Stephanie's Pillowbook

So, another year of Promming is over. I only made it to 7 or 8 concerts this year – circumstances forced me to miss Argerich playing Prokofiev and Ravel for instance. But the ones I did make it to were all wonderfully enjoyable.

It is curious, then, to be reminded that the Culture Secretary last year dismissed the Proms as elitist and irrelevant and alienating to people of “different backgrounds”. What nonsense! The audience at a typical Prom concert is far more heterogeneous than most – there are many more young people for a start: I have often found myself queuing between what were clearly music students and those who have never been to a classical concert before in their lives. There are tourists and people who have come straight from work. Most dress casually, though some dress up. A few appear outlandish – there was one character who stood beside me at one concert in a huge black Victorian dress. When there was no music playing he wore what looked like an executioner’s hood over his head! I confess I found him rather creepy and I wish he had chosen somewhere else to stand… But generally, the informality of the Proms is one of its great attractions.

Anyway, the first concert I went to was Prom 2 on July 18th given by the Gabrieli Consort & Players conducted by Paul McCreesh with a large choir and soloists and a performance of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation. For a piece based on Genesis and Paradise Lost it is a very jolly work – a product of the Rationalist 18th century with its depiction of an innocent world before Original Sin. It was disappointing that they used an English translation – it’s not like anyone is unfamiliar with the story! The performance, though, was glorious, the choruses fleet and golden, the massed period instruments sounding sumptuous. I left the Albert Hall glowing.

Next was Prom 9, a concert of 20th century British music given by the BBC Philharmonic under Vassily Sinaisky. I confess I have been one of those who’ve readily dismissed this kind of thing as “cowpat music” – but I have been giving it a chance lately. This concert definitely made a good case. It began with E. J. Moeran’s Symphony in g minor, an atmospheric if rather bleak work inspired, apparently, by the landscape of County Kerry and Norfolk. Redolent of Sibelius it is nonetheless an original work – one wonders, though, whether it will always be described, and damned with faint praise, as “interesting.” After that we had Gerald Finzi’s Grand Fantasia and Toccata for piano and orchestra played by Leon McCawley. I’d never heard this before and it was great fun. A very energetic work reminiscent perhaps of Busoni with its faux-Bachian counterpoint, Lisztian pyrotechnics and hints of Bartokian modernism. Finally, Elgar’s Symphony No.2, full of restrained passion, barely-concealed nostalgia and melancholy, the whole coming to a climax of calm resignation.

I was back the following night for Prom 10 and a fascinating concert of French and Japanese music from the Orchestre National de Lyon conducted by Jun Märkl. It began with a performance of Takemitsu’s Ceremonial: An Autumn Ode. The lights were dimmed around the lonely figure of Mayumi Miyata playing the sho, a kind of ancient Japanese mouth-organ, the long, slow notes eerie and ethereal as they insinuated themselves around the great expanse of the Royal Albert Hall. In the middle section of the work focus switches to the orchestra with dreamy strings and evocative woodwinds before returning to the solo sho and its meditations. Wonderfully strange! This was followed by Caplet’s gorgeously orchestrated version of Pagodes from Debussy’s piano suite Estampes and a vigorous performance of Ravel’s colourfully beguiling Rapsodie Espagnole. There was more Takemitsu after an interval, the densely impressionistic Green. Then Akiko Suwanai came on stage as the soloist in Sarasate’s brilliant Concert Fantasy on Themes from Carmen and Ravel’s demoniacally virtuosic Tzigane. Suwanai has a clean, flawless technique – too perfect, perhaps, for these two works? I would have preferred playing that was, well, dirtier, sleazier, more improvisatory and dangerous. Following a second interval there was a new work by Toshio Hosokawa entitled Cloud and Light and the return of Mayumi Miyata and her sho. An atmospheric piece of pulsating harmonies. The concert concluded with Debussy’s La mer.

A week later I was at Prom 20 for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The concert began with the music for Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, the ballet created by Diaghilev for Massine, in the complete version for orchestra and three vocalists. The score was based on 18th century manuscripts attributed to Pergolesi – but the final outcome, with its piquant orchestration and spiky rhythms, is pure Stravinsky. Darkly humorous, it is very entertaining. It was followed by Schumann’s Piano Concerto, one of my favourite pieces, played by Nicholas Angelich. The performance was perfectly acceptable – the first movement could have been more firmly characterised, though, and should have been more Romantic, and the slow movement was a little too understated, but the finale had great dash and liveliness. Then we heard Mendelssohn’s 5th Symphony, the Reformation. A more serious-sounding work than the Scottish or Italian Symphonies this was a powerful and convincing interpretation with the great chorale Ein Feste Burg ringing out magnificently at the end.

