Old Fogey

Past Hearing

2008-07-26T23:08:00.004+01:00

It’s official. I’m going deaf. My consultant told me. But I wouldn’t believe him. I was hearing fine. No problem.

It’s this thing in my right ear. It fills up and then, it knocks me over and makes me sick. Then I get up again and carry one. Meniere’s Disease. No cure.

Over time, they say, it burns out – you stop falling over - but you can’t hear yourself doing so.

I didn’t believe it - I was hearing OK.

Tonight I listened to Elgar’s “The Kingdom” – a lovely, uplifting work, near equal of “The Dream of Gerontius” – and it was the bit in the Pentecost section where is sung “In the Name of Jesus Christ”. I could hear it – my left ear functions still – but I missed the emphasis on Name – it was veiled, closed in – not the way I remembered it. Memory confounded how I should hear it now.

Here deafness isn’t absolute – it’s crept up on me. Try talking to the truly deaf. I’ve done that – it’s stunningly difficult to talk to someone stone deaf (see Marlee Matlin and William Hurt in the film “Children of a Lesser God”).

I can still hear. But not being able to hear what I once clearly heard seems to mark for me a slow withdrawal from the things I once knew – as a kind of aural veil falling between what I know now and what I knew then.

It’s not serious. My left ear will compensate. It just means the rest of my life is in mono.

Endeavour to Persevere

2008-07-25T19:40:00.006+01:00

Reading Barack Obama’s Berlin speech my brain started playing tricks and I found it being tugged towards the image of Chief Dan George from Clint Eastwood’s great western The Outlaw Josey Wales. Wales is on the run from murderous ‘red legs’ and he seeks refuge in the Indian nation. On entering the nation he come across Chief Dan George, an old Indian wearing a battered white man’s suit and top hat. He has gone soft and slack from trying to imitate the white man and, like his clothes, is now a cast off from both races.

He tells Wales the story of when he and the other great indian chiefs were summoned to Washington. They were decked out in suits and tops hats for the occasion. At this momentous gathering they were addressed by the Under-Secretary for the Interior, who congratulated them on their appearance, said he understood their problems and at the end of his speech urged them all to “endeavour to persevere”.

The chiefs then went away to think about what he said – “endeavour to persevere” – and after they had thought about it for a while, they declared war on the USA.

Here are the closing words of the Obama speech.

“People of Berlin – and people of the world – the scale of our challenge is great. The road ahead will be long. But I come before you to say that we are heirs to a struggle for freedom. We are a people of improbable hope. Let us build on our common history, and seize our common destiny, and once again engage in that noble struggle to bring justice and peace to our world.”

And he could have added “and endeavour to persevere”.

Blowin' in the Wind

2008-07-24T22:40:00.008+01:00

This song is my favourite Bob Dylan song of all time. Not because it's his best - it isn't - but because it was how I was in 1964, aged 18, when I first went up to University. And like the rest of my companions I bought the record. Then I was a vaguely rebellious Angry Young Man. Cross with grown ups - who told me what to do. I felt a mass of general feeling in favour of what was 'right' - being fair, looking after the poor and helpless, stopping wars. Dylan's song matched these generalised sentiments.

'How many times must the cannon balls fly
Before the're forever banned."

'How many years can some people exist
Before they're allowed to be free."

Such expressions of feeling about what must be right!

The problem is that while the answers were blowin' in the wind, so were the questions.

It took me years to realise that abstract admirable sentiments in favour of the good and virtuous weren't enough. You needed precise questions and answers - what is the mechanism whereby you redistribute wealth to some without stealing from others? What exactly do you mean by 'free'? Is it my freedom to spend my own money in buying an advantage for my own children? And if not how do you adjudicate between what I can buy and others with less means can't? Will forever banning cannon balls ourselves allow us then to protect the vulnerable threatened by those who don't share our admirable sentiments?

The vague sentiments on the side of right in 'Blowin' in the Wind' were fine for eighteen year olds in the 1960s but they won't do now when you're all grown up. My problem with the 1960s is that it arrested development. It left us with the vague sentiments in favour of right that Dylan expresses without the maturity to decide how practically they were to be realised.

