Sumptuous new book to buy:
 Night and Day

My first Chapbook of poetry and imagery is on release to view, browse - and,  if you'd like, to buy.  You are warmly invited to check it out at: http://www.photoboxgallery.com/8799

“The living”, it has been said, “are dead people on holiday”.  This book is a ten-year testimony to one man’s living death, concluding in acceptance and at least the chance of a return to hope, love and a new life.   The poetry here pulls apart the inner sadness of encroaching age and irredeemable failure, with a candour which for most of us has to be kept stifled, silent, perhaps barely even thought.

But this is a book which surmounts despair; and for the narrator here as much as for anyone else: if these are the ashes of a failed life, they are the ashes from which a phoenix can rise.  And yes, someday it will.

Stephen Jackson’s fusion of his own poetry with digital imagery has been acclaimed as “hauntingly beautiful...tight, life-affirming”.  His account has been called “fascinating and amazing”: with a texture of writing comparable to John Donne’s. 

 

TO VIEW THE FULL "DEAD PEOPLE ON HOLIDAY"

1) Follow this link: http://londondigitalart.spaces.live.com
2) Click on the album displayed at the top right, "Dead People on Holiday".  This will show you the page mock-ups - but not in much detail.  So now:
3) See PUBLIC FOLDERS ("Skydrive") immediately below that collection of layouts.  Click open "Dead People on Holiday (images and poetry)".   Click on each spread (page) to view it.  Click again on this view to see it enlarged to full screen size.   

...And yes: I am looking for a publisher 

[TalentDatabase.com] You've just been featured!

From: TalentDatabase.com

Sent: 18 March 2008 13:46:06

To: stephen_jacks58@hotmail.com

Congratulations.

......

...See me now on:

http://thedb.com/londondigitalart and http://londondigitalart.spaces.live.com/

DAWN

What can it mean, to be alive?

Ask the bird – that sings in adversity

In loveless Autumn's withered, immemorial gardens

Where land (larval, leathery, newly dead), exhales.

The air is as sombre as opal, unlit and undiscovered.

A silent cat, with serpentine eyes, stalks;

...And still the bird sings.

MUD LOVE

Love should be like a hatchling butterfly:

Tearing free from worn-out skin,

Bursting with new blood its once-crushed wings, and

Ready to surpass the sky.

But middle age brings whiskery lust, for us

Or feathery, like dust - gristly with intimacies:

Mumbled in judicious teashop undertones, to a furtive

Crumpling of nylon macs, or pitched against a public

Squall of brats.  

Either way: you know you ought not to be there,

Caught in the light. You ought to know better.

Shouldn't be out, not at your age, where you can be seen and shamed.

Decrepitude is melancholy: warm, dark, moist -

Primal, I suppose; like your abode before you were even born.

What inner child survives, in me?

Ah, mine wouldn't die.

Mine didn't grow.

It reposes, clenched fist of a foetus that it is, gripping

My life's misjudgements, binding them tight. 

A lifetime's chatter fills my ears.

My silence is big enough to swallow worlds.

Yet still I need to feel another's hand.

Addled love is a clock cranked backwards.

A crab scuffling sideways

Writhing, worming pinkly on a skewer like a caterpillar:

Awaiting resurrection as a soft-boiled egg

To be absorbed into the dark belly of the earth.

To see the latest combination of my writing and

imagery, brought together in a publishable format,

visit: http://londondigitalart.spaces.live.com

STORYBOARD

Presented here in portrait format, for higher image quality - but for easier viewing, you can print each page out.

Era and Place

Timeless, or rather nondescript; but there is a sense of everything being old and cluttered: decorative and homely once, now grimy and grey.  Through this, images of heaven blaze with a deep chromatic lustre. 


Format

Digital video, transferred to DVD or whatever formal is most appropriate.


Techniques

So, there you go.  And don’t forget to screw

MY EARLIEST WRITING:

A FEW SAMPLES

If you want to see my music journalism: scroll down.  If you want to see my latest poetry and imagery: scroll down further.  What you’ll find here are a very few samples of my earliest extended writing, which I did to cut my teeth.  The occasional  nativete and exuberant overstatement of the obvious make me sigh - but I wish I could recapture the fluency...

