Prom 18

It's not often that I'm familiar with the composer of a work to be premiered at the Proms, but that was the case at last night's concert by the Australian Youth Orchestra. Brett Dean's "Three Caprichos after Goya" are on a Naxos CD of Australian guitar music that I bought earlier this year. They aren't the most memorable pieces on there (I prefer Ross Edwards's "Blackwattle Caprices" and Graeme Koehne's "A Closed World of Fine Feelings and Grand Design", but they're certainly listenable.

Last night's piece, "Amphitheatre", was a tone poem based on a description of a ruined Roman amphitheatre in Michael Ende's children's book Momo. As far as I could tell, it did a good job of evoking both the haunted atmosphere of the ruins, and the excitement of the spectacles that had once taken place there. There was a slow bit at the end whose purpose I wasn't sure of.

Two things generally strike me about contemporary compositions: their extensive use of percussion (I think this one may even have had castanets), and the way most of them sound like they should be film scores; listening to them on their own seems like an incomplete experience. The modest audience seemed to give this one a reasonably positive reception, and the composer himself turned up to take a bow. He should have tucked his shirt in first.

The selections from Mahler's "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" were, unfortunately, a disappointment. Mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova showed little emotional range in her performance, so that a lighthearted nonsense song about geese sounded exactly the same as a tragic ballad about a dead soldier and his sweetheart. Things only really came together in the last selection, "Urlicht". Gubanova's style seemed perfectly suited to this tender hymn about a soul making its way back to God (and I loved the klezmer-inspired phrases on the violin).

At last there was Shosty 10. (I was recently chastised by a group of classical-music snobs for using this nickname for Shostakovich's 10th Symphony -- which seems to me an excellent reason to keep using it.) It was beautifully played; my only criticism is that the percussion could have been stronger in the last movement. The crowd were enthusiastic enough to demand an encore, which brought Australia and Britain together -- Percy Grainger's arrangement of the Londonderry Air.

A diet of rubbish

Brilliant news from the UK's "Equalities Minister" (me either), who has announced that women should stop torturing themselves to have unrealistic stick figures, and start torturing themselves to have unrealistic hourglass figures instead. I suppose telling women simply to maintain a healthy weight, and learn to love whatever shape their bodies happened to be at that weight, might have caused rioting in the nation's magazine offices.

Can you imagine any government minister -- especially one charged with "reduc[ing] discrimination and disadvantage for all, at work, in public and political life, and in people’s life chances" -- taking time to pronounce on which actor's body shape men should aim to imitate? Or the media reporting on this as if it were a serious issue ("Join the debate on our forum!"), rather than an excuse to run pictures of the actor in question? How much longer are intelligent women going to put up with this nonsense?

Johnson and the Great Wall

I spent my day off yesterday at Dr Johnson's House, one of those little-known but fascinating museums of which London is full. Among the historical objects there, I was surprised to find a brick from the Great Wall of China:



Turns out this didn't belong to Johnson, but was donated to the museum after his death, in honour of his lifelong fascination with the Wall. Boswell's Life of Johnson includes this passage:

He expressed a particular enthusiasm with respect to visiting the wall of China. I catched it for the moment, and said I really believed I should go and see the wall of China had I not children, of whom it was my duty to take care. "Sir, (said he,) by doing so, you would do what would be of importance in raising your children to eminence. There would be a lustre reflected upon them from your spirit and curiosity. They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the wall of China. I am serious, Sir."

Prom 8

Last night's concert by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales included one of the finest performances of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony I've heard. As the snare drum began its slow, marching crescendo in the first movement, I looked around and found myself surrounded by tapping feet, nodding heads and drumming fingers. (Less charmingly, a few minutes later someone's mobile phone went off. The second time I've heard that happen during this work, I believe.)

