feet and inserting an occasional consumptive cough for authenticity.

I vaguely recalled that there was a tree in the garden under which Keats was said to have written "To a Nightingale", but there's no reference to it in the house's official literature so I may have imagined it somehow. In any event, the play meant I couldn't get close enough to most of the trees to investigate, but I got a picture of this possible suspect from over the fence:



From within the house itself, I photographed a more assuredly genuine scene. We know that as Keats's health deteriorated, his friend and housemate Charles Brown set up a "Sopha-Bed" by the window in his own parlour so that Keats could look out at the garden. This is the view.



The house has changed considerably since Keats lived there. The wall that divided the Brawnes' half from Brown's and Keats's was knocked down later in the 19th century, and a subsequent owner added several large rooms. But if you confine yourself to the two-and-a-half tiny rooms where the poet lived, it is still possible to imagine his presence.

The curators have decorated the rooms with period furniture and with various items relating to Keats's life. Perhaps the most haunting of these are the numerous copies of his death mask, the largest of which watches eerily from a glass case at the foot of the poet's bed. In one sense, it's an anachronistic intrusion into the room as Keats would have known it. But on the other hand, perhaps it's fitting: today we cannot think of Keats sleeping in that bed -- or indeed doing anything else -- without remembering the early death that awaited him.

To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, when Keats was my age, he'd been dead for nine years. Yet in his brief life, he produced one of the greatest bodies of poetry in the English language. As I've said before, it's as if someone knew from the beginning that he wouldn't have much time.

Fair natural

A fellow Jesuit, wishing to sum up Gerard Manley Hopkins' eccentricity, described him as "a strange young man crouching down that gate to stare at some wet sand".

It turns out, though, that taking an interest in damp sand isn't so bizarre. The RSPB recently undertook a major project to restore an area of wet sand that had become overgrown at its Dungeness reserve. It seems that the sand provides the only suitable conditions for the critically endangered Jersey cudweed, as well as for Omophron limbatum, a beetle so rare it doesn't have an English name. Amazing what you can find if you look.