Next was the event I was looking forward to most this season – Multiple Pianos Day! First was Prom 32 given by the Britten Sinfonia under Ludovic Morlot. They began with a languorous orchestration, strangely enough, of Fauré’s Dolly suite for piano duet. Then Katia and Marielle Labeque came on stage for a lazy Sunday afternoon performance of Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos K365 – a bit too relaxed, perhaps? After the interval there was a première – of Left Light by Anna Meredith. Single isolated sounds build up to an enormous climax. I found it an immediately attractive piece but I wonder whether it would bear much repeated listening? The Labeque sisters reappeared for an electrifying dispatch of Lutoslawski’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini. Breathtaking. And, as always, I am so envious of the stylish jackets the Labeques wear in concert. Finally, there was Saint-Saens’ ever-popular Carnival of the Animals played in sparkling fashion by Lidija and Sanja Bizjak. I don’t think I’ve listened to Carnival of the Animals for years – it’s one of those pieces so hackneyed one avoids them on purpose. Unheard for so long it now appears fresh once more. The concert over I crossed the road into Hyde Park and sat under a tree to eat my packed lunch or rather tea before returning to the Albert Hall to queue up for the evening’s Prom 33. This was given by the London Sinfonietta conducted by Edward Gardner. They began with Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique in the version for four pianos, a battery of percussion and laptop. As so often the noise was toned down and restrained but the work still retains its modernist charm. That was followed by the tedious Grand Pianola Music by John Adams. The long first section is pure kitsch, sweet and syrupy, the second bombastic, presumably some kind of ironic joke. At the end I applauded with gratitude that it was finally over. After the interval a work with real, meaningful content, one of the masterpieces of 20th century music I believe, Bartok’s Sonata for two pianos and percussion. The complex interplay between the four instrumentalists is at times demonic and exciting, at times mesmerising and magical. And then the climax of the day, the folky primitivism of Stravinsky’s Les Noces given a very spirited performance.

I turned up for Prom 40 – which included Beethoven’s 9th Symphony – but the queue for the Gallery was so terribly long even an hour before the doors opened that I suspected I would not get in so I went home. The queue was even longer the following Friday for Prom 48 – but at least I was at the front of it this time! The first Prom I went to – about five years ago? – was given by the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, the group of young Arab and Israeli musicians formed by the conductor Daniel Barenboim. And now I was to hear them again in a very assured and beautiful concert – if rather short and marred by a lot of noise in the audience. It began with Liszt’s symphonic poem Les Préludes – as gorgeous and convincing a performance as I’ve heard, I think. Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde was just as impressive. And after the interval a vivid rendition of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique with quite incredible bell sounds before the Dies irae.

Life and lack of cash got in the way of my attending any more concerts until Prom 69. This was given by the venerable Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Riccardo Chailly. In the first half they performed Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No.1 with Saleem Abboud Ashkar at the piano. A lively, classical performance with some lovely moments in the slow movement. Of course this orchestra will forever be linked to the memory of Mendelssohn. In the second half, Deryck Cooke’s completion of Mahler’s Symphony No.10. I’ve never actually heard the whole thing before and it was a revelation. What can I say? Moving and profound music yet sketchy and tentative, too. Nostalgic and forward-looking at the same time. Applause was prolonged – and rightly so.

A few random bits and pieces…

1) I was just reading Freiya’s blog The Other Side of the World and something she wrote yesterday about watching television struck a nerve: “its funny but when you’re on your own there seems less incentive to watch it. I never realised how much of a social thing watching television is“. I agree entirely. Back in the ’80s I used to watch Dynasty, Dallas, the Brookside Omnibus, and I always watched them with friends. That was the fun, discussing the actors, their characters, their clothes, their ridiculous situations, tearing them apart, making jokes and arch comments and so on. Dynasty, for example: you could always tell who was supposed to be gay – they would always be wearing, for some reason, the most tastelessly appalling chunky sweaters. Spotting that sort of thing and laughing about it with others – that was the entertainment. When I came back home I stayed at my parents for a few months before moving into my flat. So during the first week I sat down with them to watch the soaps and as usual started talking at once. I was immediately shushed: “Now I missed what so-and-so said!” I was astonished. Was I supposed to sit there in silence and actually watch the programme? But it’s rubbish. My father doesn’t even like me talking through the football – I can’t keep my mouth shut, though, I’ll burst! It feels so unnatural just to sit there and say nothing. When I moved into my flat it was too sad to watch the soaps on my own. So I gave them up.

2) I really need to learn how to touch-type. I can type pretty fast but I make tons of mistakes. And I have to look at the keyboard mostly. I have played all those games which are supposed to help increase your speed and accuracy like Typespeed and gtypist and I can do quite well at them. The trouble is that they simply make you better at doing what you already do. Your bad habits are confirmed and reinforced. Most of my faults arise from the fact that I am left-handed. So, for one thing, my left hand covers most of the keyboard. More seriously, my left hand reacts more quickly than my right so I notice that most of my spelling mistakes at the keyboard are the result of the left hand being faster than the right. The worst thing, though, is that your hands become accustomed to making particular movements. So, when I come to type “its”, for example, I almost always type “it’s” – not because I don’t know the difference (I certainly do and would never make a mistake when writing) but because my fingers automatically make the movements for it’s. When I learnt how to write at school we were forced to do a lot of apparently meaningless exercises – lines and lines of a’s and b’s and so on. I’m sure the purpose was to make writing an automatic business that you don’t (or at least shouldn’t) have to think about consciously. I need to learn typing the same way. The problem, of course, is that it is very difficult to go back to being a beginner at something you can apparently already do. I have thought the solution was to change to using a Dvorak layout – except, as someone pointed out, it leaves you eventually unable to use other people’s keyboards effectively.

