Snow in Midsummer
29 March 2017

About four years ago, John and I went to Stratford-on-Avon to see the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of a Chinese play, The Orphan of Zhao, in a new version by James Fenton.  I can’t say I remember very much about it except that the primary villain was a wicked courtier.  Looking it up now, I am reminded of some other elements: a weak emperor who shoots arrows randomly into the assembled populace, a doctor who sacrifices his own child to save the unwanted Imperial offspring, and a few other details. The play is regarded by the knowledgeable as “the Chinese Hamlet,” more, I think, for its place in the dramatic tradition than for details of plotting or characterisation. I do remember that we enjoyed the production, and that we admired Fenton’s work.

This is the sort of play that draws us to Stratford.  We do, of course, go to some of the Shakespeare productions in the main theatre, usually of favourite plays (we would, I think, go to any production of Much Ado About Nothing that was ever mounted there) or of less familiar ones like Cymbeline or Pericles.  But we tend to avoid the crowd-pleasers like Romeo & Juliet or Julius Caesar unless there is something special about the production – for instance, an actor or director we particularly admire.  It is a long time since we have been to Othello or Antony & Cleopatra, both of which we saw in productions so good we doubt they can ever be bettered, and we live in hope to add to that list.

We do, however, go regularly to the Swan theatre in Stratford, where the RSC stages a more eclectic repertoire:  plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, plays from other theatrical traditions (like The Orphan of Zhao), modern and newly-commissioned plays.  We are quite picky about new plays, of which our experience is distinctly mixed.  Last year’s Queen Anne by Helen Edmundson, produced by the RSC, was excellent.  But the prize-winning Pomona, which we saw in 2015 (to be fair, it was at the National Theatre, not the RSC), was the worst rubbish I have seen in many a day.  How it won so many awards is a great mystery.  But that’s another story.

In the last six months, we have only been to Stratford once.  While I was awaiting, and then undergoing, radiotherapy I avoided booking tickets for shows in case I was unwell and the tickets were wasted.  As things have turned out (so far – touch wood!), the precaution was unnecessary, and we shall be resuming our Stratford visits later this year.

Thus it seemed likely that we would miss the RSC’s latest take on a Chinese drama, in this case Snow in Midsummer, in a modern adaptation by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig.  But I had the good fortune to be offered a ticket for the play by my friends David and Frances Thomas who, like us, are regular playgoers.  I went with them to see the show last week, and it turned out a rewarding experience.

Unlike The Orphan of Zhao, this version of Snow in Midsummer is a modern adaptation, set in present-day China and with plot features far removed from the play’s 13th century origins.  The original story is fairly simple in outline.  A girl, Dou Yi, is unjustly convicted for the murder of a patriarch, Master Zhang.  On the execution block she calls down a curse on the community:  snow will fall in midsummer, and there will be unending drought until the injustice is put right.  The play follows the working-out of that curse.  However, Cowhig has added some other plot strands, which among other things dramatise the tension between ancient tradition and modern industrialisation, and make the time scheme more complex so that the full story only gradually emerges.

It is a ghost story in what I understand is a distinctly Chinese manner. Unlike the ghosts of Banquo or Hamlet’s father, Dou Yi’s ghost takes an active part in the story and is frequently seen on stage, dressed in a traditional white.  We were slightly disconcerted that the actress, Katie Leung, spoke in a distinctly Scottish accent (she was in fact born in Dundee, and trained at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland).  But she gives an excellent performance, by turns innocent, terrified, vengeful and implacable.

In the opening scene we see her still alive, innocently gathering palms to weave into animal charms which she offers to the audience.  Only if we know the story or read the programme can we guess who she is.  Then we are transported into another world, recognisably modern China, with street sellers and business people cheek by jowl, neon lighting in the backdrop and harsh rock music on the loudspeakers.  We have also moved forward three years in time, though we initially have to guess this too.

At this point in the show I was both a bit confused (fair enough – many stories begin with apparently unrelated strands which they then gradually knit together) and becoming irritated.  There have been several recent RSC productions which have resorted to loud music as an unnecessary production device and I feared that this would be another.  However, when the character Tianyun appears, with her adopted daughter in tow, the production cools down and the plot starts to take shape.  Tianyun is a businesswoman planning to buy the local factory from Handsome Zhang, who appears to be a gay playboy type.  (Doesn’t she know about the three years’ drought?  Rather a risky purchase, I would have thought.)

Handsome’s boyfriend, Rocket Wu, has had a heart transplant, and we gradually realise that the heart came from Dou Yi – another plot strand far removed from the 13th century.  Meanwhile Dou Yi’s ghost has started to communicate with and through the adopted daughter.  Perhaps the finest scene in the show occurs when the ghost communicates with, or possibly possesses, the little girl.  The RSC is employing three young girls, who presumably take turns, to play the part of the adopted daughter.  I do not know which of the three was on stage when I saw the play, but she had clearly been very well directed in the possession scene.  Unfortunately, later she stood or wandered around, well schooled but rather inert, and thus was a weak link in an otherwise accomplished production.

Gradually, secrets are uncovered, the plot unwinds, and the significance of those opening scenes becomes clear.  We do eventually get to see, in another flashback scene, how it was Handsome Zhang who killed his father and framed Dou Yi for the crime.  By the end of the play, not everyone has died, justice prevails and the drought is ended, but at a cost.  So this is not quite a tragedy in the classical or Shakespearean sense.  Nonetheless, it has some of the same dynamic, with an initial act of injustice leading to catastrophe before being resolved.

It is easy to imagine that Shakespeare would have been able to make a powerful drama out of the same material.  Cowhig hasn’t quite done that – there are confusions and redundancies in the plot, and the script is serviceable without much poetry or depth.  But the story and production, between them, do give the show a distinctive flavour, and its theme of the clash between old and new is of course readily transferable.

I have read that the RSC is planning to stage more Chinese plays in translation or adaptation in the future.  I shall look forward to that.  The Orphan of Zhao and Snow in Midsummer have certainly whetted my appetite for more.

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The Suppliant Women
28 March 2017

It is, alas, more than forty years since I received my Honours degree at Oxford, and therefore also more than forty years since I read an ancient Greek play in the original language.  I only remember a fraction of what I learned about Greek drama; much of what I now remember probably comes from seeing modern performances of English translations.

Even when I was at Oxford I only read a fraction – perhaps one in five – of the Greek tragedies that have survived.  There are in total seven by Aeschylus, seven by Sophocles and seventeen by Euripides.  (I notice that Wikipedia lists eighteen by Euripides:  it is possible that one has been rediscovered, probably on papyrus, in the last forty years.)  They are a pitifully small fraction of what we know was written by those three alone, let alone any other playwrights, though we know there must have been many.

Ancient Greek drama is an essential precursor of modern theatre, and a few of the plays are still performed regularly.  John and I have strong memories of Peter Hall’s fine production of Aeschylus’ Oresteia (a trilogy) which we saw at the National Theatre in the early 1980s.  More recently we have seen Oedipus Tyrannos at the National and Antigone at the Royal Exchange in Manchester (both Sophocles), both of which speak clearly to modern audiences, and several plays by Euripides:  Medea, Hecuba, the Trojan Women, and the Bacchae, all of which have (or can be given) echoes in the modern world.  But many of the surviving plays are for one reason or another less attractive to modern theatre directors.

One such reason is the role of the chorus, which is quite unlike anything in modern theatrical practice.  Ancient Greek drama has its origins in religious festivals at which lyric poems of religious significance were declaimed, chanted or sung (we don’t really know).  These were originally simply choral.  But gradually a solo part was also developed, first no doubt simply for contrast, but then given a specific role to play; then there was a second soloist, and so dramatic development and conflict became possible.  However, the chorus remained, and in each play that survives takes an important part, introducing, commenting on and sometimes directly participating in the drama.  The Greek playwrights were poets too, and some of their choral poetry is very fine.  Nonetheless, it presents a challenge for any modern theatre director.