"Strike It lucky" is my only short story to date, and it serves simply to illuminate some of my later themes.  "Write me something with ghosts in it", had suggested a Polish friend in Richmond.  On the Tube home, fortified by tumblers of vodka from the Old Country, I penned this in my head...

 OUT OF LATVIA

Riga is the colour of the Eastern bloc, like nougat kicked around in a gutter.  Beyond the river lies a scabby horizon of cranes and dockyards and peeling high-rise, yet the centre is an old town of faded elegance: all stucco and trams, promenades of frozen trees and their drab imprint of impacted shadow.  Paris between the wars, perhaps.  A  clamour of bells is incessant, as if the city is in some perpetual funeral; and religious services have kept their entreating, East European fervour. The faces here retain the transparency and innocent animation of Eastern faces, their candour and vulnerability; these people know nothing, yet, of guile.

This cannot be the place to launch the most extravagant marketing assault of 1995.  Yet the voice of a nation - silenced, occupied and dispossessed for centuries - is about to speak to the world.  Peteris Vasks, an unassuming man born 49 years ago in a Latvian village, seems set to capture the imagination of the west with a momentum which eluded even his friend, Henryk Gorecki. In the month of the Berlin premiere of his Cello Concerto, British critics have acclaimed the music of his first compact disc, MESSAGE, for its "passionate energy: emotional and spiritual, intense and ethereal; joyous and, above all, beautiful to the ear."

That Vasks was discovered at all is a fluke.  It is due to a young British conductor and film-maker, Kriss Rusmanis, who has since become something of the composer’s champion.  "I went to Riga in 1986" Rusmanis recalls.  "It was the most depressing part of the Soviet era: you were followed everywhere, and there were endless queues outside abandoned restaurants.  But there was a thaw of sorts.  They wanted to promote culture rather than risking nationalist dissent and so these invitations appeared on the desks of western publishers for a Festival of Contemporary Music - the first thing of its kind in forty years.  I found more than 35 composers, but Vasks was staggering.  I heard his Musica Dolorosa, which commemorated both the death of his sister Maria and what he saw as the political burial of his homeland.  It was richly experimental, yet accessible too; with a taut structure and a driving force which verged on sexual intensity.  It became my ambition to gain a hearing for his music in the west."

Their first encounter wasn’t what Rusmanis expected.  "I found this quiet, intense man who often seemed close to tears when his music was performed, it was so intimate for him."  Meet the composer yourself and he seems a bit of a dreamer; gestures expansively benevolent but the speech hesitant, with a habitual clearing of the throat as he reflects.  This is an ascetic personality, consumed by what is clearly its vocation, and lifted by compassionate good humour - rather as his music is spared from obsession by its humanising if dark vein of lyricism.  He lives in a small city flat with his wife (a film-maker) and five children.

No surprise that he sees his work in other-wordly terms, but it was a grim series of events that sharpened his musical acuity.  Rusmanis remembers, "In January 1991 came the storming of the of the Latvian Internal Ministry by Soviet troops.  It happened a week after tanks had entered Lithuania and captured the television centre.  I rushed out to Riga as soon as the Black Berets passed the Latvian border.  My father was Latvian and already I’d conducted the Riga orchestra; they were my friends.  I had to be there.  I went and I found a barricaded city.

"The streets were jammed with farm trucks and heavy blocks and the population was camped round fires - mostly outside the TV station, of course.  I’d been with Juris Podnieks, the film director, for four nights: waiting, circling the city with our video cameras until dawn.

"We heard over the phone that the Ministry was being taken, so out we ran.  The shooting was concentrated round the Kronvalda park, which has a river running through the middle.  It was an incredible moment.  If the gunfire didn’t stop we thought the tanks would move in.  Bullets flew past us and I froze with fear in front of a bridge.  Podnieks ran across but somebody pulled me back.  Through what was becoming a snow storm I climbed a little mound and crouched behind a wall.  The next minute, two of our cameramen died a couple of yards in front of me."

As Vasks puts it, "If you have whatever you could wish for, what is there left to write about?  People from affluent countries have everything but indifference flows from their music.  Our perception of life is very different.  Our roots are full of sadness and suffering; but in artistic terms our tragic history has given us a terrific impulse to be creative."