Yet I suppose I thought that over the last forty years or so we might have habituated ourselves to the real practicalities, and constructed a politics based on down to earth reality. But what do I see, but Barack Obama playing brilliantly the same generalised sentiments in favour of the virtuous and good that I felt at eighteen - but now feel we ought to have outgrown. How good he makes people feel about what they feel, and which he shares. Whatever it is they feel, he will have some magical phrase confirming how he feels in the same way too - and the bloke with opposing views has exactly the same impression.

So I feel about Barack Obama like I would have felt at 18. But I'm not 18 and I fear he will be elected.

Now, over 60, I truly don't know what he stands for, except what is good and right and virtuous and vague.

Anything and everything. Whatever is blowin' in the wind.

I've posted the song on my Music blog here.

Music Links (5)

2008-07-22T21:54:00.003+01:00

My latest posts on my music blog are here, an extract from Joanna Macgregor's extraordinary concert at Wigmore Hall in April 2001, and Oscar Shumsky playing Kreisler at St John's Smith Square in 1983 here. Latest additions are 'Come Let Us All', an example of that joyous style of church singing of the early nineteenth century, before the clerics closed in with their organs and choirboys, and Noirin Ni Rian singing 'Resurrection' with the monks of Glenstal Abbey.

"Wife"

2008-07-21T22:45:00.004+01:00

Not-So-Spotless in her post here writes about this poem by Emily Dickinson.

I'm "Wife"- I've finished that-
That other state-
I'm Czar-I'm "Woman" now-
It's safer so-

How odd the Girl's life looks-
Behind this soft Eclipse-
I think that earth feels so
To folks in Heaven- now-

This being comfort-then-
That other kind- was pain-
But why compare?
I'm "Wife"! Stop there!

I find it interesting how Dickinson apostrophises “Wife” not just as a label of subjection, but also in some kind of fierce accommodation.

As a label of scorn “wife” has a pedigree. Think of “fishwife” and “old wives tale” and their connotation of ignorance and superstition. “Wife” too is meant to contrast with “mistress”, with irregularity and immorality. And “wife” too seems to travel with a stronger possessive “my” than does “husband”.

It’s not hard to see the reason for string, independent women scorning the title.

But I don’t think Dickinson quite sees it that way - even though there’s no admission of the man’s view.

For a man “wife” can mean support, even when he is in tears. An early memory of mine is my mother comforting my father after my younger brother broke his thigh in a playground accident. See too how Beethoven portrays the masculine ideal of wifely devotion in ‘Fidelio’.

Men are their own worst enemies, of course. Intimately, in the home they privately may acknowledge their need for their wife’s support – but then they go down the pub and talk to their mates about their “trouble and strife” and “’er indoors” – and all the other commonly applied epithets.

That’s not to say that their wives don’t have their own version of the same fault. They have their own talent for bitter, sexual scorn, which all men fear.

I like to think that behind these public utterances, it is in private and at home, in their sharing of life together, their fears and uncertainties, that these stereotypes are undermined. Stereotypes are abstract, derived from that odd tic and tendency we all have, to generalise from the particular.

“All women/men are like that” does no good. We can’t understand each other abstractly. We can only do so intimately. Dickinson’s strange enclosed life isn’t one for the rest of us to emulate. We need to live in the open air, with all the other men and women close around us – to love and hate as we please, but individually, not as a whole.

Peace and Tranquillity

2008-07-20T21:34:00.003+01:00

Living in London for over thirty years, I’m still not a Londoner (though my children, Billy and Mary are, to their fingertips). I still talk with a strange accent and have odd cultural peculiarities – culinary taste for faggots and peas or chips with gravy. But not tripe and onions. I could never get on with tripe – too much like trying to eat knitting.

Visits up North, where I grew up, always spark some interesting generational misapprehensions.

We were up in Lancashire for the “dedication” of my nephew’s daughter. This is a revised form of “christening”, which in turn for me, brought up a Catholic, was always a watered down (no pun intended) version of “baptism”. We had a dreadful journey up – delays at every motorway junction and interchange. It is experiences like this – and the inability to find a parking space virtually anywhere in or near a town without having to pay for it – confirms to me at last how overcrowded England is.