I had almost completely forgotten that Aeschylus ever wrote a play called The Suppliants (in Latin, Supplices, which is the title that I have now called back to mind).  It is rarely performed in the modern theatre:  it has a prominent role for the chorus, which is in fact the protagonist in the drama, and – being the first of a trilogy, of which the other two plays are lost – does not have the denouement which a modern audience may expect.

But it does have a strong modern resonance and this has been brought out in a new touring production by the Actors Touring Company, which John and I saw in Manchester last week.  The production uses a new verse translation by David Greig and has been given a revised title, The Suppliant Women, to fit its theme.  Briefly:  the suppliant women are refugees from forced marriage; they arrive in Argos and plead for sanctuary; the king of Argos is torn between religious duty and political reality; he puts the issue to a popular vote; the women are granted asylum.  But they have been pursued, and the rest of the trilogy would have continued the story.

The production is clever enough not to force the modern parallels (except for a couple of crass moments in what is otherwise a very fine translation) but the themes of forced migration and female emancipation come through quite clearly.  John and I enjoyed the show without feeling that we had been preached at.  I can’t speak for John, but what I particularly admired was how the performance of the chorus, the text and music combined to give some sense of how an Athenian audience might have felt two and a half millennia ago when the play was first performed.

The chorus is a large group of volunteer performers from the Manchester area who have been rehearsing since January.  This must have been a Herculean effort by them all.  They are on stage virtually throughout the show’s 90 minutes and active for most of that time (they do get a few quiet minutes when others are speaking).  Their movement on stage was a little ragged on occasion but I thought that was quite appropriate for a group of desperate exiles:  over-drilled neat choreography would not have suited their role at all.  They sing or chant their highly rhythmic lines with energy and clarity, sometimes in unison, sometimes antiphonally, sometimes breaking into as much as six-part harmony.  The amount of physical and vocal stamina, and of sheer memory, on display is worthy of a fully professional cast; they are unquestionably the stars of the show.

We only have an approximate idea of what ancient Greek music sounded like, or so at least I understood when I was at Oxford.  However, it appears that a lot more work of scholarship has been done in the field since that time, based on archaeological finds of various kinds.  The Oxford professor Martin West (whom I remember as a desperately boring lecturer; he was never my tutor) has written a book Ancient Greek Music, substantial chunks of which can be read in preview online:  https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=So-Qpz6WDS4C&lpg=PP1&pg=PA84&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false.  The programme for The Suppliant Women contains a lengthy article by the play’s composer John Browne which I initially thought fanciful, but now realise is well grounded in the latest research.

Browne’s music for the show uses a modern recreation of an ancient Greek woodwind instrument, the aulos, plus a variety of percussion, and consists of a mixture of rhythmic chants plus some more elaborate harmony (which I suspect is less authentic).  It suits the play and the words very well, achieving just the right mixture of performance and ritual. Almost all the chorus’s words are either sung or chanted.  The music is not perhaps quite up to the standard of Harrison Birtwistle’s score for the Oresteia, back at the National back in the 1980s (mentioned earlier), but is not unworthy of the comparison, which is high praise.  The two hard-worked musicians are brought on stage to receive proper recognition alongside the cast at the end of the show.

David Greig’s translation is well suited to this treatment, using a variety of strong rhythmic patterns which Browne’s music then exploits.  Wisely he avoids rhymes.  I can’t speak for the accuracy of the translation, but both meaning and poetry are well conveyed.  There are a couple of places where modern language creeps in – I caught one use of “male violence” which, even if an accurate translation (which I doubt), has overtones that might have been better avoided.  Greig makes no attempt to avoid the mythological references which would have been familiar to Athenian audiences, or to explain them beyond what is already present in Aeschylus.  However, the programme notes wisely include a brief explanation of each of the mythical figures mentioned:  Zeus may be a well-known figure, but Io and Danaus, for instance, probably are not.  I should imagine that many in the audience found these useful.

The Actors Touring Company do indeed tour, but this show, dependent on recruiting a large and enthusiastic volunteer chorus, cannot move from venue to venue in quite the usual way:  it requires a lot of local preparation.  The Manchester run ends this week.  I do see, however, that the show is coming to the Young Vic in London in November.  If you haven’t already seen it, you should make a date in your diary.

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Desert Island Discs part 3
27 March 2017

(Continued from below)

As we move into the twentieth century my last three choices are all of comparative rarities, though none of them features the clashing chords which John alleges (unfairly) I favour in my own music.  All three of these pieces deserve to be much better known.

(6) Medtner – Piano Concerto no. 1, played by Dmitri Alexeev.  Medtner was a contemporary and friend of Rachmaninov.  Like Rachmaninov, he was also a virtuoso pianist; all his compositions feature the piano in some role.  Like Rachmaninov, he endured poverty and needed to be bailed out by friends and patrons.  And his music is very like Rachmaninov’s, or perhaps two-thirds Rachmaninov plus one-third Brahms.

Apart from the sheer difficulty of his piano writing, which is challenging for the finest virtuosi but no more so than Rachmaninov’s, the only reason I can see why Medtner is not better known is that Rachmaninov writes more memorable tunes.  The good news is that the advent of CDs has increased the range of recorded music now available, and as audiences come to hear Medtner’s pieces on CD they may start to demand them in live performance too.  We live in hope.

Medtner wrote three piano concertos and I could easily have chosen any of them, but I slightly favour the first, which is a single movement lasting some 33 minutes, for its arresting opening worthy of Tchaikovsky and the way in which a single theme gradually evolves throughout the piece.  Needless to say, the piano writing is spectacular too.  Alexeev’s is probably the best recording available and comes coupled with Medtner’s Piano Quintet, also a fine piece.  It’s not available online, but here is another fine recording, this one by the Australian pianist Geoffrey Tozer, which I own.  Tozer’s comes in a box set with the other two concertos, but again I don’t think Kirsty Young will give me that much latitude (though it would be worth it if she would) :  www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Rt2pJ2AFpY

(7) Finzi – Intimations of Immortality.  Gerald Finzi was an English composer whose absolute masterpiece this is.  His music is in a very English tradition, with an elegiac quality somewhat reminiscent of Elgar in his quiet moments, and of Vaughan Williams.  I stumbled across this piece quite by chance some years ago and was absolutely bowled over.  It is a long (45 minutes) single-movement work for tenor, choir and orchestra, and sets Wordsworth’s great poem with remarkable sensitivity.

Even more than the Medtner, this is a work which deserves to be performed far more often than it is.  Audiences would love it, if they could be induced to attend in the first place; sadly Finzi’s name is not a “draw” for concert planners.  I did suggest to our music director at the Hurst Green Singers a couple of years ago that we should have a go at it, but he told me (in somewhat politer words) not to be so silly.  It would no doubt be quite a challenge for our choir; and for its full effect it requires a fairly large orchestra with a substantial percussion section, which we of course do not have.  There is a scaled down version of the accompaniment for keyboard (piano or organ) which we could use – obviously not so effective, but then, we are not such effective singers either.

One of the best recordings of this piece can be found at www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lCma6FaWto.  For some reason the opening couple of minutes are rather muffled (they aren’t on the CD); don’t be put off.

I feel I should just mention the other English choral work which was my alternative to the Finzi:  Herbert Howells’ Hymnus Paradisi, similarly the composer’s masterpiece, which is a stunning piece to experience in the concert hall (and a good deal more difficult to sing).  But where Finzi’s music speaks of human joy and melancholy, Howells offers agony and ecstasy with distinctly religious overtones (the work is a requiem for his 9-year old son), and I suspect it might be a little too much for a desert island.  See what you think, in this outstanding live performance from the Proms a few years ago.  I wish I had been there to hear it first-hand:  www.youtube.com/watch?v=at-yv-BQAeA.