Last night was the anniversary of the killing.  A Vivaldi concerto accompanied the church commemoration of children the Soviets shot, and it was played with the intensity of weeping.   There were flowers and candles where Andris Slapin’s lifeless body had four years ago emptied blood like a lake of ink under mercury streetlights.  But less than a hundred people gathered round the flag in Central Square; and for today’s children, watching with their elegant almond eyes the braziers flickering against an icebound landscape, it was just another bonfire.

Vasks spreads his hands dismissively.  "What can I say?  Old news.    The media have been interviewing everybody: ’What were you doing in 1991?’ Well, I was out on the streets, every day; and in those moments a nation was made, and I came of age as a composer.  It was foreign news crews that shifted the balance of power.  We’d no idea what outrage the pictures would cause, when they were shown throughout the world.  Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised, though.  There was something of universal significance going on.  After 900 years’ subjugation we found out who we were and you asked yourself, what does it mean to be a nation?  What does it mean to be a composer?   I look back and I know it was our new beginning.  Now we have to live with the consequences.  The situation has changed; and what can you expect but disillusionment?

"I’ve never lost my fear of the composer’s lonely life, and that was the week I learnt I belonged to a greater family.  Amongst the bloodshed, ideals became real.  As Latvians say, ’Brute force against the force of spirit.’  I made my contribution then, and I have to make it now: finding a compromise between action and interpretation, between doing and offering a some creative inspiration to others."

His tone-poem Vestijums (from which the CD takes its title) explores a timeless conflict.  It is, like much of Vasks, a coldly voluptuous shimmer of sound, never quickening beyond the pace of a human heart at rest: the music of a survivor, clinging to remembered sense in the face of chance, and the fortuitous erosion of meaning out of which human dissolution and private tragedy arise.  Rusmanis explains: "Peteris talks about forces of good and evil battling but his feeling is that good ultimately triumphs.  He believes not in God, perhaps, but in a benign spiritual force to dominate our lives."  Vasks says, "Shostakovich’s music depicted Stalinism so effectively that it’s done.  You can’t say more.  Now the challenge is to set an example: to show how good can surmount the struggle.  I want to write ....not wallpaper music, not pieces to prettify or gloss over things; but something more in the nature of catharsis, with a sense of ecstasy at the natural environment."

There are centuries of music in Latvia, fostered by the German aristocracy who ruled the country since the 13th Century.  Bruno Walter spent his youth at the Riga Opera House, and Wagner composed Rienzi there.  Native composers were trained by Rimsky-Korsakov in St Petersburg, and Stravinsky remembered his own Latvian teacher, Vitols, with warmth and admiration.  Yet the indigenous tradition is one of folk music: over a million songs, and summer festivals with choirs of 25,000 voices.  Vasks’ own output once comprised choral music, but not any more.  "I don’t use words because they fix meaning too precisely. There is a richness in music which is poised in a certain ambivalence, taking flight on its own terms. And music alone captures the beauty of the land, even for a brief moment.

"My Cantabile for string orchestra uses simply the white notes of the piano to create a song of praise, an idealization of the world’s inner harmony.  More than anything, my inspiration is in Latvian rivers and birdsong and our miles of forest.  But no, this isn’t nature as innocence; things aren’t as simple as that.  We need to think not of Arcadia, but to envisage a horizon and a presence of boundless size.  My motivation is to go and see how far the horizon stretches.  Nature isn’t something created for us.  What interests me, I suppose, is what I can only call the unfinished journey of a singing voice; the infinite detail and subtlety music opens up, yet the sense that nothing you do can ever be right or complete."

He calls himself a sad optimist and his upbringing, Rusmanis admits, was complex.  Perhaps he had an Arcadian childhood in Aizpute, deep in the sticks?  Vasks laughs.  "Well, my older brother wanted to drown me.  Now he’s a priest.  Yes, we were content and self-contained - each family with its cow and its allotment.  I was quite a little shepherd, not that I ever liked that much."  Vasks is more circumspect when it comes to remembering the daily rigours and hardships.  "My father was so good at his job, the Soviets wouldn’t let him do it.  He was a priest too, forbidden to practise; and the authorities harassed us all.  They denied my brother the right to become a lawyer, and when I left music High School I was refused permission to study in the west."

His most intense relationship seems always to have been with his sister, a magical confidante in daydreams since their early childhood. She accompanied his violin from the piano. Peteris played several instruments. "Improvising at the keyboard was my secret passion, but I didn’t dare tell anyone. My first song - aged 9 - was based on children’s tales. My earliest setting of Rainis, our major poet, came at 13. That time I was dutifully patriotic. At 18 I fell for Lohengrin and wrote half an opera.