The journey up sparks much comment from Billy. I like to take the “scenic” route which means journeying up on the A1 through Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire and into Yorkshire and crossing over through the Pennines and Derbyshire. Billy is a city boy in every fibre and the scenic route sparks a litany of disparaging remarks about there being “too much grass”, “not enough shops” and “what do people find to do out here?” in this godforsaken emptiness. I can only sigh. There’s no explaining peace and tranquillity to urban yoof.

My choice of music for the journey up also comes in for criticism – this time Joni Mitchell’s superannuated melodies. Melodies don’t seem to mean the same to those brought up on Eminem, Snoop Dogg and Two Pac.

I shut him up with a Charlie Parker CD. I’m trying to get to grips with him half a century after he died. But “Groovin’ High” just proves my musical insanity – but also (more likely) Parker’s. Billy went back to his iPod.

The dedication was, in the event, a rather sweet ceremony – and I don’t at all feel Old Fogeyish about it. Everyone behaved well – a source a great disappointment to my closest female relations who attend these family gathering more, I suspect, in the hope of seeing a frank exchange of views on grievances resurrected from 30 years ago.

The father, my nephew, is an estimable young man who behaved perfectly. The mother was all smiles, prettiness and welcome.

As we parted after the ‘do’ I shook his hand and wondered aloud when might be the next family gathering.

“On that’ll be our wedding,” he said brightly.

“Count me in,” I said and bade farewell.

Hang on a minute, I thought as I walked to the car. Aren’t you supposed to do things the other way round? I mean, get married first and then have the baby.

Or is the misunderstanding mine, like trying to find peace and tranquillity in Eminem, Snoop Dogg and Two Pac?

St Thomas

2008-07-16T23:32:00.004+01:00

Jazz workshop has moved from BB's to a grotty pub in Walthamstow. We play in the darts room at the back. Tonight most of the rhythm section was on holiday so all we had was Ian on bass. The rest of the band was trumpet (Jack), trombone (me) and alto (Jim). Lauren and Sue were the rival vocalists. They are polite to each other - but they don't mix. Lauren likes standards like Embraceable You and Night and Day. Sue likes odd high pitched vocals like All Blues and Little Sunflower. They set each other's teeth on edge.

For an anarchist, Jack is a surprising authoritarian. Everyone has to take their solo in turn. Usually it's clockwise. Tonight it was widdershins. But he gets all moral when you don't follow his rules. So when I repeated the head on Softly as in a Morning Sunrise - a feature for Ian and me - trombone and bass go so well together I had to play it again - he pointedly came over afterwards to enquire why I had departed from standard routine and played the head again.

"Because it came into my head to do so," I said.

He sucked his teeth and called for St Thomas (a Sonny Rollins tune) because he knows I don't like it. He's right - I don't. It's a trivial tune.

Ian, by the way, played brilliantly.

Sonny Rollins (age 78) was in London last month. I'm afraid I missed him.

Music Links (4)

2008-07-15T21:03:00.002+01:00

I've posted three more pieces of music at Old Fogey's Favourites, my music blog. Two of them, Carla Bley's Song Sung Long and the Archduke Trio I have discussed on this blog (here and here). I have also transferred my Time Stands Still feature to OFF. The latest is Gigli singing Amarilli mia bella.

Chords or Scales?

2008-07-14T21:23:00.004+01:00

Playing at BBs is cancelled now, so we are looking for a new venue from which to torture the neighbouring population with our attempts to play jazz. It’s given me a little time for reflection.

I have been concerned for some time about the difference in the way I try to play jazz from my fellows at the workshop. They regard me (though they haven’t said so in so many words) as a primitive. It's not that my playing is worse than theirs. It's that I don't seem to do it to the same pattern as they do. The reason for this is that, when trying to improvise, I don’t seem to play from the harmonies of the piece we’re playing – the chords, that is. Here’s a brief description of how I play.

When I play the head (the main melody) I play from the dots. I don’t memorise tunes – except Victor Herbert’s ‘Stella By Starlight’, because it’s is my warm up tune, and ‘Davenport Blues’, because it’s the only number I have ever successfully transcribed from a record. I need the dots, however well I know the tune.