(8) Walton – Troilus and Cressida.  I did want to include one opera, but there were quite a lot of caveats.  I do not have too much patience for the older style of operas (roughly, up to Verdi).  The problem with this style is that it is a bit like old fashioned musicals, where everything stops for the songs, except that the dialogue is also sung, often to rather unmemorable music.  Opera is a pretty artificial form anyway, but this really makes it even more obvious.  From late Verdi onwards the distinctions between aria (the songs) and recitative (the sung dialogue) break down and, by the time of Puccini, have almost disappeared, so the music is continuous and one section flows organically into the next.

I also prefer listening to operas more when the music really tells the story, and that means the twentieth century, when composers had greater resources of harmony and orchestration.  If you listen to Richard Strauss’s Salome, for instance, you can tell pretty much where you are in the story simply by what the music is telling you – it isn’t necessary to see the action, and that seems a highly desirable quality for my solitary desert island.

Salome, which is undoubtedly a masterpiece, was on my shortlist; but all the best performances are in the original German, which I can’t understand.  The same applies to two other potential choices, Korngold’s Heliane and Schreker’s Gezeichneten (clips from both, in what look like remarkably silly productions, can be found on Youtube).  Walton has similar qualities, though his music and drama are a bit less expressionist in style; and his libretto is in English.  The one recording that exists has an absolutely stunning performance by Judith Howarth as Cressida; indeed all the cast and performers are on top form.  Unfortunately you will need to beg, borrow or steal a copy (or buy your own!) as it cannot be heard anywhere online that I can find.

Finally, the castaway is traditionally invited to choose one book to take (apart from the Bible, the big encyclopedias and Shakespeare which are all apparently already on the desert island) and one luxury, which must not be something useful, so you can’t for instance take a toolbox or a radio.  You are also asked which one of the eight recordings you would save if all the others were washed away.

(Book) Wisden; the 2006 edition with the epic Ashes series, or the 2012 edition with Lancashire’s county championship success.  Or, really, any edition at all from the last fifty years.

(Luxury) My piano.  Obviously.  Grand pianos are apparently not allowed, as they would provide shelter; but upright pianos are OK.

(One record from the eight) As the castaways always say, this is really hard, but I think it would have to be the Chopin.

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Desert Island Discs part 2
23 March 2017

(Continued from below)

At this point I have to make an admission.  Earlier I described Beethoven as one of the Holy Trinity of great composers, and yet I haven’t chosen any of his music.  Why not?

The truth is that, though I like the symphonies, piano concertos and sonatas, in each of these forms there is other music that I like more.  The quartets are quite possibly the greatest of all his music, and if I knew them better I might have nominated a favourite.  But they take a lot of knowing.  If Kirsty Young would allow me to take a box set of all the quartets as a single choice, for study… but that really is stretching the rules a bit too far.

There is one possibility which did make it on to my short list, and that is his Violin Concerto.  The problem is that there are half a dozen great violin concertos, from which I set myself to choose just one.  Among those I have had to omit, apart from Beethoven’s, are the Sibelius concerto and two by Szymanowski which conveniently fit on a single disc – that was a tempting thought indeed.  Ultimately, however, one just sneaks ahead of the others.

(4) Brahms – Violin Concerto, played by Herman Krebbers.  There are still a few musical snobs who doubt Brahms’ claim to be a truly great composer, but I am not one of them.  Brahms was one of the great Romantics and his music has the kind of intensity that I most appreciate, but he incorporates it into large scale musical structures in a way that few of the other Romantic composers truly follow.  I could easily have chosen any of Brahms’ symphonies or concertos for my desert island.  But for me it is the Violin Concerto that stands out the most strongly.

There are almost as many different recordings as of the Goldberg Variations, and some of them are very good.  Mum had an old LP with David Oistrakh as the soloist.  I don’t know what happened to it, but if it is the performance which appears on Youtube (reference below) it would indeed be hard to beat.

I have two CDs, one by the British violinist Tasmin Little and one by Herman Krebbers.  The Little CD also includes her performance of the Sibelius concerto, and that is a powerful incentive to choose her version; but in both works she is slightly underpowered.  The Krebbers almost qualifies as vintage.  It was recorded in 1973, but has aged remarkably well.  Krebbers was the concertmaster (ie leader) of the Royal Concertgebouw at Amsterdam, one of the world’s finest orchestras, and he made only a few recordings as soloist (one of the others is the Beethoven concerto, and that is the version I would have chosen).   He does not pale by comparison with any of the other performances of the concerto that I have heard, and offers just the right balance of strength and lyricism in his tone.

Unfortunately I cannot find the Krebbers performance online, but there are plenty of other good interpretations to be found.  Here is the one by Oistrakh I mentioned earlier:  www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkfgFuCUe8w.

(5) Elgar – Enigma Variations, conducted by Eugen Jochum.  This was the last of my eight to be selected.  I wanted a pure orchestral piece, and there are so many to choose from:  Scheherazade, the Planets, or Pictures at an Exhibition, for orchestral display and exuberance; one of the great Beethoven symphonies, or one of Schubert’s, probably the good tempered Fifth which I studied for O level (I can still remember the themes from all four movements and could play or write them out if demanded); or one of the later romantic symphonies, say Arnold Bax’s first (which has a memorably haunting slow movement), Atterberg’s unjustly neglected Second, William Alwyn’s or William Walton’s First, all of which I know and admire.  David would probably suggest one or more Vaughan Williams’ symphonies, and I agree that the Fourth and Sixth would not be too far behind on my list, though I do not know them particularly well.

Ultimately, however, when I thought of the Enigma Variations, I realised that they had to be my choice.  The theme itself is both characteristic and memorable, and there is above all the sublime Nimrod variation, which was also among the music we chose for Dad’s funeral.  The variations range much more widely in mood and scope than in the Goldbergs and give a vivid sense of Elgar’s circle of family and friends whom they depict.  Perhaps it is this personal aspect that gives the music its distinctive flavour.  Something of the same quality is present in Elgar’s Cello Concerto, but sadly missing from his two symphonies and the Violin Concerto, which I find overblown and uninvolving.

As for the recording, I have three:  an old LP by Adrian Boult, a more modern recording with Andrew Davis, and the Jochum recording which I prefer.  All three are good, but the Jochum really is exceptional.  Jochum, who died in 1987, was primarily known for his performances of the great German/Austrian repertoire, from Haydn to Bruckner (Mum had a collection of his Haydn symphonies, also on CDs, which I have inherited).  But he gives this Elgar masterpiece equal weight, notably in Nimrod and in the finale, while retaining a lightness of touch where appropriate.  As a bonus, the same CD includes a very fine performance of Holst’s Planets suite conducted by William Steinberg.  But I would choose Jochum’s ahead of the other interpretations regardless.

Online there are scarcely any recordings of Jochum’s to be found, certainly not this one.  Here however is a very fine Enigma recortded live at the Proms a couple of years ago:  www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKnfRpJ6f4c.

It occurs to me that some of the other pieces I’ve mentioned here may not be familiar, and they are worth knowing.  Here are some online references:

Sibelius Violin Concerto :  www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpS_u5RvMpM
Szymanowski Violin Concerto no.1 :  www.youtube.com/watch?v=iL3NmyCOiBM.
Szymanowski Violin Concerto no.2 :  www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWD-LXc-Dy8
Bax Symphony no.1 :  www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdIyF7anFeM.  The haunting second movement starts at 13’40”.
Atterberg Symphony no.2 :  www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWjOfsWJi14.  Gorgeous.
Alwyn Symphony no.1 :  www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GDQxP0rNuI.  Starts slow and quiet; stick with it!
Walton Symphony no.1 :  www.youtube.com/watch?v=exqlh5EYfQM.  The first movement in particular is truly exciting.

(Continued above)

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Desert Island Discs
20 March 2017

I don’t expect to be invited to appear on Desert Island Discs* any time soon.  But I do not see why the world should be deprived of my selection of music.  So here it is.