"Under communism we lived simple lives: the carrots and the sticks were so clearly laid out for us.  You watch events at Chechyn and you know the Russian bear has changed only in name, but now there is a corrosive cynicism at work with the invasion of consumer culture.  We’re running headlong into a Latvia where America has much to answer for; and it’s as though we’re being crushed between two rocks.   The west’s solutions are not ours.  We have to find our own way here.  You think about the loss of ideals, about the future for our arts, and you can only hope."

"We’re no good at taking risks" reminisced one of the city’s administrators over his honeyed beer - adding cryptically, "unlike German Jews.  We prefer a fair day’s pay for our work.  Most of the investment here is from expatriate Russians, who see our economy as more secure."

And sure enough, there they are on street corners, fresh from the black market: buying retail businesses out of a suitcase full of cash.  "Latvians aren’t aggressive" affirmed the British Telecom engineer, sent to resurrect a 30 year-old Soviet telephone system.  "When the Russians left they took the infrastructure with them.  The people here must rebuild its economy from scratch."

Briefly things are flourishing, like one of those flowers that blossom before extinction.  Last year the banks offered investors a return of 70%; they can’t afford that now.  Everybody lives on tick, on borrowed time, taking second and third jobs to pay the rent and heating that in the old Socialist Republic came almost free.  It is a cash-in-hand society, sailing on its downward spiral into an abyss of Soviet dimensions.  If you pay a customs man £13 per week, you can’t blame him for a certain susceptibility to bribes.  The Lat, an artificially inflated currency, makes things impossible to sell; and apart from chipboard mashed up from chipboard mashed up from those interminable trees, Latvia has nothing worth buying.

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The climate is one in which a composer must succeed to survive, and in Germany Vasks’ Cello Concerto was booed.  Rusmanis remembers, "Its openness was resented by an avant-garde clique in the audience, and the orchestra hadn’t rehearsed properly.  Peteris stood on stage with the David Geringas, the soloist, and took four bows.  After two bows the orchestra deserted them but Geringas, determined to play more Vasks, shoved his way through.  He chose a solo piece from Gramata, an astonishingly strong work which you whistle as well as bow.  It brought the house down, and what might have been a disaster became an emotional experience for everyone there."  But the reception for two-and-a-half years’ effort privately bruised a man of such moral introspection.  Vasks declares, "The vital thing is for an artist to be the voice of opposition to whatever regime is in power, whether it’s liberal or totalitarian.  Your inner voice is vital; the capacity to challenge, to keep conscience alive.  Even now, when national pride is rife and they wave flags in all directions."

Stravinsky used to say that good music had no need of labels. Imagination, in a musician, is where inevitability and surprise come together; a level of choice where logical rightness and individuality coincide.  "A masterpiece" wrote Nicholas Harnoncourt, "is like a mirror that is held up in front of us and shows us our own reflection.  We walk over it like ants, able to see only a small area that we find important.  If only we could see the whole."  There is an all-subsuming richness to a great composer’s vision, which transcends a need to preach.  To engage sympathy, for an artist, cannot be enough.  And so to perhaps a brutal question: whether the new orchestral wave from the Iron Curtain is more than a gloss of sophisticated sentimentality - coffee-table music with angst, or the unremitting sound-track to a post-Socialist Realist film that nobody will ever want to make?

Rusmanis defends Vasks’ view that music without feeling is inert.  "Many Soviet artists went through their avant-garde period and in one of his early works Peteris has the soloist dismantle his clarinet until he plays with the mouthpiece alone.  Now is the time to go back to his musical roots, finding a voice which is simple and direct.  It’s easy to write music which is so inaccessible that no-one knows whether they’ve understood it or not.  It’s an old trick.  To bare yourself, in the hope you might speak to people, is a composer’s greatest challenge; and when you have managed it, you have found your own identity."

Vasks’ antecedents are clear, amongst them Kancheli, Lutoslawski, Pärt, Mahler, Messiaen, Penderecki.  The problem now is of whether his private idiom might advance or ossify.  Rusmanis continues, "He has a great chance of growing in stature - in a significant direction - unlike the contemporary composers who barely communicate.  For too long we were entrenched in a musical world that imparted, on an emotional plane, next to nothing: a place of dessicated factions which connoisseurs could sign up for.  At last archaic barriers are breaking down, and Vasks can be heard."