During the concert I found myself preoccupied by a topic that I've often pondered in the past. The story behind the writing of the Seventh is quite interesting (so much so that I've made my own attempt at fictionalising it -- see here, here, here and here) and could make a good film. Except you couldn't really make a film about it without including the symphony itself, and since the symphony is over an hour long, it would take up at least half of a reasonable-length movie. Robert Duvall devoted 20 minutes of The Apostle to an old-time Pentecostal sermon, but even that was pushing the boundaries; film audiences wouldn't put up with 75 minutes of staring at an orchestra. So how to do it?

Last night I came up with an idea: Open the film with the Symphony's premiere in Leningrad. After the orchestra plays the first few bars, the story of the symphony's composition is told in flashback, with occasional cuts to the Leningrad orchestra. The symphony could provide the soundtrack for the flashback scenes, following on immediately from what the orchestra has played, with appropriate breaks for dialogue and so forth. The entire symphony would thus be played, with pauses, over the course of two hours or so. Then near the end, when the symphony was performed throughout the Allied countries as a propaganda tool, the finale could be a mixture of performances by orchestras around the world.

... Anyway, enough of that. In addition to this familiar piece, last night's Prom included one I hadn't heard before but was glad to get to know: Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem. This piece, too, has an odd genesis rooted in the Second World War. The Japanese government commissioned it to celebrate the 2600th anniversary of their empire (why they wanted an enemy composer -- or any foreign composer at all -- to write the music for this occasion isn't clear to me). However, Britten responded by writing a subversive protest against war, which the Japanese rejected, ostensibly because of its references to Christian liturgy. I wasn't very familiar with Britten, except for his folk-song settings (as performed by Kathleen Ferrier), so I was delighted to discover this startling, moving and very modern composition.

The other work on the programme, Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 1 in D flat major, wasn't obviously connected to the others, and was, sadly, a bit of a disappointment. As I listened I kept thinking, with shameful philistinism, of a description I'd once read of The Wedding Present's music: "a drawer of cutlery being dropped down the stairs". Alexander Toradze's playing didn't do much for me, but since I haven't heard him play anything else, I don't know whether this was because of his pianistic style or simply because of the piece.

Tan fea

Among my closest friends at university were a group of South American girls who had come over to study English for a year. We went everywhere together, even though their beauty and style made me feel not so much like an ugly duckling as like an awkwardly moulting duck.

Once at a party I took a picture of my friends smiling over each others' shoulders, forming a little pyramid of good cheer. This was in the days of film, and when I got the photo back from the developers, I was so pleased with how it came out that I took it to show the group.

I might as well have handed them a vial of acid; I could see them dissolve into self-loathing as soon as I held the photo toward them. One by one, each of my friends gingerly touched her image and whispered, in Spanish or English, "So ugly". Two girls with figures I would have given six months' of dormitory rations for scurried off to book a slot at our building's gym. Stunned, I realised that these beautiful women were not capable of seeing themselves as others saw them. In their own eyes, they really were ugly.

Recognising a phenomenon, of course, doesn't make you immune to it. For a long time I would only let my picture be taken under duress; now I take photos of myself almost compulsively, but every time I look at one I still hear the same horrified whisper in the back of my head. I wonder if there's a woman out there who doesn't hear that little voice insisting that she's ugly; or who, when common sense tells her that all women have this experience, doesn't think: "Yes, but for me it's really true!"

Philip Larkin reads

In a bookshop a few weeks ago I found, quite by accident, a CD of Philip Larkin reading his poetry. This seems to have been released quietly last year; I'd never seen or heard of it before. The contents come from two tapes Larkin recorded in 1980 for something called the Watershed Foundation (I'm not sure what this was).

Recordings of poets reading their work can vary widely in quality, but this one is a real pleasure to listen to. Larkin doesn't put on a special Poetry Voice; his reading is lively, with plenty of good humour (not what you might expect from his reputation). From this recording, I've heard nuances in his poems that I missed on the page.