After the head is out of the way, and I’m trying to improvise, I shut my eyes. I don’t look at the dots, or the chords. I know what key I’m in, and if I know the tune well, I know how it changes, say, in the middle eight bars (which is one or two key changes). As I know those other keys I know what additional notes are available to me and how to finger the valves in the changed keys. Once I know this – and where I am, at any particular place in the piece, I feel able to negotiate my way through a solo, trying to shape a new melody out of the old one. I get flummoxed when the rhythm goes awry, or the piano player is weak and doesn’t keep me on track with the movement of the main melody (which is always at the back of my head), at the same time as trying to improvise a new one in parallel with it. In these circumstances I can lose the melody but I can keep on playing against the piano harmonies in the hope I eventually find my place, or the next soloist gets fed up of waiting.

My fellows do it differently. Throughout their solos they keep their eyes firmly fixed on the music, on the chords. They know the chords, and the notes that make them up, and when they solo they build around the changing notes available to them as the chords change. They get flummoxed by a chord they don’t know or, more often, by a sequence of chords that is out of the normal pattern of chords they have come to expect. The more brazen blast their way through it. The more timid get stuck and stop, leaving others to pick up the reins.

I never get stuck for something to play - however awkward. I was just not sure how what I do relates to their way of doing things.

Until I read this recently in James Lincoln Collier’s great book “The Making of Jazz”. He is contrasting Lester Young’s way of playing with Coleman Hawkins’s (photo above). He says that it was “Lester’s habit of playing from scales rather than chords.” He remarks on the relative simplicity of the tunes he improvised on – the blues, variants of ‘I Got Rhythm’ rather than the complexities of ‘Body and Soul’ (Hawkins’s tour de force) or ‘He’s Funny That Way’, both of which seem to pass through three different keys in the middle eight bars.

That’s it. It is scales not chords. That’s what I was playing, without understanding what I was doing. I know that in ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ the middle section likewise passes through three keys. I’ve stopped trying to improvise here but have learnt a few paraphrases of the melody which gets me through, till I reach safe ground in the key of G for the last sixteen bars.

I’m so glad I finally found out what I was doing. I guess I’m still a primitive but I’m in good company.

Point and Shoot

2008-07-12T21:53:00.003+01:00

The writer, John Fowles, remarked to the photographer Fay Godwin, about a striking photograph she had taken of a landscape in Wales, that she was lucky to catch such a perfect sky. “I didn’t catch it,” she replied, “I sat down and waited three days for it.”

Fowles crushed.

That’s the difference, between a true photographer and point and shoot snappers like me.

Most photos I take are the normal run of family snapshots and the like, and photos to do drawings from. Though I don’t have anything like Godwin’s patience and devotion or an ounce of her skill, I’d still like to be better. But no matter how hard I try I’ll always make some elementary error. Usually I fail to keep the camera on the horizontal so everything looks as though it’s leaning downhill. So, I do a lot of close ups of flowers – there’s no horizon with flowers.

However by luck sometimes, I get something I quite like - with a bit of cropping and tweaking on Photoshop (cheating, I know, but hey……..!).

Here’s two. The first (above) is William Pitt’s statue in Hanover Square, not far from where I used to work in Savile Row. This was taken with one of those obsolete Advance Photo System cameras, the one with odd print sizes, that were all the rage ten years ago. You can’t sell them on ebay now – except to me it seems.

The second is in the market in Whitecross Street, just outside the City of London. The geezer in the flat cap is telling the puzzled girl some tale which will end up with her buying it – the story and whatever else on the stall goes with it. The cheapest small digital cameras are good for taking candid shots like this. They’re easy to conceal.

Well, I haven’t been punched on the nose – yet.

Music Links (3)

2008-07-11T19:33:00.003+01:00

Over at Old Fogey’s Favourites I have now uploaded music which I have talked about in this blog. There is Shallo Brown (see also here) and This Old House (see also here).

Also uploaded is Kate Rusby’s Bitter Boy, a song all the more heartbreaking in the light of her own personal emotional turmoil at the time. Most recent is an account of a lunchtime concert I dropped into for want of something to do at the time – Ian Bostridge’s debut fifteen years ago.