A few preliminary words.  Stranded on this hypothetical desert island, possibly for years, it seems wise to make a wide selection – not, for instance, eight Bach cantatas or Mozart symphonies or Beethoven sonatas, but a mix of forms and styles.  I have also cheated a bit by thinking about what else might be on the selected CD (Kirsty Young doesn’t insist on vinyl these days, I believe) as several of my chosen pieces take up only part of a standard disc.

(1) J S Bach – Goldberg Variations, played by Andrei Gavrilov (piano).  No collection, even of as few as eight discs, can be complete without something by Bach, one of the great Holy Trinity of composers (along with Mozart and Beethoven – we’ll get to them in a minute).  Bach wrote a vast quantity of music and I am familiar only with a tiny part of it:  the 48 Preludes and Fugues, the Brandenburg Concertos, French Suite No.5 (which I studied for O level), and the Goldberg Variations.

I’ve chosen the Goldbergs as much as anything for the sake of this specific performance.  Gavrilov was a pupil of the Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter, who was a masterly and idiosyncratic virtuoso of the highest rank.  Gavrilov has never quite attained the same heights but he has some of the same qualities.  This recording was made in 1992, and I believe I purchased it soon afterwards on the strength of a recommendation in Gramophone magazine.  What I particularly like is how the performance is true to the music as written, without distortion, yet gives it a highly personal, almost modern quality.

Variation form is in part an opportunity for display:  a simple tune (very simple in this case) is subjected to more and more elaborations, placing ever-increasing demands on the performer.  It can become repetitive and yet shapeless.  Gavrilov avoids the traps with a performance of ever increasing intensity, giving the full set of 30 variations a clear shape and direction.  It goes without saying that his articulation is exemplary, and the dynamics (not Bach’s own – he rarely added dynamics markings to his music) are natural and clearly defined.

There is a school of thought that Bach’s keyboard music may authentically only be performed on the harpsichord.  I do not agree.  It is unquestionable that if Bach had known the piano he would have written for it.  A piano can do everything the harpsichord can do, and more besides:  it is, for instance, far easier for the performer to emphasise the lower parts in Bach’s intricate counterpoint on the piano than with the unvarying tone of a harpsichord.  And, to be truthful, I think a little harpsichord music goes a long way, whereas I could listen to the piano all day and not be bored.

Gavrilov’s performance can be found at www.youtube.com/watch?v=758SDhCAKOU, then www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZtlwU8L7Ew.  The slow tune, with which it begins, is very ordinary, but what Bach does with it in the variations is not.

(2) Mozart – Clarinet Concerto, played by Benny Goodman.  Mozart is as much a sine qua non as Bach, but what to choose?  There is the Piano Concerto in A (K.414) which I learned to play when I was a teenager.  There is the Requiem, his last (and unfinished) masterpiece, which I sang, as a member of the Hurst Green Singers, just a few years ago.  There are other concertos, symphonies, operas, sonatas.

But the Clarinet Concerto is special.  It was his last big orchestral work.  The clarinet was newly-invented and it is a token of his absolute genius that he immediately grasped its potential.  Even today there is no other clarinet music to equal it (though Mozart’s own Clarinet Quintet comes close).  And the slow movement contains some of the most exquisitely beautiful, poignant music ever written by anyone anywhere.

The Benny Goodman recording was one of the first LPs we bought for our new record player back in the late 1960s.  Goodman was a jazz clarinettist of great distinction who in this recording showed himself just as much at home in classical music.  We chose the slow movement to be played at Dad’s funeral, so this music has a personal significance for me.  The recording (on LP or CD) also includes the Clarinet Quintet, so with this selection I get two for the price of one.  A valuable little cheat.

The performance can be heard online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY6vLmjUAeI.  Unfortunately the sound reproduction isn’t great.

(3) Chopin – Études, played by Boris Berezovsky.  I was already learning some of Chopin’s simpler pieces (there are one or two) when I was still with my first piano teacher, Miss Zalud.  When I was 11 she told Mum I had progressed beyond her ability to teach and I was passed on to Mrs Eva Clark, who – after Mum – was the second most important influence on my music.  But that’s another story.

I have always been attracted by two particular aspects of Chopin:  his use of chromatic harmony for expressive purposes, and his virtuosity.  As an example of the chromaticism see this performance of his E minor prelude, which was also one of the first I learned:  www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHGHhYZCIQI.  For the virtuosity, consider the B minor scherzo in this performance by the young British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor:  www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGCWmnDaRc4.

The scherzo, again, was on one of the first LPs we ever owned and I was fascinated by it.  I remember an occasion when Stan Crouch, my music teacher at the Liverpool Institute in the third and fourth forms (ages 13-15), invited us to name a piece of piano music which he would then play for us on the spot.  I named this piece and he played it – not as fast as Grosvenor, but still he could scarcely have done anything better to earn our respect.  Sadly he left after just two years.  If he had stayed I might have added music to my other A level subjects.

Anyway.  As with Bach and Mozart there is a wide range of pieces to choose from, but to my mind Chopin’s music reaches its highest peak in the two sets of Études for piano.  Strictly speaking they amount to 24 different pieces of music; but these days, virtually always on CD and in concert as often as not, they are performed as a single work, so I do not think I am cheating by treating them as such.

There are more than 80 different recordings of the Études currently available.  I own two:  one by Vladimir Ashkenazy, which is absolutely free of mannerisms and faithful to the music but ever so slightly lacking in excitement, and one by Boris Berezovsky which is occasionally a bit too mannered for my taste (the tune ever so slightly out of synch with the accompaniment, a quirk of style which was mysteriously fashionable at one time) but which is absolutely riveting from first to last.  No surprise which I would prefer.

Berezovsky’s performance is at www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ0M4_7wwYU.

(Continued above)

* : For Australians:  Desert Island Discs is a long-running BBC radio programme in which well-known “castaways” are invited to choose the eight discs they would most like to have with them if they were marooned on a desert island.  The current presenter is Kirsty Young.

——————–
Denial
17 March 2017

Beware : spoilers

In an internet age it is, at first glance, democratic to say that everyone is entitled to their own opinion. That is surely true. It is however a fatal step to then claim that all opinions are equal. Some opinions are backed by fact. Others are not. And those that are not backed by fact are worth considerably less than those that are.

These words might have been written in an article about climate change deniers, or Brexiteers, or the alt-right at large.  But they were not.

The words come from a Guardian article by the writer David Hare about his screenplay for the film Denial (www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/03/david-hare-nothing-but-the-truth-about-a-holocaust-denial).  The film was given a limited release in the UK in January and I went to see it at Oxted cinema (“showing for one night only”) yesterday.

Denial is about a court case.  An American professor of modern history, Deborah Lipstadt, published a book Denying the Holocaust in which she described the British historian David Irving as a dangerous Holocaust denier.  Irving sued Lipstadt and her publishers Penguin Books in the UK courts, where it was incumbent on the defence to prove the truth of the alleged libel.  (In the US it would have been the other way round:  the complainant would have to prove that what was written was both false and damaging.)  Penguin and Lipstadt defended the case, and won.  The final judgement utterly condemns Irving not just as a racist, anti-semite and supporter of the far right, but as an untrustworthy historian.

A key strategy of the defence was to focus entirely on Irving.  Lipstadt was not called as a witness.  Nor were any Holocaust survivors.  This deprived Irving, who conducted his own case, of the opportunity to cross-examine them, in the course of which the focus of the trial would have been decisively shifted and they, the sufferers, would have become victims twice over.  Much of the drama in the film comes from Lipstadt’s initial incredulity, then resentment, of this strategy, as she wants to defend her own words and attest to the historical truth of the Holocaust.  Yet by the end the strategy has been totally vindicated, and in a subsequent press conference she is able to give acknowledgement to the survivors of an ordeal that was beyond words.