3) I followed a link once from Tranniefesto to a site called Gaping Void. The writer of this blog asked people to submit mini-manifestos. One of them, contributed by somebody called Seth Godin, was the purest tosh. This point in particular had me gnashing my teeth: “Everyone is a marketer, even people and organizations that don’t market. They’re just marketers who are doing it poorly.” What a dismal philosophy that is! If I thought for a moment that was true I’d go out and hang myself. How dead do you have to be inside to really believe that everyone is engaged all the time in “selling themselves”? This is the kind of silly statement made by those apologists for capitalism who don’t understand that it is, for good or evil, an historical phenomenon. It’s the product of certain particular conditions. It hasn’t always existed and won’t always exist in the future. Human nature, therefore, is not coterminous with homo oeconomicus

[From my responses to comments] Whatever you want to call it, selling, marketing, it’s personal relations mediated by money – it’s not an inevitable or necessary part of human life. It’s pure capitalist ideology to pretend otherwise. I’m rather disturbed, actually, by the way you conflate reputation and brand. The latter is surely a reified form of what the former used to be?

I’m not arguing with you that marketing is sometimes necessary and appropriate in particular circumstances. But Seth Godin was making a generalisation – that marketing is what we all do all the time. That I do object to. Human beings aren’t naturally and fundamentally commodities – Godin’s statement implies that we are.

You seem to be generalising the word “marketing” – like Godin does – to cover any activity in which one person is influenced by the action of another. Do you really mean that? Do you really believe all human relationships are mediated by money? Do you not at least dream that there might be the possibility of contact that is not reduced to the concept of selling something for a profit? No, it’s a dismal and hateful ideology Godin has and I reject it…

4) This summer [of 2007] has had a few highlights – such as my sailing trip with my boyfriend – but otherwise it has been a dreary season for me. The oppressively hot weather finished me off. I wilted under the heat. I couldn’t be bothered to do anything so I became bored. Feeling bored all the time I became frustrated and depressed. Now summer is just about over and I’m feeling much better for it. This is my favourite time of year (just as twilight is my favourite time of day). There is a mellow and melancholy atmosphere which suits me well and there is the first slight chill in the air to presage autumn. September always feels like a new beginning – it is the proper month for making plans. I have spent so long at school and college that I tend to keep to the academic year. How pointless is it to celebrate the new year on January 1st when one is normally in the midst of things?

5) The weekend with my friends was very refreshing – good company, good food, good wine. One thing struck me, though, when a couple more friends came round for Sunday lunch. At all these kind of gatherings I am always the one who ends up playing with the children. I wonder why? Well, the children don’t jump on any of the other adults or drag them off to play football or have balloon fights or help with puzzles. Do they detect something about us? When I mentioned it, one of my friends said she thought it was because I wasn’t afraid to make fool of myself. Children may be naive and lack knowledge of the world but they are often astute in piercing the masks and pretences of adults

6) Late yesterday afternoon I went over to the local shops for some cooking chocolate and some vanilla so I could make a chocolate Impossible Pie. In front of me in the queue at the till was a boy and a girl of 18 or 19. They were joined by another boy. He seemed to be in a very jovial mood. Here is part of the conversation: “… it was so funny… we had him down on the ground in the underpass and Carl was stomping on his head… ha ha… I’ve seen people cry but this was just… it was fucking hilarious, man, ha ha.” It’s not the violence exactly which shocked me. No, it was the normality of it. This boy felt perfectly at ease telling his story out loud in a crowded shop. And he really did think it was the funniest thing ever to see this other boy cry his eyes out because his head was being stomped – I mean, his eyes were glistening with pleasure. And they were still laughing five minutes later when I walked out of the shop…

7) It was my mother’s birthday today and my father took us out for dinner. Now, around these parts finding somewhere decent to eat is difficult enough so when a restaurant opens that actually garners something of a reputation… Well. So, this evening we made our way to The Fox in Willian. We sat for a while in the rather well-scrubbed bar and munched on home-made crisps. When we were led to our table we were served with a few slices of bread and oil. For my first course I had, and I quote from the menu, Confit chicken rillettes bound in a tarragon creme fraiche, crispy Parma ham, pink grapefruit and citrus compote. It wasn’t bad at all, very nice indeed, but it lacked something and I couldn’t help but look a little enviously at my father’s pigeon breast on a beetroot mash. The main course, however, was almost perfect. Char grilled marinated lamb chops with caraway greens, garlic and rosemary parmentier potatoes and port and mint syrup. Accompanied by a piquant and peppery Chianti it was gorgeous and succulent. I followed it with ice-cream and a rather rich brandy. I don’t often eat like this so you can imagine I came away very satisfied…

8) Ruth Brandon’s Surreal Lives: The Surrealists 1917-1945 is an entertaining book and quite interesting, but rather journalistic in style and ultimately disappointing. She observes perfectly correctly at the beginning that the Surrealist movement was primarily a literary movement. It’s a shame, therefore, that she wastes so much time on that preposterous old fraud Salvador Dali. In fact she ends up seeing surrealism as either descending into Daliesque shock-spectacle and commercialism or being subsumed into New York Abstract art. There is no mention of post-surrealist groups like Lettrism, Cobra or the Situationist International. There is little mention of the spread of surrealist ideas around the world. A more absorbing book might have situated the Breton circle more firmly within the general artistic and intellectual milieux of between-the-wars France. I certainly find some of the more tangential figures – Leiris and Bataille to name but two – rather more fascinating than many of the second-rate poets and hangers-on of the legitimate group. Even with the concentration on Breton much seems to be overlooked. A vitally important part of Surrealism was the attempt to overcome the boundaries between art and life for instance and for discussion of that we must still go to Maurice Nadeau, it would seem.