BB

2008-07-11T13:54:00.005+01:00

I wrote here about the Wednesday night jazz workshop at BB’s Jamaican Bar in Forest Gate, E7 – not far from where I used to live.

Last Wednesday, I turned up as usual, to find the rest of the band standing forlornly outside BB’s, obviously locked up. The reason, I soon knew, was that BB had died two hours earlier of some unknown internal obstruction. He was 62.

He was a gentle, sweet man who every now and then, out of the goodness of his heart, would cook us up a Jamaican meal. He had heard us play, so I guess he was sorry for us. Goat curry was his best dish, though alarmingly full of bits of broken bone. To be ate, and savoured, slowly and carefully. His unknown fish in spiky sauce was another favourite. His sandwiches were terrible.

Some weeks ago I was talking to him about his wife, who was ill at the time. He was telling me about her, how much he loved her and how he couldn’t live without her. They had been together since he was sixteen. He had a horror of her dying first. Well, that anxiety is passed.

I didn’t know him by any other name but BB. Thank you BB and good night. RIP.

Being with Bill

2008-07-10T23:48:00.005+01:00

Billy came round today. The moment he hoves into view I haven’t a moment to call my own.

I took him to the clinic for some tests, about nothing in particular. Then I hung around for several hours before the call to pick him up. Now I’ve had to listen all day to how excruciating the treatment was, how badly he was (reasonably) treated, and how pretty the girl in reception was (she made eyes at him, but he didn’t notice).

I’m now in process of copying down to file every photo he ever took over the last year. He needs to keep everything (in triplicate) to ensure not one jot of his flight over the Grand Canyon is lost, or one moment of the Joe Calzaghe fight, or one note of the latest Bon Jovi concert.

He’s gone to bed, at last, leaving me still here figuring out what to do.

The photo is from 1991.

Finsbury Square

2008-07-09T22:46:00.004+01:00

You won’t find this on the tourist map of London. It’s a square of grass above an underground car park. Where, if it’s fine, office workers sit out at lunch time eating their sandwiches.

I had a nostalgic trip back to my old office near Bunhill Fields a little while ago. I took my normal route from Liverpool Street Station, where East London workers disgorge into the City, across the square and along Cresswell Street to Bunhill Row.

Most of the buildings around the square are new – it was badly bombed in the war. But the north side was undamaged and the Royal London House, built between 1906 and 1930 still survives, with a sculpture of Trident on top. It has been renamed Trident House. Pevsner says, affectionately, that it is “victoriously vulgar”. And so it is. That’s why whenever I pass through the Square, I can’t take my eyes off it.

Music Links (2)

2008-07-08T23:05:00.003+01:00

I've added two more links to my music blog for songs I have written about on this one. Richard and Linda Thompson's heart-rending 'Walking on a Wire' is here - Richard Thompson's guitar solo at the end is very moving. Also here is quintessential Billie Holiday, young and without a care, singing free and fresh, and unforgettable - before someone told her she was an 'artist' - 'Miss Brown to You'.

Defending Docklands

2008-07-07T20:56:00.017+01:00

botogol in his comment here takes me to task for drawing a likeness between Canary Wharf, in London’s Docklands, with New York's Manhattan. He knows Manhattan. By implication my comparison is superficial. A matter of tall buildings.

Well, yes, in one sense, it is. Likeness is superficial. That’s what fooled Mary when, at first sight of my photograph, she thought it was New York – then corrected herself. The matter of tall buildings is no small matter. Skylines define cities for us, and our attachments to them (we have learned to love the Gherkin and the OXO Building). The similarity of the skyline of Canary Wharf (right above) with New York’s (left above) is London's homage to the definitive character of the modern city, which New York quintessentially is.

One big difference, which botogol mentions, and which mitigates against drawing the resemblance deeper that this likeness, is their contrasting social character. Manhattan has evolved over more than a century, and its character reflects the changing patterns of social and economic activity, and their reactions within its built environment over that time. Canary Wharf is less than twenty years old and at its financial heart has, still, the social character of the City of London, of which it is presently an outpost. Parts of it, like the City, are a social desert after 8pm.