There are many fine incidental moments in the film:  when Lipstadt is first introduced to the peculiarities of the British legal system; when she finds that her legal team have already mapped out a strategy without her participation; when Irving is induced, by playing on his vanity, to accept a trial by judge alone, without a jury; when Lipstadt, at a Jewish dinner party, is directly asked whether she has fallen under the spell of her solicitor, Anthony Julius, who had previously acted for Princess Diana in her divorce and had a reputation as a lady-killer; when, at the same dinner-party, she is advised to settle the case and keep her head down (a traditional strategy of minority Jewish communities over many centuries).

The performances are uniformly excellent.  Rachel Weisz makes Lipstadt both intelligent, and passionate.  Andrew Scott is equally good as the intense, intellectual strategist Julius, whose sheer brainpower is seductive.  Timothy Spall has won special plaudits as the self-congratulating, sinister and mendacious Irving – an especially difficult role to bring off, as any element of caricature might itself have been a libel.  But for my money the outstanding performance is by Tom Wilkinson as the barrister Richard Rampton, who initially seems like an old buffer who drinks too much, but who learns German in the course of a year so as to study the key historical documents in their original language, and who proves to be more than a match for the intellectually vain Irving.  It is Wilkinson who gives us the most fully rounded character and is, ultimately, the star of the show.

There are equally fine actors in supporting roles:  Alex Jennings as the trial judge, Mark Gatiss (tuned down two or three notches from his usual hamminess) and John Sessions as expert witnesses, and above all the brilliant Harriet Walter as a Holocaust victim who pleads for the opportunity to tell her story.

The film is necessarily static:  we see Lipstadt/Weisz jogging a couple of times, and that’s about it.  Yet it is not just talking heads.  The confrontations, first among the defence team over strategy, then in the courtroom as Irving is mercilessly shredded, are as intense as any action movie.  David Hare is a fine playwright as well as scriptwriter, and it is true that much of Denial might work equally well as a stage play.  There is however a key sequence actually filmed in the ruins of Auschwitz, respectfully done (no music or tricky camerawork), which could not possibly be reproduced on stage.  The film would not lose too much if watched on a small screen, and I noticed that the BBC are listed as co-producers.  But I am glad to have seen it in a cinema where the large screen and the absence of distractions add to the intensity.

According to observers at the time, much of the trial was excruciatingly dull (as extended legal proceedings often are).  Hare makes a fine job of selecting verbatim from the transcript and, in the courtroom, invents nothing.  A key moment comes when the judge asks Rampton:  does Irving honestly believe his own claims?  If he does, then he cannot be lying, as Lipstadt had asserted in her book; his views, though mistaken, would be held in good faith.  This would have been fatal to the defence case.

Rampton counters this with an argument by analogy.  Imagine a waiter in a restaurant who frequently gives his customers the wrong change.  If he is guilty of honest mistakes, sometimes they will be in his favour, sometimes in the customer’s.  If his errors are always and only in his own favour, they cannot plausibly be mistakes:  they must be deliberate.  Rampton’s meticulous deconstruction of Irving’s mistakes, all tending in the same direction, undermines the possibility they were all made in good faith.

There were only a dozen or so people in the audience last night, and that seemed to me to be a pity; not just for the loss that the cinema must have taken, but for a political message which thus went almost unheeded.  As Lipstadt says in David Hare’s screenplay, certain things are true. Elvis is dead. The icecaps are melting. And the Holocaust did happen.

We might add some other truths.  Brexit will not save this country £350 million a week.  Carbon dioxide emissions are a primary cause of global warming (denied by Trump appointee Scott Pruitt).  And there was no Bowling Green massacre.  Some of these truths matter more than others, but they have this in common:  they are not matters of opinion.

An odd thing has happened in the last few weeks.  Lawyers have become popular:  unlikely saviours of liberal democracy.  The British Supreme Court required the Government to obtain Parliament’s express approval before activating Article 50 (Parliament’s subsequent craven behaviour is not the lawyers’ fault).  American courts have twice struck down executive orders by the President that have breached constitutional safeguards, though Republican politicians do seem almost as pusillanimous as our own in exercising their own powers of restraint.  Irving vs Lipstadt was another such occasion, and for that reason is worth celebrating.

——————–
Sherlock and Elementary
13 March 2017

I think I must have started to read the Sherlock Homes stories when I was no more than eleven or twelve years old.  We had an omnibus edition of the short stories, a plainly bound red hardback book of some 1300 pages:  it is now, somewhat the worse for wear, on the bookshelves at our house in the Lake District.  I can be fairly sure about the date because a BBC television adaptation with Douglas Wilmer and Nigel Stock was first broadcast in 1965, and I remember watching.  Wilmer was a good Holmes; Stock, however, made Watson into a buffoon, which is how Nigel Bruce had played him in the movies (with Basil Rathbone, famously, as Holmes) but is not really true to the stories.

It was quite a surprise to read recently how critical Wilmer later was of deficiencies in the scripts, lack of rehearsal time and other flaws.  None of these problems was apparent to me at the time.  Either I knew the stories already, or I was inspired to read them by the show.

Wilmer was, of course, outdone by Jeremy Brett in the Granada television series first broadcast between 1984 and 1994.  Brett is widely considered to be the definitive Holmes; David Burke, and later Edward Hardwicke, played Watson as a competent (if somewhat unimaginative) sidekick, much closer to Conan Doyle’s original creation; and the whole series is remarkably faithful to the original stories.  This was one of the high-water marks of Granada TV during a period when it produced several other high quality costume dramas including The Jewel in the Crown and Brideshead Revisited.  Other principal roles are well cast, with Colin Jeavons as Lestrade, Charles Gray as Mycroft and many notable guest stars.  The sub-Elgarian theme tune, with its solo violin, sets the mood.  The scripts, evocation of Victorian England and overall production are of equally high quality.  We have a DVD box set of the full series, also now up in the Lake District; they are still worth watching and have not dated at all.

However, modern television producers seem unable to leave well alone – or perhaps they have been intimidated by the excellence of Brett and Granada into applying their own spin to the original stories and characters.  Consequently we have the BBC’s recent Sherlock, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, and CBS’s Elementary, with Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu, both set in the present day.  I have been watching both series, thanks to Amazon’s Lovefilm DVD rental service (and to Georgina’s recommendation of Elementary).

Conan Doyle would not turn in his grave.  He famously didn’t care much for his own creation and was quite happy for others to do what they will with the characters.  But it is striking (and perhaps just as well, given that m’learned friend must have been on the lookout for any signs of plagiarism) that two different groups of producers, writers and actors have come up with two such different reinterpretations.  They have different strengths and weaknesses, but in a nutshell I do not think that either has matched Brett and Granada.

For a while, Sherlock created “appointment TV” of a kind that is increasingly rare when streaming and other services make it so easy to watch at a time of your own choosing.  I, for one, made a point of watching when it was first broadcast, and for about half of that first show I was totally riveted.  Cumberbatch captured the brilliance, the impatience, the focus, the charisma of Holmes, fully equalling Brett in this regard; Freeman was almost equally good as Watson, a foil to the main character but with his own personality, neither cypher nor stooge.  The production, with an innovative use of text on screen to show Holmes’ thinking and stylish photography tuned in to 21st century London, brought a fresh glamour.

Then, about half way through that first episode, it went completely off the rails.  Up to that point the central mystery was as perplexing as any of Conan Doyle’s, and Holmes’ observations and reasoning, obvious only when explained, were fully true to the character.  But at the point when the story narrows down towards a resolution it became preposterous.  The crime made no sense, the method and motivations ditto.  It was as if the scriptwriters either boxed themselves into a corner or simply lost interest.

The characters are important for Sherlock Holmes, but the stories are important too. They are intriguing; they give Holmes a justification, and a relevance.  Perhaps Conan Doyle was over-fond of plots threatening national catastrophe, or villainies whose roots lay in the mysterious East, which we would now regard with a more sceptical eye.  But, in their own terms, they made sense.  Sherlock’s first episode didn’t; and, alas, most of what has followed has similarly lacked any plausibility.