9) This time last year I was reading quite a bit of Haruki Murakami: Norwegian Wood, Sputnik Sweetheart, South of the Border, West of the Sun, Dance Dance Dance, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore. Romantic, evocative, cool, compelling, enchanting, mysterious tales of estrangement, memory, loss and desire. I like the style of writing which is at once poetic and colloquial. Murakami’s world is an easy one to get lost in – so much so that reading anyone else seemed an unwelcome intrusion. In the end I felt I had to drag myself away forcibly from it.

10) I’ve just finished watching How William Shatner Changed The World on Channel 5 and very entertaining it was too, although it lost its way somewhere around the middle of the show. William Shatner was his usual witty, ridiculous self. The programme proposed the idea that Star Trek’s vision of the future actually influenced scientific progress of the last few decades. Absurd? Not really. Since our earliest days important things have often appeared first as play. Anyway, it’s a thesis which has more promise so far as the original series is concerned because it is certainly possible to argue convincingly that there was a close connection between technological innovation in the 1960s and popular culture. The computer itself might have been the tool of the military-industrial complex – but we surely wouldn’t have the PC without a lot of old hippy ideals (and GNU/Linux might be seen as the latest manifestation of that counter-cultural impulse). Technology mixed with freedom could be a heady brew. It was amusing to note that Star Trek became less popular the more a pessimistic, irrationalist, anti-scientific animus took hold in the late 80s and early 90s.

I have to confess I was not really a fan of Star Trek in any of its incarnations. Well, the original had a certain charm – but it was a guilty pleasure (like eating white chocolate). In fact I don’t like any television science fiction – or many films. I’ve never understood the appeal of Star Wars or any space opera or fantasy. I like my sci-fi hard.

11) As soon as I started using a computer I enjoyed playing games (starting with Star Trek in 1978). But for a long while they were just arcade games and that sort of thing. Then, around 1999, 2000 my brother gave me Settlers III Gold Edition for my birthday. I quickly became addicted. I loved watching all the little people run around building things and fighting each other. I soon moved on to Red Alert and Starcraft and Age of Empires. Although I tried other genres I always came back to Real-Time Strategy. Starcraft was my favourite – so perfectly balanced and with a story that was actually interesting.

But then I discovered the Total War series. I was a little late coming to Shogun but I got enough of a taste to buy Medieval Total War as soon as it came out. For me that was the best game ever. I loved the scope of the game, the fact that it demanded real decisions regarding economics and diplomacy and real strategy when it came to battles, the fact that every game was unpredictable and different. Every major character in the game had a personality that could influence one’s failure or success. I remember one game, for instance, where every one of my Kings was either a loon or a coward – I could not prevent the gradual decline, the unhappiness of the population, the constant revolt of the generals. But there were other games where a great general would appear at just the opportune moment to enable me to seize real power. I became reasonably good at it, too. I could play a one-province state like Denmark or Aragon on the hardest level – and win.

I was very enthusiastic when Rome: Total War came out but I agreed with those who said it was dumbed-down from Medieval . In fact, I preferred to play the Total Realism mod. Then, I suddenly stopped playing. I haven’t played a computer game – other than arcade games – for nearly three years now. I suppose it was just a phase. But great fun while it lasted…

12) In olden times it was believed that one’s health, both mental and physical, was determined by the balance of the four humours that supposedly lurked in the blood. If one of the humours became “burnt”, then the balance would be upset too far and melancholy adust would be the result. Over the centuries melancholy was reduced from a permanent disposition towards madness or genius to a temporary mood, a feeling of sadness without cause. Well, none of this has the slightest relationship to truth… and yet, it does have a certain psychological appeal. Every few weeks it seems as though my veins become filled with poison, some dark ink colouring my emotions. There is no external reason why I should feel sad, touchy, tearful and yet I do. It may not be an imbalance of humours but I would not be surprised to learn that there is some physical factor involved. A fortnight later it is as though there were a tonic flowing through my veins and I am alert and curious and full of smiles. This cycle of moods is, I stress, quite independent of events in life which rightfully induce happiness or depression – it’s an underlying swell and fall. Oh well, at least the swings aren’t as violent as they were in my twenties.

13) I have always been a little suspicious of Wikipedia, notwithstanding that I use it often enough. The trouble is, the very first entry I ever looked up was that for Friedrich Nietzsche, the one subject for which I can claim to have some knowledge. I was appalled. Every sentence was incorrect if not idiotic. I was tempted to rewrite the whole thing myself until I realised there was nothing to prevent some ill-read student overwriting me. Still, I have to admit that the quality of the Nietzsche entry has improved over the years: where once it was a disgrace now it is merely sophomoric. I think most people with any real knowledge of philosophy would sooner direct the curious to the Stanford Encyclopedia. The standard of writing is much higher, each entry being written by an acknowledged expert, and is well worth the reading. The main article on Nietzsche by Robert Wicks is acceptable and has a good bibliography. There is also an excellent article on Nietzsche’s Moral and Political Philosophy by the always brilliant Brian Leiter. To repeat, so far as philosophy is concerned, the Stanford Encyclopedia is much to be preferred over Wikipedia.