London Docklands, nonetheless, is a fascinating area. Perhaps if you work there, you don’t always see it. I worked by Oxford Circus for more than 20 years, and was blind to the fascination the area had for thousands of tourists. For me it was a place to escape from.

A hundred yards from where the photo of Canary Wharf was taken, in Limehouse, the river path along the quay doglegs behind a former warehouse and turns into Narrow Street. It is aptly named. It is closed in on the riverside by the high brick warehouse wall, and by (rather dull) modern development on the north side. Follow it along and it opens out into Limehouse Basin with its eighteenth century Dockmaster’s house, and the Barley Mow pub opposite. The path winds along the quay, with its vertiginous drop down to river below, unprotected by railings. Carry on over the bridge and you arrive at the most intriguing mix of ancient and modern, rather higgledy piggledy around a ‘square’ – more a wedge than a square with an absurd bird sculpture in the centre, and a park beyond, and 1960s municipal housing beyond that. But on the riverside of the square is a, not very straight, line of seventeenth and eighteenth century terraced houses (left). One is a pub, “The Grapes”, another a bar of some sort – the rest, impossible to say.

Then you pass onto Dunbar’s Wharf, then through a gap in the buildings, back towards the river, to a lovely curving footbridge (left) over a small dock branching off the river. Then onto Canary Wharf. All within a mile.

Docklands is full of this, these odd juxtapositions of old and new. In Wapping, Rotherhithe, Shadwell, Bermondsey, Millwall. And the slightly surreal character of the largest docks, like the Royal Victoria (left), where you are surrounded by sky and water. Large parts of Docklands have been residential for a short time, and people need a generation to stamp a place with social character.

Give it time.

London's Manhattan

2008-07-06T20:54:00.005+01:00

Today I put this photograph as background on my laptop. Just as I had done so, my daughter, Mary, looked over my shoulder and said “Oh, New York”, then swiftly corrected herself, “Of course it’s not. It’s Canary Wharf”.

Her mistake was revealing.

I don’t know to what extent the redevelopment of London’s dockland area modelled itself explicitly on New York, or anywhere else. But seeing Canary Wharf from Limehouse, where this photograph was taken, it is hard not to see it as a homage to New York’s Manhattan skyline.

The dominating buildings of Canary Wharf surround Canada Square. No.1 is the oldest and the dominant one – in the centre with its pyramid roof – built in 1991. The other two flat roofed buildings flanking it are the HSBC and Citigroup buildings built between 2000 and 2002. No. 1 Canada Square was originally intended to be higher, but would have interfered with flight paths around the City Airport.

This part of London is unrecognisable to what it was when I first came here almost forty years ago. There is no port here now – that has moved downstream to Tilbury. What is left is a vast area of docks and wharves and warehouses now rebuilt, renovated or replaced into a vast financial, leisure and residential area. The charm, and the rats, of forty years ago have gone and I’m not sure I regret it. Wherever you go in Docklands beside brand spanking new buildings you’ll bump into eighteenth century churches and schools, nineteenth century warehouses redeveloped as apartments, old almshouses still lived in by locals, brutalist housing from the 1960s, ancient quayside pubs and some lovely modern bridges spanning the expanses of water on all sides.

But however local it is in its details, whenever I see this view of Canary Wharf I shall also see it, as Mary did, as our Manhattan.

I took this photo as an experiment, using one of those old roll film cameras that were popular in the 1950s – in this case an Agfa Isolette, which I got for a few pounds off ebay. I think the square format works very well, with Canary Wharf dead centre. I think if I were taking the photo again, I might move slightly more to the left, in order to readjust the line of the metal railing in the foreground, putting the post at the angle more central. As it is here, it slightly distracts the main view, I think.

Time stands still (3)

2008-07-05T21:45:00.004+01:00

From the age of nine till I went to University in 1964, I was a regular altar boy at my local Catholic Church, just two hundred yards away from where I lived. This was pre-Vatican Council, so all masses were said in Latin. We altar boys (my four brothers were draftees too) had to learn the Latin responses – many an ‘et cum spiritu tuo’, a ‘Gloria tibi , Domine’ and a thankful ‘Deo gratias’ when it was over.