Of Sherlock’s many flaws, perhaps the greatest is how his nemesis Moriarty is portrayed.  Brett’s Moriarty was played by Eric Porter with a deep, saturnine malevolence, properly sinister and a perfect antagonist for Holmes.  Cumberbatch’s Moriarty is played by Andrew Scott, a fine actor, with more mercurial flippancy than malice.  It is impossible to believe in him as a criminal mastermind.  In the final rooftop confrontation, where he prises open all Sherlock’s insecurities, you are left thinking:  where did all that come from?  Moriarty should be scary, but Scott’s Moriarty is just weird.

Elementary is set in New York City.  Jonny Lee Miller, another fine British actor, plays a Holmes exiled from Britain after his drug habit overcame him; his struggle to stay clean and the effects on his personality are a key plot point.  In this version Watson is initially his “sober companion,” paid to supervise his recovery, and is played by Lucy Liu.

The idea of a female Watson is neat, but it is a shame that Liu is such a poor actor.  To be sure, Miller’s Holmes is hyper-kinetic, with sudden mood swings and surges of energy, a reckless insistence on saying what he thinks regardless of tact or conventional politeness, and every feeling plain on his face; Watson needs to stand in contrast.  But this Watson is just dull.  As the series progresses she starts to learn from Holmes and develops into a partner in his detective work, but this is plainly just a writers’ contrivance, not a natural development of the character Liu has shown us.  Miller is not quite a match for Cumberbatch, but he is not far off.  Liu is light-years behind Freeman.

CBS has produced Elementary in five seasons so far, each of 24 episodes.  I have reached the end of series 2 and so far, though the quality is variable, there hasn’t been a single dud.  This Holmes assists the New York police as a consulting detective and, apart from Liu, my main complaint with the series would be that, simply as a detective, Holmes is not special enough.  The writers have given him hyperaesthesia, so he notices things (especially smells) that other people can’t, whereas Conan Doyle’s detective noticed things that other people overlooked.  So his reasoning is not, in fact, “elementary;” it is special.

That said, coming up with new brilliancies of reasoning for each of 120 episodes must be brutally hard.  But the ever-present risk, that Elementary devolves into yet another police procedural, with Holmes as a standard-template TV detective and his relationship with his sidekick as a soapy sub-plot, has so far been averted.  And there have been some standout episodes, not least those graced by Natalie Dormer as Jamie Moriarty, who in this version is Holmes’ former lover and continuing obsession.  They are well matched, and their encounters strike sparks.  When Holmes eventually turns the tables it comes, not as a surprise, but as a catharsis:  it was a worthy contest.  Moriarty has not apparently been seen since the second season, but all the fan sites crave her reappearance, and with good reason.

Finally, Elementary has one of the most imaginative opening title sequences I have seen for any show.  Have a look:  www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0j_hA6aKQU.  No solo violin, though.

The Interloper (aka David):

I read many of the same books as Mark when I was a boy.  Literally: I remember the two volumes of Sherlock Holmes stories, one of which had the four full-length books in a single volume, and the other being the omnibus edition about which Mark writes.

I too have watched both Elementary and Sherlock.  I was rather put off the former when one of our “adoptive daughters” (long-standing female friends of the boys, who will never be their girlfriends) said that she thought that I was just like Jonny Lee Miller – or was it the other way around?  Anyway, I couldn’t stand the cardboard of Lucy Liu.  “Sherlock”, on the other hand, I liked, at least initially.  I thought the translation to the modern era, with mobile ‘phones and the internet, was well done, and the character of Holmes as a high-functioning autistic was well realised by Benedict Cumberbach.

However like Mark I felt there was a steep downhill slide, possibly with the exception of the episode with the courtesan (whose name I forget as I write this entry – Mark, help me!).  The transformation of Holmes into a quasi-Bond is what our mother would have declared a “TRAVESTY” – as she did once when watching a particularly bad Hollywood adaptation of a Jane Austen novel.  That’s another story, though …..

Irene Adler

… was the dominatrix, and I agree that the episode in which she appeared, the first of the second series, was the best that Sherlock has given us.  She is a character in the first ever of the original Holmes stories, in which she is an opera singer blackmailing the Bohemian nobleman who has jilted her.  According to Conan Doyle, she was always regarded thereafter by Holmes as the woman.  Sherlock’s producers have sexed her up quite a lot, but in this particular case it works.

I’m glad you agree wih me about Liu.  Wouldn’t like to think I was just indulging a prejudice.  –  Mark

——————–
A birthday weekend
9 March 2017

My friend Trevor celebrated his sixtieth birthday with a country house party last weekend.  I was one of twenty-four guests who gathered at West Dean College in Sussex for an overnight stay complete with dinner, breakfast and a bracing Sunday morning walk, followed by lunch at a nearby pub.  I avoided the walk (too hilly); for what I did instead, see below.

West Dean House was previously the residence of Edward James (1907-1984), who inherited a fortune (earned by his grandfather in American timber, mining and trade) and spent it on supporting the arts.  James was, most significantly, a patron of the Surrealists, including Dali and Magritte, but he had a wide range of other artistic contacts, from Aldous Huxley to Bertolt Brecht.  He was also a (very) minor poet and novelist in his own right.  He commissioned the French composer François Poulenc to set four of his poems to music:  the finished work, Sécheresses, has been recorded twice, and may be found on YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=otPNr6wD1J4).  Unfortunately it is in French which I can’t follow, and I have been unable to find a translation anywhere, so I don’t know what the poems are about, and the music doesn’t help much.  Sécheresse means dryness or drought, which is not much of a clue either.

In 1964 James handed over the West Dean Estate, including the House, to the Edward James Foundation.  In 1971 the Foundation established West Dean College as a centre for the study of conservation, arts, crafts, writing, gardening and music.  The College now provides postgraduate training in conservation and the creative arts, and runs short courses for enthusiasts on topics as varied as blacksmithing and bookbinding.  Most of James’ extensive collection of artworks was sold after his death, but some were retained at the House, including one of Dali’s lobster telephones and his Mae West Lips Sofa, and a striking portrait of Edith Sitwell by Pavel Tchelitchew.

We were given an excellent tour of the House and a shorter tour of the Gardens – shorter because it rained!  The House staff lent us some splendid red umbrellas but it was pretty miserable out of doors.  So all we saw were the walled gardens and large Victorian greenhouses, and a small part of the very extensive lawns, carpeted with snowdrops and purple crocuses.  In the walled gardens is an orchard where frames have been placed around the trees so they can be trained into shapes (goblet and pyramid) that are easily accessible for fruit picking.  Very clever, but it made me wince.  Trees as contortionists?  I can’t think they enjoy it much.

The dinner was a very splendid affair:  all twenty-four of us seated round a single long table.  I had Trevor’s 22-year old daughter Alice on my right and my friend Tom’s wife Christine on my left.  Much of the conversation at the table was about Trump and Brexit (we were unanimously against them both), and we spent much of our time speculating about what happens next.  The consensus was that Trump will eventually be impeached, either for his Russian entanglements or some financial impropriety, or for covering them up, which is of course what ultimately brought down Nixon.  No such unanimity about Brexit:  most of us think it is now unavoidable, but there are still a few who think public and poliical opinion will change in time to save us.  There was a good deal of schadenfreude over Theresa May:  a classic case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for..

Trevor had asked us for our menu selections beforehand, and the staff delivered our choices to us without a hitch.  One slight drawback was that the kitchens are on the far side of the House from the grand dining room, so the food arrived quite slowly.  But with such good company it scarcely mattered.  And when I had breakfast the following morning, my full English (minus black pudding and hash browns, which I don’t consider to be English anyway) arrived under a beautiful bell-shaped plate cover, one of those elegancies you usually only see in movies.