For me, perhaps the greatest intellectual resource freely available on the internet is the Dictionary of the History of Ideas. What a wonderful thing it is. Originally published in 1973-74 it is, as the preface has it, “a culminating work in a tradition that had been energized by the fight against fascism. It was a tradition committed to the pursuit of disinterested scholarship in the academic sphere and to free expression of thought in the political sphere”. The articles were written by such luminaries in their field as Isaiah Berlin, George Boas, Owen Chadwick, Mircea Eliade, Sidney Hook, Claude Palisca, John Plamenatz, Arnaldo Momigliano, R.C. Lewontin, Judith Shklar, and many others. Browsing randomly through the entries we find fascinating articles on Biological Homologies and Analogies, Man-Machine from the Greeks to the Computer, Harmony or Rapture in Music, Cosmic Fall, Game Theory. Enough to keep anyone occupied… for months, for years.

14) Non-Photography Day is the idea of one Becca Bland and her defence as presented in a BBC News article is a catalogue of various New Age idiocies. The whole argument is constructed around a series of simplistic binary oppositions: mediation is bad, the immediate is good; the partial is bad, the whole is good; technology is bad, the natural is good; appearance is bad, essence is good; representation is bad, the real is good, and so on. “Experience life in an unmediated fashion”, she writes. Perhaps she would like to explain how that can be done. Is an unmediated experience possible? In the first place, what is involved in having an experience? Surely it implies all kinds of mediations? I suspect Becca Bland has never read Hegel. She continues, you should experience life “without anything in front of your eyes”. She means, of course, without holding a camera in front of them – and yet, how do you see anything in an unmediated fashion with your eyes? You don’t see the thing itself: light hits your eyes, is focused through the lens, is collected and manipulated on the retina, is converted into electrical nervous impulses to be reassembled and interpreted by the brain. Mediation after mediation!

Then we are urged to “Live in the moment”. Admirable advice, I’m sure. New Age types, however, always assume such a thing is simple, we just have to throw off the shackles of civilisation and it is done. They invariably speak of freedom as though it were already achieved. The ancient philosophers, too, believed that we should live in the moment – but they tended to relate such an approach to life to the knowledge of death and thought it could only be achieved after the intense practice of what Pierre Hadot called spiritual exercises. Nowadays, in a world devoted to immediate satisfaction, phrases like “live in the moment” belong to the language and ideology of advertisers.

And so on…

15) I thought Non-Photography Day was a tiresome gesture and now I’ve just discovered that two days ago it was No Music Day. This was the idea of Bill Drummond who apparently started it back in 2005. Last year he wrote a manifesto in The Observer entitled Silence is Golden – or for at least one day of the year it is. It’s not very convincing. In the first place Drummond shows too much concern with novelty for its own sake. As though the chief interest of music lies in hearing something you’ve never heard before. I don’t deny that can provide an exciting experience. It’s a mistake, though, to identify pleasure in music with the satisfying of an urge for novelty because, as Drummond, indicates, the novelty always wears off. Sooner or later you become jaded. I couldn’t help thinking, too, that the desire to not listen to any music for a day was just another way of satisfying that urge for novelty. Secondly, I detect in Drummond’s article the hint of a common tendency among those who don’t really like music as such. What they really like are the things that music reminds them of, the things in life which are so often accompanied by music. As a middle-aged man he will never again have a first kiss – likewise no music will ever mean so much as that which did form the background of his first kiss. I can sympathise with much of what Drummond says but music is more than either commodity or soundtrack. So, I won’t be celebrating a No Music Day this year or any other year. I suspect anyone who sings or plays an instrument is aware that music is inseparable from silence. There is no need for gimmicks.

First posted on various dates during 2006 & 2007

I thought I would share with you some blogs and other sites about food and cookery that I have discovered over the past year. All of them have certain things in common: interesting writing, inviting photographs, and yummy recipes! So, here are the ones I enjoy the most:

• A Slice of Cherry Pie – lovely photographs and great writing.
• Eat Like a Girl – passionate writing about food and excellent photographs.
• Ambrosia and Nectar – the most original and fascinating recipes.
• Jumbo Empanadas – delightful writing about cooking, eating and life.
• Feeding my Enthusiasms – the title says it all!
• Lucullian Delights – subtitled An Italian Experience it is full of fabulous photographs and enticing recipes.
• Cooking the Books – mostly cakes from various cookery books.
• Culinary Concoctions by Peabody – more gorgeous photos and recipes to make your mouth water.
• Mrs B’s Baking – delicious home-baked cakes and biscuits.
• Joy of Baking – just look at those cakes!!

First posted in November 2007

The Proms are a great British institution. A series of Promenade concerts was started in 1895 at the Queens Hall by Robert Newman and Henry Wood. They were intended as a cheap and informal introduction to classical music for the masses. For many years now they have been held every night at the Royal Albert Hall between mid-July and mid-September under the aegis of the BBC. And the programmes nowadays are rather more varied and adventurous than they once were. As a teenager I listened religiously to the broadcasts on Radio 3 – they were an important part of my education. I have been to the Proms before, of course, but when I moved to London I was determined to make the most of this season. The concerts are still cheap – you can stand in the Arena for just £5; although I prefer to go up to the Gallery at the top of the building – it’s the same price but you have a great view, you can drink, you can stand or sit and stretch your legs in between pieces. A group of people next to me one night had a full-blown picnic!