The Watershed Foundation apparently asked for a selection that would represent Larkin's whole career. This means we get several poems from his early collection The North Ship, which most critics consider inferior, and don't get some of his most famous works, with "This Be the Verse" being the most obvious example. But there are plenty of great poems here -- "Home Is So Sad", "Mr Bleaney", "Toads" and "Toads Revisited", etc. -- and I highly recommend the CD (there's no download, alas) to any fans of Larkin's work.

Villanelle

Mid-journey, I forget my destination.
Now in-betweenness is my rightful cast.
To miss you is a full-time occupation.

The hidden streets, the mouldings in the station,
Your memory at every door I've passed --
Mid-journey, I forget my destination.

Each word I share with you is a collation,
A mark by which I measure out the fast.
To miss you is a full-time occupation.

So tell me, is it joy or desperation
That seizes me to steer me through the blast?
Mid-journey, I forget my destination.

Next time we can discuss what separation
Might mean when minds can cross a space so vast.
To miss you is a full-time occupation.

Existence is a tricky operation.
The present will not serve, nor turn to past.
Mid-journey, I forget my destination.
To miss you is a full-time occupation.

Blindingly undiminished

I worry that lately this blog is turning into a string of obituaries. But I couldn't go without mentioning the death of Harvey Pekar, the comic-book author who produced funny and moving vignettes about the dramas, pleasures and regrets of everyday life, and, in my opinion, gave Robert Crumb something genuinely interesting to do with his talents.

Like Philip Larkin, Pekar also had a sometimes-overlooked career as a jazz writer. His music articles included a profile for the New Orleans paper Gambit Weekly of Joe "King" Oliver, whose "Riverside Blues" was the inspiration for Larkin's poem "Reference Back":




Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse,
They show us what we have as it once was.
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently we could have kept it so.

God bless Christopher Hitchens

Last weekend I picked up a copy of Christopher Hitchens's 1995 book on Mother Teresa, The Missionary Position. It had been recommended to me by a few people I respected, and I figured he could probably use a few extra quid about now.

It's a shame that Hitchens has become known as a kind of professional atheist, because that makes it easy for Mother Teresa's supporters to dismiss this book, on the assumption that it's a bigoted attack on the Church. In fact, though Hitchens makes no secret of his disdain for Catholicism* and for religion in general, he does not attack Mother Teresa on the grounds of her religious belief. His main accusations against her are:

• She actively supported dictators and criminals as long as they were willing to give money to her order. This wasn't just a case of taking donations from all comers, on the grounds that even money from evil people can be used to do good. She gave sycophantic praise to the Duvaliers in Haiti; pleaded for clemency for the Savings & Loan swindler Charles Keating (and ignored a request from his prosecutors to return the stolen money he had given her) and posed for publicity photos with a cult leader who claimed to be greater than Jesus.
  
• Most of the money that was donated to her went to missionary work, rather than to the care of the poor, as the donors likely expected.
  
• Doctors and nurses who visited her clinics found the medical care and hygiene to be of a poor standard -- even though, according to Hitchens, Mother Teresa had received enough in donations "to give Calcutta the finest teaching hospital in the entire Third World".
  
• The "miracle" that caused Malcolm Muggeridge to convert while making a documentary about Mother Teresa -- in which the dark interior of one of her hospitals appeared brilliantly lit -- was actually the result of new super-sensitive film that the BBC crew were using for the first time.
  
• She lobbied Western governments against abortion, divorce and contraception, but claimed to be apolitical when asked about some of the unsavoury regimes she associated with.
  

I list these points partly because I think Hitchens's book has been talked about more than it's actually read, but also because I have never heard any opponent of this book refute any of these points in any meaningful way; most negative responses, like the Catholic League's, merely descend into ad hominem attacks.

In fact, Hitchens comes across as a far more decent person than I would have guessed from the behaviour of some of his admirers. What seems to have motivated him in writing this book is a concern for truth and justice. I disagree with his thesis, expounded upon in God is Not Great, that religion is fundamentally opposed to both. But at least he writes from a position of genuine moral concern, not from the smug arrogance that seems to motivate too many in the "new atheist" movement.