However, apart from the company, the main pleasure of the weekend so far as I was concerned was to play the College’s three beautiful grand pianos:  two Bechsteins and a Yamaha.  One of the Bechsteins was showing signs of use, with a shrill treble, a growly bass and (by comparison) a rather underpowered middle range.  The second Bechstein, however, was in a much better condition and had a consistently gentle tone which reminded of Uncle John’s old Bechstein upright, though stronger and in much better condition.  The Yamaha is a modern concert piano with a strong tone and a wide dynamic range, rather like a small Steinway.

It was interesting to play my own music on the different instruments and consider what adjustments, in touch and especially in pedalling, were needed to achieve the right effect.  On my own Challen upright I have got into the habit of using the sustaining pedal to compensate for its bright one and relative lack of resonance.   But the Bechstein’s soft tone and the Yamaha’s responsiveness require much less pedalling and I had to adjust.  A piano like the Yamaha would be completely unsuitable for most living rooms (at West Dean it is kept in the concert room), but I was rather envious of the second Bechstein.  At any rate, once I had worked out what to do the music sounded fine, and one or two of the house guests were quite complimentary, especially when I told them what I was playing.

On the subject of music, I’m pleased to say that I have made quite a lot of progress over the last few weeks with my Eight Songs for December (see blog on 25 January).  I have completed fair copies of The Christmas Gardener and Drear-Nighted December for voices and piano, and of To A Snowflake and The Old Year for piano solo – the full versions of which will be my next task.  I have decided that alongside the song cycle I will prepare a set of piano versions, excluding This is the Month and Drear-Nighted December which – because the music is repeated for each stanza without much variation – would be rather dull played by a solo piano.

One other little piece of news is that my PSA test (see blogs on 1 March and 10 February) had a satisfactory outcome:  my PSA is down below 0.1, and the oncologist, whom I saw today, was very positive about my prognosis.

——————–
Guy Gavriel Kay
5 March 2017

I am currently a quarter of the way through Guy Gavriel Kay’s first stand-alone novel, Tigana, and when I finish it I will have read, or re-read, all his published fiction within the last twelve months, except his most recent novel which has not yet appeared in paperback.

Kay writes fantasy novels, but of a very particular kind which almost no-one else that I know of has attempted, let alone mastered.  True, his first three books are a trilogy set exclusively (well, almost) in a standard fantasyland:  in other words, the model established by Tolkien and followed by so many other second- or third-rate fantasy writers.  Kay seems to have been determined to get the whole Tolkien bug out of his system in one go.  The Fionavar Tapestry (comprising The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire and The Darkest Road) contains just about every fantasy standby you ever heard of, and then some:  a Dark Lord and the Wolf Lord who is his sidekick; a disinherited prince and a beautiful princess; heroic warriors and despicable traitors; gods and goddesses who intervene in mortal affairs; wizards, shamans and priestesses; elves, dwarves, wolves and giants (no orcs or goblins, but Fionavar’s urgach and svart alfar are a close equivalent); a magic cauldron, a magic horn, a magic tree and a magic ring; nomadic tribes and the Wild Hunt; Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot, who all appear in person; a sea monster, a unicorn and a demon; and, of course, dragons.

It is a heady brew, and Kay barely keeps it all under control.  The plot fits together neatly enough, but it all seems just a little profligate; his later books are much more economical.  Perhaps because of this profligacy, the characterisation is also generally sketchy, and the tone swings uneasily from mundane to high-romantic.

From Tigana onwards, however, Kay steps away from the standard fantasy model.  Each of his later novels except one (Ysabel, of which more later) has been set on an almost-Earth in a specific historical period.  The names are changed, the geography is adjusted, and the specific events are imaginary, but the novels are absolutely rooted in their time and place.  Here’s a list:

Tigana – renaissance Italy
A Song for Arbonne – mediaeval Provence and the Albigensian Crusade
The Lions of Al-Rassan – the reconquest of Moorish Spain
The Sarantine Mosaic (comprising Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors) – Justinian’s Byzantium
The Last Light of the Sun – the Viking invasions of Saxon England
Under Heaven – China under the Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD)
River of Stars – China under the Song Dynasty (960–1279 AD)

In each case the historical background is meticulously researched, and the story is crafted to fit that background, often drawing on elements from real myth and legend.  Each book acknowledges help given by historians and scholars whose work has created a frame for Kay’s imagination to fill.

The imagined settings give Kay more storytelling freedom, but he does not overload his plots with magic or the supernatural.  He left all the fantasy baggage in Fionavar.  Magic plays a part in Tigana, which features a bitter rivalry between two despotic sorcerers and the struggle to depose them both; but after Tigana the supernatural elements, though always present, are almost incidental.  Religion is a significant factor in some of his plots, but as a driver of the characters’ behaviour, not as a source of supernatural power.

Kay’s stories after the Fionavar Trilogy are not epic fantasies à la Tolkien.  There is no Good vs Evil.  Their protagonists typically include figures from exalted, middle-class and humble backgrounds whose lives become interwoven.  He has a particular liking for doctors and musicians – by now he must be quite an expert on what mediaeval and Renaissance medicine could, or could not, achieve.  The principal figure in the Sarantium books is a mosaicist, as unheroic a figure as you could wish.

I suspect Kay glosses the backgrounds a bit to give his female protagonists more scope, though he is generally quite realistic about the roles played by women in these societies and he has no female warriors.  From Tigana onwards he mostly avoids caricature villains:  his characters are driven, brought into conflict and sometimes betrayed by understandable human motives and emotions.  When combat occurs, between armies and between individuals, it seems carefully realistic and yet properly heroic.  The Sarantium books contain almost no combat at all:  there are palace coups, intrigues and assassinations, but warfare takes place off-stage.  Yet they also contain two of his finest action scenes, in the shape of two chariot races, meticulously imagined and described, which far surpass anything in Ben-Hur or since.

A quality which is present in all Kay’s books, including the Fionavar Trilogy, is the sheer storytelling.  His plots are often quite intricate, with large casts of characters and frequent changes of viewpoint, yet they invariably mesh together to reach a satisfying conclusion.  He is capable of the concluding twist – when I re-read Arbonne, I had completely forgotten how the denouement rounds off the book, so I had the pleasure of its surprises all over again – but he doesn’t overdo it.  And at the service of the storytelling is his way with words.  Simply through how he writes, Kay is able to send shivers down your spine.  The nuances of syle which achieve this effect are hard to pin down, but they are powerful:  the climaxes of his books evoke feelings of joy and melancholy which few other novelists in any genre can match.

One of Kay’s later books is missing from the list above, and that is Ysabel, which is set in present-day Provence.  Ysabel is a timeslip novel in which an ancient, unfinished story continues to play out.  It reminds me a good deal of Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, though it is less spooky and more exciting than Garner, and magic is much more on display – more so than in any of Kay’s books since Tigana.  The language in Ysabel, though still characteristic of his style, is plainer and simpler than elsewhere, and the protagonist is a fifteen-year old boy, so the book may qualify as young adult fiction, though to the best of my knowledge it has never been marketed as such.

I don’t think Ysabel is entirely typical of Kay’s work.  As such it may not be an ideal introduction, though on the other hand its themes and story are less dense and thus more accessible.  Ysabel won several prizes for its author, and I must be careful not to damn with faint praise:  it is just a bit different.  I have lent my copy of Ysabel to Georgina and she hasn’t given up on it yet, which is good.  I just hope she makes it to the payoff at the end.

My absolute favourite of Kay’s books is Al-Rassan, but Arbonne and Sarantium are close runners-up.  The China books are not, I think, his best work, but perhaps he felt he needed to stretch himself.  His very latest book, Children of Earth and Sky, returns to middle Europe, so perhaps Kay has himself recognised that he feels more comfortable in a broadly European milieu.  Some critics have also suggested that his distinctive style has devolved into a set of mannerisms, and though I don’t agree with this I can see what is meant.  Perhaps he needs to try a little less hard.