Anyway, I went along to the first night on July 18th which presented a very mixed programme by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jiří Bělohlávek. The concert got off to a bad start – to my taste, at least – with the tedious Festliches Präludium of Richard Strauss: a pretentious pastiche of sub-Wagnerian bombast. I hope I never hear it again. That was followed, though, by the always delightful, if comparatively light, charms of Mozart’s Oboe Concerto K314 played with great sparkle by Nicholas Daniel. The first half of the concert ended with Strauss’s elegiac Four Last Songs. I was somewhat disappointed that the advertised singer Karita Mattila was unable to appear – her place was taken by the soprano Christine Brewer. I will not say anything about the voluminous sky-blue negligée she appeared in! Her voice, though, was warm and rich; although, as with so many beautiful singers these days, I could not make out a word she was singing. A fine performance, anyway, and very well-received. After the interval Wayne Marshall stepped up to the organ to play Messaien’s La Nativité du Seigneur – Dieu parmi nous. An astonishing piece of wildly joyful avant-garde virtuosity. Then Pierre-Laurent Aimard, a pianist I rather admire, joined the orchestra to play Beethoven’s Rondo in B flat WoO6. I’d never heard this attractive piece before – apparently it was an early work originally intended as the finale of the second Piano Concerto. Aimard returned to the stage to give the UK premiere of a piano work specially written for him by Elliott Carter, Caténaires. What a wonderful piece it is, a furiously fluctuating toccata that rushes and skips over the entire keyboard – and magnificently played. Finally, the orchestra performed Scriabin’s wonderfully throbbing Poem of Ecstasy which ended the evening’s eclectic programme gloriously.

Next up for me was Prom 9 on July 23rd. This was again given by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Jiří Bělohlávek. The programme was a replica of one presented in 1958 and consisted of Mendelssohn’s Ruy Blas Overture and Italian Symphony and Brahms’s Piano Concerto No.2 and Symphony No.2. All vivacious and poetic Romantic music exuberantly played. Lars Vogt was the pianist in the concerto: his classical approach was perhaps a little too restrained and measured – the slow movement, though, was beautiful.

Luis accompanied me to Prom 20 which celebrated Stockhausen Day. First was the great early work, Gruppen. I am quite familiar with this piece from various recordings but hearing – and seeing - it live was a revelation. Gruppen was written for three orchestras each with their own conductor. On recordings the spatial aspects of the work – which is really the point of the music – are flattened: it sounds just like one huge orchestra. To take one example, my favourite section of the piece has the horns piling up single loud notes in rapid-fire fashion to climax in echoing glissandi before being interrupted by a piano cadenza and a barrage of drums. It was absolutely fascinating to listen to and observe the music moving from one orchestra to another. Another thing that was quite revelatory – and unexpected -about hearing Gruppen live in a place like the Albert Hall was the human warmth of the orchestral playing. It had an almost traditional ambience. That could not have been said about the next piece on the programme, Cosmic Pulses, one of the Hours from the large-scale cycle, Klang, based on the hours of the day, that Stockhausen was working on up until the time of his death. This was a half-hour long work for electronics receiving its UK premiere. Colossal blocks of sound whirled round the auditorium crashing into each other. Snatches of speech and song could be discerned deep in the mix. It all sounded like one was engulfed in some other-worldly elemental sea-battle. My immediate response was quite simply: Wow! Cosmic Pulses was followed by another piece from the Klang cycle: Harmonies for amplified solo trumpet. This was apparently a world premiere. It was an interesting, contemplative work based on loops of melody and at the same time a virtuosic tour-de-force. To be honest, it was a little underwhelming after the dense pulsations of the previous piece – it might have been better to have started the evening with it. After the interval came the best part of the concert in my opinion, Kontakte for electronic tape, piano and percussion. Again this is a piece I know quite well from the recording and once more the live performance was a revelation. The contacts of the title refer to the contacts made between the sound-worlds of the piano, the percussion instruments and the electronics. It was, again, so much easier to see and hear those contacts being made and for the piece to become thereby more comprehensible. Live, too, the work seemed much more colourful and varied. The performance was more dramatic, as well – notably so towards the end when both performers stepped out to strike the two gongs on centre-stage against bell-like sounds emanating from the speakers around them. Well, I thought it a fantastic performance. It was followed by a second playing of Gruppen. I’m not sure what the reason was for that – I can only imagine it was didactic. Was it necessary? It was surely a wasted opportunity not to conclude with another rarely-played piece such as Carré, for instance. Still, it was good to hear Gruppen once more. One thing which was a definite disappointment, however, was that here we have a truly wonderful concert at a major festival in London devoted to the music of arguably the greatest contemporary composer … and the hall is barely one-third full. Disgraceful! No, really. Where were all the trendy, arty types? It is a puzzle to me why the avant-garde in any of the visual arts has a large audience but avant-garde music still doesn’t. And let’s not forget, Gruppen and Kontakte are works of the 1950s! Surely they are not still scary?

The following day I had a late lunch date with a gentleman acquaintance (very pleasant, although he never called me back…). Not wanting to rush home afterwards I decided to head for the Royal Albert Hall and Prom 23. This was given by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Donald Runnicles. Two works were played – Beethoven’s Symphony No.1 and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. The former was given a rousing if conventional performance. The latter – with the mezzo Karen Cargill and the tenor Johan Botha – was ravishing.