One more thing: At the time when The Missionary Position was published, Mother Teresa was in declining health. Hitchens acknowledges this, pointing out that she went to some of the world's most expensive clinics rather than trusting her own hospitals. But you know what he doesn't do? He doesn't jeer at her illness; he doesn't gleefully describe the lingering, painful death that she may suffer; he doesn't gloat about how she's soon to discover she was all wrong about the afterlife. Compared with the way some "Christians" and "peace" activists have reacted to Hitchens's recent announcement of his esophogeal cancer, his behaviour comes across as ... well, saintly.

*Though even this is qualified; he says, for example, that there is "something impressive and noble in the high priority the Church gives to potential life".

Peter Rabbit at the V&A

Beatrix Potter - The Rabbit's Dream
Originally uploaded by Laura A. Brown

We had to search for a surprisingly long time for the Victoria & Albert Museum's new Peter Rabbit exhibition. Although it's had a fair amount of publicity in the press, there were no signs guiding us to it in the museum itself. It turned out to be quite small -- just two rooms in the Prints & Drawings section -- but interesting nonetheless.

The first room has all of Beatrix Potter's original watercolours for her Tale, displayed with the corresponding text. The book has gone through a few different editions over the years, and a handful of the illustrations had been omitted from the version I had as a child -- including a frankly scary picture of Mrs McGregor serving up the pie containing Peter's father.

The next room showed how Potter's illustrations had developed. From childhood, she had regularly drawn and painted her pet rabbits. These naturalistic portraits needed only slight tweaking to turn them into storybook characters. You could see how this process evolved in Potter's drawing "The Rabbit's Dream". Realistic sketches of rabbits in various poses surround a picture of an anthropomorphic bunny tucked up in bed.

I had mixed feelings about Peter Rabbit's story as a child. The Tale was irresistibly engaging, and yet also terrifying. (What scared me most wasn't the part where Mr McGregor nearly caught Peter, but the part where Peter was wandering around the garden looking for the way out, unable to find anyone to help.) I often found myself skipping to the end, where Peter had his camomile tea (which sounded soothing, though I had no idea what it was). I was relieved to see, from the comments by present-day children's authors that were posted around the exhibition, that I wasn't the only kid to have had this reaction.

At the same time, it was nice to see present-day children walking around the exhibition, one clutching his Peter Rabbit doll by the paw. When the Tale was first published, Potter's publisher warned her not to expect much money out of it, especially since her contract stated she would receive no royalties for the first thousand copies sold. As it turned out, Peter became the first licensed character and made his creator a rich woman, as well as establishing her reputation for generations to come.

Happy birthday, J.F. Powers

New York Review Books' Twitter informs me that today is the 93rd anniversary of J.F. Powers's birth. I've quoted from his work before, but in honour of the occasion, I thought I'd offer another snippet. This is from his story "Renner", which unusually, is not about Catholic priests; it focuses on a European refugee from World War II, who may or may not be Jewish, and who is forced to confront a less lethal but still poisonous anti-Semitism in America.

Renner dipped his glass at a bowl of fruit rotting on the wall. "It's too bad der Fuehrer couldn't paint a little. Another bad painter, we could have stood that." He began to speak in what I had come to know as his autobiographical tone. He appeared to listen to himself, sceptical, though he was accenting words and ideas, of the meaning in what he said, trying to account for himself on earth. "Anyway, my mother hired a sergeant major to discipline me when I was eight years old. The Austrian army was not the most formidable in the world, except of course at regimental balls, but she hoped he could do the job. He couldn't. I was not to have many such victories."

The idea of Renner the child died away when I looked at the man across the table from me. Renner had rusty hair, bristling abundantly, tufted eyebrows, an oddly handsome face with the depth and decision of a wood carving about it. When I looked again Renner the man was lost in our surroundings. I saw an album world: exaggerated bicycles and good-old-summertime girls, picnics and family reunions, mustachioed quartets, polished horses galloping through Budweiser advertisements, the heroes and adventures of Horatio Alger, the royal commerce of the day. The furniture reached boldly into the past and yanked these visions into being. I had only to step out the door to find everything changed back fifty years. Meanwhile the green walls, waiting to be smoked black, stood patiently around us.