The mid-1980’s marked only the beginning of the thaw amongst a European establishment inimical to melodic music, and they were hard graft for Vasks.  In 1989 he won a commission from the New York Philharmonic for a cor anglais concerto, when its principal Thomas Stacy heard Musica Dolorosa.  The result was acknowledged as a significant addition to the repertoire.  Then the Baltic uprisings made Latvian culture a curiosity, and Rusmanis was approached by Radio 3 for a series.  Three years since have been spent by Conifer Records, negotiating corruption and demands for backhanders, to get a recording made on Vasks’ home territory.  Now western cinema wants the Musica for soundtracks.

What would be Rusmanis’s assessment?  "Structural strength is vital to Vasks and he creates an arc-form which is thoroughly satisfying. He has no need for multiple movements: he prefers one continuous development in different sections, which works very well.  He has a great sense of form, in fact. He’s no wish to write opera because, in Riga, it won’t be performed.  His string quartets are written for local musicians (the soloists he admires) and his pieces are short because it’s the time-span in which his sound-world works best."

Stephen Johnson, a British critic, compared the Cor Anglais Concerto to an English rural tradition of Vaughan-Williams.  The analogy says little for a sense of chaos which seems as implacable as Shostakovich’s.  Vasks’ strings offer a threnodic drone, and as in Sibelius, his sonorities are rooted in almost subterranean reverberation and percussive effect.  The origins of his melancholy, too, lie as much in the glacial orchestration of Sibelius, or the finesse of Ravel, as in any succession to Bartók and East European tradition.  His creative candour never succumbs to Mahler’s brittle or frenetic posturing, no matter how firmly the texture of sound places his music in the aftermath of late Romantic opulence and creative reflexivity.

The difference, I think, is one of outlook: the composers of the early Twentieth Century emphasizing ambivalence and nostalgia in the wake of what their parents had thought certain, Vasks as the inheritor to a tradition for which the recent past is a trauma as much to be cauterised as refashioned according to new, expedient tenets of humanity and reason. Inevitably his idiom lacks roots, the references and variegation which a long cultural history makes possible.  As such, it does not allow the levels of meaning that true self-awareness permits; for it is the capacity to see oneself from the outside that creates irony, or any of the effects of what Henry James called "a mind in dialogue with itself."  But the potential is there for more than pastiche.  All he needs is time, and access to viewpoints and artforms beyond his homeland which Vasks knows he has been denied.

Latvians aren’t inclined to speculation.  "I don’t think about the future.  It’s tough enough for me to make each composition as good as I can.  The epitaph I want is to be remembered as a musician who did his best.  I’d like to die able to say, ’Remember that piece?  I wrote it.  All you have to do is listen.’

What will he do when Conifer have plugged him as the new Gorecki: famous from New York to Japan, his bank account siphoning up royalties?  He is intrigued that Karajan found it necessary to fly a private jet.  You sense he doesn’t give a damn, and then he quotes Kant.  "’The starry heaven above me, the moral law within me’.  Yes, I’ve heard of the Bahamas; they don’t appeal, and neither does the prospect of a fast car.  I don’t have a driver’s licence, you see. I’d like somewhere bigger to live, but there are many more deserving charities.  I expect I’ll give the money away."

Rusmanis confirms it. "All Peteris wants is to put Latvians on the map.  He is aware that there are only two million of them, and it’s a miracle that their country has managed to hold on for so long."  Yet his music has a wider resonance.  It offers the language not of compromise, but the authentic conscience of the century we live in.  As Vasks writes, "To my mind, every honest composer searches for a way out of the crises of his time - towards affirmation, towards faith.  He shows how humanity can overcome the passion for self-annihilation that flares up from time to time.  And if I can find this way out, this reason for hope, the outline of a perspective: then I offer it as my model."