Next came Prom 35 given by the BBC Philharmonic conducted by Vassily Sinaisky. The concert began with Elgar’s In The South (Alassio). Described by the composer as a Concert Overture it is rather more substantial than that – more of a symphonic poem. It was inspired by a holiday in Italy. There is a hauntingly beautiful section in the middle where a solo viola is accompanied by harp and glockenspiel. The more rousing aspects of the piece were a little bland to my taste, however. That was followed by Vaughan Williams’ Piano Concerto played by Ashley Wass. I have to confess that while I am quite the aficionado of piano concertos I am not familiar with this one. Which is a pity because it is a rather original and interesting work. Its nearest neighbours, perhaps, are the concertos of Bartok. The piano-writing is arguably not very pianistic – indeed, for much of the time it sounds like an orchestral reduction. As a consequence the piano part is more tightly integrated into the orchestra than is usual in a concerto. The first movement is vigorous – the second lovely (despite the noise of the storm raging outside!) – the finale a fugue broken up by long cadenzas. It ends quietly and magically. Ashley Wass returned to play an encore – a Prelude by Messiaen. After the interval the orchestra performed that old warhorse, Shehérazade. Not the greatest piece of music ever written, I suppose – but Rimsky-Korsakov was nothing if not a glorious orchestrator and it was a sensuous pleasure to hear it live in a concert-hall and played with such verve and colour.

I had planned on going to Prom 38 but I didn’t make it. So then, Prom 45. Luis again accompanied me to this fascinating evening of largely electroacoustic music. The Proms this year are celebrating the centenary of the birth of French composer Olivier Messiaen. I recall the night he died – back in 1992: the announcer on Radio 3 simply abandoned the rest of the night’s programming and played records of Messiaen’s music instead. It’s things like that which make the BBC a great institution, I believe. Anyway, at the time of his death the composer was working on a piece entitled Concert à quatre – it was completed by his wife, Yvonne Loriod. It is typical Messiaen – luscious melodies and exotic rhythms, marvellously inventive orchestration, the usual transcriptions of bird-song, and a heightened mood alternating between tranquillity and fervour. The piece was preceded this evening by Jonathan Harvey’s own personal response to the composer’s death, Tombeau de Messiaen. This was played by the pianist Cédric Tiberghien alongside a tape of electronically-distorted piano sounds. Some wonderfully shifting and morphing bell-like sounds were conjured up. Actually, the sound of bells was something all six works in this concert had in common. After the Messiaen came Harvey’s electronic piece Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco. I have such a vivid memory of hearing this work for the first time on the radio when it was premiered at the Proms in 1980 or thereabouts. It was a striking experience then, now it was almost overwhelming. The title comes from the words inscribed on the great bell of Winchester Cathedral – Horas avolantes numero, mortuos plango, vivos ad preces voco (I count the feeling hours, I lament the dead, I call the living to prayer). Harvey has used the sound of the bell and the voice of a boy chorister to create a most beautiful work that obviously evokes Stockhausen’s pioneering Gesang der Jünglinge and yet still sounds fresh and original. To hear these rich tones echoing around the Royal Albert Hall was unforgettable. This was followed by the world premiere of Harvey’s Speakings for orchestra and live electronics, a large-scale work in which the composer apparently wanted to explore the relationship between music and speech. A very rich and interesting piece which I look forward to hearing again. Afterwards Harvey himself appeared on stage to great applause. The concert ended with two pieces by Edgard Varese. First was his electronic classic, Poeme Electronique, composed for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair designed by Le Corbusier. This sounded rather different from the recorded version. In that the concrete sounds seem to predominate. Hearing it in a large concert hall the work sounded more purely electronic. This was followed by Déserts for brass and wind instruments, piano and a battery of percussion with interpolated sections for what Varese called “organised sound”, electronic music recorded on tape. Again, it was a revelation to hear such a work as this live. For one thing the echoing and resounding balance between the instrumental and taped sections was so much more effective than in any recorded version. According to the programme notes, Varese once wrote that Déserts “signify for me not only physical deserts of sand, sea, mountains and snow, outer space, deserted city streets, not only those destructive aspects of nature which evoke sterility, remoteness, timelessness – but also this distant inner space where no telescope can reach, where man is alone in a world of mystery and essential solitude“. It was an extraordinarily powerful experience and a fitting climax to this long but absorbing concert.

A couple of days later I attended Prom 48, another very long and fascinating programme. This time given by the Gürzenich Orchestra conducted by Markus Stenz. The concert opened with Mahler’s bucolic yet melancholy Symphony No.5. This was followed by an early work of Stockhausen’s, Punkte. Where the Mahler was listened to in rapt silence with a thunderous reception at the end the Stockhausen was greeted right from the start with audible fidgeting, aggressive coughing and the philistine refusal of many to even applaud. Yet is there such a distance between the two works? In some ways Punkte is Stockhausen’s most traditional-sounding piece. One could almost call it Mahlerian – even if it is a Mahler fragmented and refracted through the eyes of Webern. If Mahler’s music is about a world threatened with destruction, Stockhausen’s reflects a world in which much of that destruction has already taken place. And I can’t help feeling that a refusal to accept an aesthetics such as Stockhausen’s goes hand in hand with a sentimentalising of a composer like Mahler. Anyway, after another interval the programme continued with another link between present and past: a group of four Schubert songs which have been orchestrated by modern composers. They were sung by the mezzo Angelika Kirchschlager (in a rather fetching purple dress). For the most part the music was straightforwardly transcribed – but there were many interesting touches. All four were most attractive. I liked the third best – Nacht und Träume transcribed by Colin Matthews – very beautiful and dreamy, intricately scored. The official end of the concert was Beethoven’s stirring Leonora Overture No.3. But there was an encore, too, the Good Friday Music from Act 3 of Wagner’s Parsifal. Wonderful.