"Because he could paint like that", Renner said, "my uncle became president of the Vienna Academy". I glanced needlessly at the pictures. Renner laughed shortly. "He had a patriarchal beared, however, which he used to clean his brushes on. His only attempt at eccentricity and it failed. In fact, it killed him -- lead poisoning."

Bees and clover

Bee with white clover
Originally uploaded by Laura A. Brown

When I was growing up in West Virginia, red and white clover seemed equally abundant; I remember stopping to remark on both types growing by the side of the road on the way to kindergarten. Back then I gave serious thought to which type of clover I liked best. Usually I chose red for its tallness, cheerful colour and resemblance to strawberries, but there were times when I took the side of the more easily overlooked white.

Here in London, red clover seems much rarer than white; I've only noticed it growing in any numbers at the Wetland Centre. By contrast, the "Open Space" near work is snowy with white clover. Needless to say, there's also a small multitude of bees. When a clover flower is particularly close to the ground, the bees almost lie on their sides to get at its nectar.

Another thing I noticed when I moved to the UK was the lack of "clover honey", which I'd grown up eating in the U.S. With the exception of expensive specialist types, most jars in Britain were labelled as plain old "honey", no flower specified. Perhaps clover wasn't as abundant here, I thought, or maybe British bees preferred some other flower.

Imagine my surprise when I learned that in America, the term "clover honey" can legally be used for any mild-flavoured honey, regardless of which flowers were involved. Presumably beekeepers figure their tiny livestock are bound to have visited clover at some point in their travels, whatever other species they might have dropped in on. Genuine monofloral clover honey, according to Wikipedia, is quite rare and has a "waxy aftertaste".

Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries

Of the three elements in the title of the National Gallery's new exhibition, the first is the the least interesting. True, there was a certain detective-novel appeal in learning about the clues that give away a forgery (often the paint turns out to contain pigments that weren't invented till after the painting's alleged date). And it was amusing to see that one critic was suspicious of Umberto Giunti's fake Botticelli "The Madonna of the Veil" from the start, because the Virgin had "something of the silent cinema star" about her.

But stories of forgery are really fairly straightforward -- simple age-old tales of dishonesty and greed. More intriguing were the paintings that had been changed by restorers for non-fraudulent reasons.

When Theodor Dumler was charged with repairing holes in the canvas of Giorgione's gorgeous "Il Tramonto", he decided to throw in a picture of St George and the dragon -- just because he thought it would look good, perhaps. A 16th-century Italian painting of a "Woman at a Window" was overpainted during the 19th century to make it more acceptable to Victorian tastes: the brazen blonde was changed into a demure brunette, and her nipples were made less visible under her dress. In the late 15th century, Bellini painted a staid portrait of a Dominican friar. Less than a century later, the unfortunate subject had had a dagger inserted into his chest and a cleaver embedded in his skull. The curators claimed this had been done to make the painting more salable by giving its subject the attributes of a popular martyr, but it looked to me like the sort of thing schoolkids do to their textbooks when they're bored.

Incidents like this suggest that the cult of authenticity in art is a fairly recent invention. Until the mid-19th century or so, the owners of great paintings seemed to feel no qualms about altering them to suit their tastes, and no one seemed too bothered about whether a picture had been painted personally by a master or was just a product of his workshop.

By the time the National Gallery began collecting works, though, the adulation of great artists had taken over. The Gallery was so eager to own paintings by big names that it sometimes didn't stop to question their attribution. How could any art expert possibly have thought that Michiel Coxcie's "Man with a Skull" was the work of Holbein, or that an anonymous "Allegory" had been painted by Botticelli? They can only have been blinded by star power. Fortunately for the Gallery, both of these are good paintings in their own right, and by admitting its mistakes the Gallery has provided us with a fascinating show.