Beyond the window, a corrugated bus the colour of linoleum propels the faithful from the Southern Fried Chicken to MacDonalds, all at London prices.  The shops are filling with goods and a bubble of euphoria.  Around the city outskirts beggars complete their daily crawl but in the centre (granted enough capital) you can still buy a house on your interest from the bank.  At a middling hotel I buy Vasks and his daughter a meal costing as much as a Riga Philharmonic violinist earns in a month.  Across the tables, a group of luxuriant call-girls is manoeuvring itself into place for the night-shift.  Maybe, like property speculation, it seems more prudent than gathering rosebuds.

January 1995: this long article on Vasks was featured in both the Sunday Telegraph and European.  With its policital focus, I hoped it would help me break out of the mould of "music reviewer".

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A BRIEF BESTIARY


To carry the child into adult life
Is good? I say it is not,
To carry the child into adult life
Is to be handicapped.

- Stevie Smith


There are the scientists. They know how to play.
There are the children, who know how to play and how to weep.
There are artists, who play and who purport to weep.
There are misfits, who yearn to play and weep.
And, last of all, come the decent grown-ups
Who have forgotten how to do either.
If, indeed, they ever found out.

Why have we killed the child inside?
Since it is better (we suppose) to forfeit joy than to
Admit the possibility of failure. Better to do nothing
Than to risk a humiliation of mistakes. Instead
We’ll tilt at windmills; and bind our bones with iron
Against the breeze.


Stephen Jackson

January 2005

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If you want to see more recent creative work of mine: just carry on down. Meanwhile, this is how I cut my teeth as a journalist and professional writer - long years ago...in fact, I think, back in the early 1990’s. Shortly after the millennium I decided I might at last have had enough of the precarious freelance life...Bouncy cheque, anybody?

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J S BACH

English Suites No 1 in A major, BWV 806; No 3 in G minor, BWV 808 

RICHTER (piano)

(Stradivarius STR 33333)

TT: 52:08 (DDD)

Full price

* * *

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BEETHOVEN

Piano  Sonatas Opus 2 Nos 1 in F minor, 2 in A major,  3  in  C
major

HOBSON (piano)

(Arabesque Z6637)
TT: 78:26 (DDD)
Full price

* One star recommendation

I  think it was Tovey who compared Beethoven’s sense of  humour to  a  dog’s; and these early pieces are full of the  surprise, the  brio,  the  gallops up and down keyboards, that  make  the thinking behind his verdict clear.  But more besides: a hint of monolithic  growth that anticipates the Hammerklavier,  of  the mesmeric  control  of  timespans that makes  the  last  sonatas uniquely challenging.  There is also something to Opus  2  more insidious than either distinction - charm.   A fine performance needs  the  quality  of laughter to it; and an  eager,  tensile spring.

This is not a way to ease yourself into Beethoven by halves.

I  remember hearing Brendel play the second of these sonatas at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, almost a decade ago; and I was struck by  the  surge he brought to its first movement, using  pivotal phrases to link the widest range of expressive techniques.  The Largo  was  all about luminous transitions, and you could  only admire  the  refinement with which every effect was  given  its context  -  the  proportions and range of a  performance  which seemed  at  once spontaneous and created from inner meditation. These  are  also  the hallmarks of Schnabel in EMI’s  Collected Edition: a sense of experiment and glowing rightness, something which  is  at  the  same time skittish and  as  eloquent  as  a recitative.

I  remember hearing Brendel play the second of these sonatas at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, almost a decade ago; and I was struck by  the  surge he brought to its first movement, using  pivotal phrases to link the widest range of expressive techniques.  The Largo  was  all about luminous transitions, and you could  only admire  the  refinement with which every effect was  given  its context  -  the  proportions and range of a  performance  which seemed  at  once spontaneous and created from inner meditation. These  are  also  the hallmarks of Schnabel in EMI’s  Collected Edition: a sense of experiment and glowing rightness, something which  is  at  the  same time skittish and  as  eloquent  as  a recitative.

Now, Ian Hobson gives us playing so wholesome you could send it to  collect  Grandmother from the clinic.  In the A major  work the  staccatos are pedalled almost primly, with a  neatness  I would  give my thumbs for.  Yet motion is lost, and since  it’s pace that holds this music together, what survives is a residue of clotted overpreparation.   His Largo is an attempt to make a statue out of a movement which, in that process, loses its true grandeur.   When insight shrinks from the relationship  between parts,  the  cut-and-thrust is forfeited that  makes  Beethoven work.   You  end up with an undiscerning millwheel  of  sound, from  which  repeats protract themselves towards the  infinite.