I find going to mass now (rare) a less satisfying experience than then. It lacks the gravitas that Latin brought, and even when, at High Masses, there are sung Latin responses, it isn’t the same; it’s a pale and insipid version – and the rest is mumbled vernacular.

I loved the plainchant sung at 11 o’clock Sunday mass. The choir was terrible – the altos were matronly elderly ladies wobbling away, the tenors were young men whose voices had just broken, press ganged by their mothers, or older men, failed baritones made into unnatural tenors straining away as if their underpants were too tight – the basses were the old stalwarts of the parish who just grunted away. But there were a couple of good, ex-Children of Mary sopranos, from the posher end of the parish, upon whom the greater burden fell.

I always liked the opening ‘Kyrie’, light, open and welcoming. ‘Gloria’ and ‘Credo’ were solemn and heavy, the heart and substance of the mass. I felt grave and intimidated – though I found the moment where the singing almost comes to a stop and the priest genuflects at ‘et Incarnatus est’ very moving. The ‘Sanctus’ was declamatory. The ‘Benedictus’ seemed like an add-on to the Sanctus – but I liked the words – ‘Blessed is he who cometh in the name of the Lord’. It was positive and optimistic – a call to us all. I always felt it ought to have more prominence.

That’s before I heard Beethoven. He gets it right, in the ‘Missa Solemnis’ and, for me, makes it the centrepiece of the whole mass. The time stands still moment is the gentle entry of the violin in the Praeludium. It comes as a moment of blessing when true faith, through the Holy Ghost, descends as grace, unbidden, as natural as air, in the heavenly violin solo that lays peace upon us all.

You can hear the Praeludium and ‘Benedictus’ here.

Time stands still (2)

2008-07-03T21:14:00.003+01:00

There is a very strange moment towards the end of the first act of Richard Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” when the Marschallin, young still but aware of impending middle age and the life of duty that beckons her, ponders the meaning of time. Time is flowing between us, away from us, showings its marks in the mirror.

For an instant she becomes almost unnerved and, in a moving passage, tells Octavian, her young lover, how sometimes at night she comes downstairs and stops all the clocks. At this point the orchestra is silent except for the sound of a tolling bell.

Octavian, young and still stupid, can’t understand and protests his undying love. But we understand as she does – that their love is doomed. Time has stepped between them.

“Der Rosenkavalier” was the last great opera written before the world became deranged by the First World War. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, in a film of this act recorded in 1960, plays the scene as if she too is on the brink of madness. Her performance is mannered, self regarding and utterly gripping.

Jessye Norman sings Richard Strauss

2008-07-02T22:47:00.003+01:00

Elizabeth Schwarzkopf''s recording of the 'Four Last Songs' of Richard Strauss is always held up as the benchmark against which other recordings are measured. Few have survived the comparison. But one does - and in three of the songs at least surpasses Schwarzkopf. This is Jessye Norman's recording with Kurt Masur. My appreciation is here, where you can also listen to her incomparable singing of Strauss's last song of all - 'Im Abendrot'.

Music Links

2008-07-01T18:51:00.004+01:00

I'm slowly adding links to my music posts, to my music blog where you can listen to some of the music I talk about. The links are at the foot of the relevant post. My latest additions are for Heather Rankin (here), Scott Hamilton (here) and Margaret Price (here).

Music Blog

2008-06-30T20:44:00.002+01:00

The last three posts will give the clue. I've been having great fun with my new music blog. Over the last few months I have posted several appreciations of singers and musicians on this blog. I hope now to be putting a link to my music blog where I'll now put the music. My first is Patty Griffin's "Mary" - my original appreciation and link are here.

Elizabeth Connell sings "Schlafendes Jesuskind"

2008-06-30T19:55:00.002+01:00

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Good things come in threes. This is from my music blog here, where I've posted the words and background. The music starts 20 seconds in.

Elly's Encore

2008-06-29T22:42:00.002+01:00

From my music blog, here a song by Elly Ameling.

Janet Baker sings "Silent Noon"

2008-06-29T20:56:00.003+01:00

I have just re-opened my music blog here and this is my first post.