I had hoped to go to a number of concerts after that one but unfortunately I wasn’t able to afford it. The last one of the season that I made was on Saturday September 6th. In the afternoon I had gone to the Press for Change picnic in Hyde Park. That was rather disappointing. I had great trouble finding it, for a start – my unerring sense of direction leading me a mile astray as usual. Luckily, Helena was there to rescue me. I had a pleasant chat with her for an hour, ate some sushi and drank some wine. After she left I stuck around the picnic for a while feeling very out of place – everybody else seemed to know each other and I was the outsider. Then just as I was feeling tired of playing the wallflower two people did approach me – thank you, Rachel and Willemein! Well, as the afternoon faded away I persuaded both of them to accompany me to Prom 69. The Albert Hall, of course, was only a few hundred yards from where we were sitting. The concert was given by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Stéphane Deneve. It opened with the brash and dramatic Bacchus et Ariane – Suite No.2 by Roussel. This was followed by Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No.2 played by Stephen Hough. And played fabulously, too. Taken at a brisk tempo and with clean lines emphasised this was nevertheless a very powerfully emotional performance. I think we were all rather overcome by it. Hough’s recording of all four Rachmaninov concertos was highly praised – I shall certainly seek them out now. After the interval the orchestra played Thea Musgrave’s colourful and impressionistic Rainbow. And the concert ended with another powerful performance, this time of Debussy’s La Mer. I wrote earlier that imaginative programming had revealed some connection between Mahler and early Stockhausen. So here, too, the gulf between the arch-modernist Debussy and the supposedly reactionary Rachmaninov seemed rather smaller in this evening’s concert. It is hard to explain – just that there appeared something similar in the form and the emotional effect of the two works played.

And that was it for last year’s Proms. The whole thing starts up again in a month’s time and I’m looking forward to going to at least as many concerts this year.

First posted in July, August & September 2008

I was recently reminded of something in Umberto Eco’s novel, Foucault’s Pendulum. When I first read the passage it had impressed me – I thought, yes, that is the job for me. So, here it is (p224-5):

“A sudden illumination: I had a trade after all. I would set up a cultural investigation agency, be a kind of private eye of learning.
“Instead of sticking my nose into all-night dives and cathouses, I would skulk around bookshops, libraries, corridors of university departments. Then I’d sit in my office, my feet propped on the desk, drinking, from a Dixie cup the whiskey I’d brought up from the corner store in a paper bag. The phone rings and a man says: ‘Listen, I’m translating this book and came across something or someone called Motakallimun. What the hell is it?’
“Give me two days, I tell him. Then I go to the library, flip through some card catalogues, give the man in the reference office a cigarette, and pick up a clue.
“That evening I invite an instructor in Islamic studies out for a drink. I buy him a couple of beers and he drops his guard, gives me the lowdown for nothing. I call the client back. ‘All right, the Motakallimun were radical Moslem theologians at the time of Avicenna. They said the world was a sort of dust cloud of accidents that formed particular shapes only by an instantaneous and temporary act of the divine will. If God was distracted for even a moment, the universe would fall to pieces, into a meaningless anarchy of atoms. That enough for you? The job took me three days. Pay what you think is fair.’”

Of course, I’d specialise in ideas not merely information. And no, being able to Google for stuff nowadays is no substitute! You have to know what you are looking for – and where you might find it – and be able to judge the significance of what you find – and understand how it fits in with what you already know. You need a good nose… Of course, anyone who thinks all knowledge can be discovered through a Google search is, how shall I put it, at a disadvantage…

First posted in September 2007

I went AWOL from my blog for a couple of weeks in April 2006. The reason being that I was rather strangely ill. One Friday afternoon, while sat at the computer, I felt faint and light-headed. Early in the evening I had to lie down and shut my eyes for a while. When I opened them again the world started to spin around me. It was liking being very drunk – but worse. Then I found I simply could not stand up however hard I tried. I had totally lost my sense of balance. Every movement made me nauseous. I must have begun to panic because my breathing was rapid and I felt pins and needles over the whole of my body. My parents called for an ambulance and the ambulancemen managed to drag me to my feet. It felt as though a great force was impelling me backwards and down – like I was being sucked into a whirlpool. It was quite the most peculiar thing I have ever experienced. And one I never want to experience again. After a couple of steps I vomited violently. I was sick again when I arrived at the hospital. When I finally saw a doctor she performed a battery of tests including holding tuning forks over various parts of my head. Anyway, she concluded that there was nothing fundamentally wrong and that I probably just had a severe inner-ear infection. So I was sent home to lie in bed until the infection cleared up. The following day was my birthday and I spent the whole time staring at the ceiling in my bedroom! What fun! After a few days I was able to get up and about although I still had a fuzzy head and was somewhat shaky on my legs. It took a month for the giddiness to disappear completely. Oh well, I suppose it’s downhill all the way now!

First posted in April 2006