I do not want to attempt a potted review of all the books.  Reviews aplenty can be found online at Amazon, Goodreads and elsewhere.  Some of the books have good Wiki entries (but beware spoilers).  The Guy Gavriel Kay website www.brightweavings.com contains references to works of scholarship that have been written about him, as they might be written about any other significant modern author.  I am sure I read somewhere that The Fionavar Tapestry has been used as a set text for school examinations in Canada, where Kay, who is Canadian, is something close to a national hero.

Apart from his fiction, Kay is also a poet.  You might guess as much from the splashes of poetry which appear in the novels, definitely a class above the doggerel you can find in other fantasy fiction.  On Amazon you can read the first few pages of his book of poems Beyond This Dark House, which gives a taste.  It’s worth a look.

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An interesting day
1 March 2017

I woke today a bit earlier than usual, at half past seven, just in time to quash the alarm clock before it rang.  The alarm in my head still seems to be in working order.  This was in aid of an early appointment at the Health Centre for a blood test, to determine my PSA level in time for when I see the oncologist next week.  I think they do blood tests early in the day so that patients who are required to fast beforehand are not put to too much inconvenience.  Fasting is not, in fact, required for a PSA test, but I didn’t want to make a fuss about it.

Whether this is NHS routine I don’t know, but the Health Centre assigns one of its nurses specifically to do blood tests.  I imagine this duty is rotated among the nurses, as it would surely be intolerably boring to have nothing to look forward to but administering blood tests all day, every day.  The advantage is that the nurses get to be very good at it.  When they say *just a sharp scratch,” it is literally true.

And I have come to be rather blasé about the whole process.  During the period I was taking immunosuppressants for my eczema, a blood test was needed every quarter, to ensure that my white cell count remained at an acceptable level.  That’s stopped now, of course, since cancer patients need to have their immune systems working at full throttle, whatever the other inconveniences.  But in any case I have become quite used to the routine.  I still can’t bear to look at the cannula, though.

Later in the morning I caught the fast train up from Oxted to London Bridge, and then shuttled on to Waterloo.  There was a period last year when this journey was not possible, as the Waterloo-bound trains were not stopping at London Bridge while the Thameslink programme improvement works were under way.  I still used the London Bridge route on occasion, but the convenient, fast route to Waterloo and the West End (Charing Cross) was not available.  It’s good to have it back.

While the project has been under way, I have been peering out of the train window on every journey to see what progress has been made since last time.  There was a long period during which it was interesting, but not at all obvious, to puzzle out how it would look when the works were finished..  But in the last couple of months the final layout has taken shape.  The flyover which is to carry the Thameslink trains across the South Eastern main line has been completed.  The realigned tracks for the Thameslink and South Eastern routes have not yet been fully laid or joined up, but the track beds are all in place.  South Eastern trains are using temporary trackwork, and Thameslink has been diverted to avoid London Bridge altogether, but that should not be for much longer.

About half of the new concourse under the viaduct arches at London Bridge has been opened, though there is still construction work of some kind taking place on the other half.  From being an unwelcoming, draughty dump, London Bridge is gradually being transformed into one of the most spacious, convenient and well organised main line stations in central London.  The arrangement is similar to St Pancras International and Liverpool Street stations, with a main concourse below the tracks and escalator access to the platforms.

Every time I travel this way, I think what a massive feat of project management it has been.  There were some well-publicised problems early on while the new timetable, designed to make best use of reduced capacity while the works were carried out, bedded in; on a couple of days angry crowds gathered on the old concourse at London Bridge, police were called and there were questions in Parliament.  But once the teething problems was sorted out, the project appears to have run smoothly.  When you think of the challenge involved in keeping a heavily-used commuter railway going while a major engineering project is undertaken alongside, involving successive changes to trackwork, signalling and timetables, it really has been an astonishing feat.  Network Rail comes in for a lot of public criticism, much of it justified, but it has its successes too, and London Bridge (touch wood! – the project isn’t finished just yet) looks like being one of them.

At Waterloo I met Michelle, and we walked across Hungerford Bridge towards the West End.  After a brief reconnaissance around Leicester Square, where there are several slighly tired-looking Italian restaurants, Michelle decided she wanted a pub lunch, and we ended up in the Bear & Ragged Staff on Charing Cross Road just south of Leicester Square tube station.  I had expected everywhere to be crowded with tourists, but for whatever reason there seemed to be fewer than normal, and the pub was more than half-empty when we arrived, though it did fill up a bit later.

The Bear & Ragged Staff turned out to be pretty good – recommended, so long as you don’t want haute cuisine.  Michelle had fishcakes and salad; I had gammon, egg and chips.  However, if you go there, speak clearly to the barman.  I ordered a half-pint of cider for Michelle and a half of Nicholson’s Pale Ale (which was, by the way, very good) for me, but Michelle ended up with a pint.  I think it was an honest mistake, but don’t mutter.  I was astonished to see that the drinks menu included 21 different types of gin, though it did indicate that not all may be available on any given day.  I would not have guessed that so many different types even existed.  There were also five different types of tonic.  I didn’t count the varieties of bitter lemon.

After lunch we went to the National Gallery to see an exhibition of Australian Impressionists.  Really, it should be John who writes about paintings, not me, but the exhibition closes at the end of March and he would need to make a special trip down to London if he wants to see it.  Probably not worth his while for a really small exhibition – at a guess, barely 40 paintings (including several very small ones) in just two rooms.  But they are very good paintings, if not of the first rank at least high on the second.  The larger paintings easily pass my test of whether I would want them on my living room wall.

The show features works by just four artists:  Tom Roberts, Charles Conder, Arthur Streeton and John Russell.  I had never heard of any of them.  The first three are near-contemporaries of the first French impressionists, by whom you might think they were strongly influenced, though the historical record says otherwise.  Streeton’s Golden Summer was the first painting by an Australian-born artist to be exhibited at the Royal Academy, and was awarded an honourable mention at the Paris Salon in 1892.  Russell is a little later.  He came to Europe, corresponded with Van Gogh and worked with Monet, though his later pictures in particular remind me a bit of Cézanne.

Russell and Streeton are probably the most considerable figures among the four.  Here are two examples of their work, both of which are in the exhibition.

The Interloper (aka David):Arthur Streeton is my favourite, and IM(nv*)HO a much under-rated artist.  He walked around the lower Blue Mountains (where I live) at the turn of the 18th/19th Centuries and painted some marvellous pictures at that time.  My absolute favourite is “Fire’s On!”, which was painted very near to where we live.

It is a picture of the first Glenbrook Tunnel being built.  It was bored through the escarpment to carry the railway up the hill without having to use the Lapstone Zig-Zag, which delayed trains considerably.

Actually the details of where and why it was painted are not as important as the way in which Streeton captures the colours of the Australian bush – the pale browns of the landscape and the almost-impossible-to-describe particular blue of the Australian sky in summer.

I hope it was in the exhibition which Mark saw.

There are much more popular Australian artists, (Nolan, Roberts, Russell, et. al.) but none as talented or who produce such wonderful art, I believe ….

Streeton also painted “The Purple Noon’s Transparent Might”, which is a landscape including the area where Nepean Hospital (where I currently work) is now situated.  We used to give a framed copy of this picture to each departing Advanced Trainee at their leaving party.

The title is an obscure Shelley reference, I am told.

* = not very

Post-postscript

Yes, Fire’s On is in the exhibition, and I agree that it is very good.  I thought it was your tunnel, but I wasn’t sure.  I’m glad you have added it to the blog.  But I think the Redfern picture is very good too – I particularly like how all the detail is in the background while the foreground is expressively empty.  Michelle and I both commented on how Streeton’s paintings capture the quality of the Australian sky.  The Purple Noon… is also in the exhibition and we both liked it a lot, though to my eye it barely qualifies as impressionist:  Michelle said some of his paintings reminded her of Constable, I said Corot.  Not that it really matters. – Mark