This is the sort of length for which one is not grateful.

The  impression is of a table with no food on it, although  you love  the way Mr Hobson has ironed the napkins.  In the  end  I identified  with the hostess who said, "Why don’t you  go  away and  write  all of this down?"  Jenö Jandó’s disc  (Naxos)  has these  same  sonatas;  and  whilst  it  too  is  unrelieved  by sensibility into the inner subtleties that make the  first  two of them live, it has sharper instincts.

For  Brendel, the first movement of Opus 2 No 3 was a  sort  of joyful  collision  between  suavity and  momentum;  although  I noticed  how  cleverly he made space for his  effects  to  take flight.  Actually, cracked heads are what this music is  about; it is the repercussions of making irreconcilables work together that  set  a  stamp on the first truly Beethovenian sonata.  In Brendel’s   hands  it  might  almost  have  been  an  unfolding narrative.   But  you need to listen to Schnabel  to  hear  how strikingly the finale can soar.

Not  that  you’d glean too much from Mr Hobson.   At  last  the straitjacket  comes free, but it’s a case of playing  which  is palatable rather than revelatory: a perfunctory feel for timing which  reveals  too  little sense of wider  implications.   The Adagio is overcooked to the point where all that’s left is grey and  limp;  and  it is the fact he tries so  hard  in  the  the Scherzo that makes contrasts fall together into the thresher of (oh dear, I hate to say this) stifling indistinction.

Music  so  tightly meshed has to sound inevitable, or it  means nothing.   And  Jando  again, however bruising  his  occasional bouts on the megaphone, is really more interesting than this.

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BRAHMS

3 Intermezzi, Op 117, 6 Klavierstücke, Op 118; 4 Klavierstücke,
Op 119

AFANASSIEV (piano)

(Denon CO-75090)
TT: 69.20 (DDD)
Full price

These  last piano works were written for Clara Schumann,  whose dwindling  strength brought the need for intimate music  rather than  strenuous  force. "It’s wonderful" wrote Clara,  "how  he combines passion and tenderness in the smallest of spaces."  If many of these pieces are saturated with a sense of decayed  and forfeited  mortality, their world leads as easily  to  autumnal fulfilment and glancing good humour.  Often the simplest idea - an  inversion or widened tonal interval - forms an  entry-point to a lifetime’s experience, distilled into moments.  Yet it can all  stay intractable: dour and hesitant, desultory, saturnine: its  meaning  so easily lost in unleavened tedium  or  inflated heroics.  Brahms isn’t about either.

The most interesting comparison here is between Emmanuel Ax and Stephen  Kovacevich.  In Opus 117, much though  I  admire  Ax’s orchestral  scope, I am troubled by his tendency to overplay  a hand  -  melodrama which distorts Brahms’s logic  and  exhausts resources,  leaving  not  enough  left  to  say.  It’s   tough competition that prevents my recommending him; but I was struck by  Kovacevich’s  capacity to say more within a  sparser  tonal palette:  a sense of both evanescence and cohesion, of shifting light.   In No 2 Ax reveals his deft sense of fleeting effects, but No 3 is full of fortuitous little stabs and distortions.  I was  reminded  of  Brahms’s  relation  to  Schumann:  and  both composers  bring to their closing bars a sense of summation  or fading memory.  With Ax, you need a little more of that.

Opus 118 is different.  Ax is the performance to go for if  you like  your Brahms spacious and granitic.  There’s a magisterial strength  which  is  at  the same time  alive  to  the  music’s adventure  and imperative force: a new agility and  aptness  to the  thinking, keenly sensitive to moving currents.   Number  2 brings  passion  tempered by sharp nostalgia, even  if  for  me Kovacevich still knaws more leanly at what the music is  about. In  Number  4  Ax  creates  an  interplay  of  suggestions  and recollections which builds its way towards what he  sees  as  a towering  climax, but which from Kovacevich’s standpoint  might subside  into  a grandiloquent clutter.  Yet Ax feels  his  way into  these  pieces more palpably than anyone else.   It  is  a performance for those who like to hear a musician thinking.

There  is a lack of self-indulgence to both pianists that makes you feel you are eavesdropping on a private confessional.  Ax’s range is bigger: diffident or lucid insinuations, all with this silky  tone;  and  in Number 5, a sense of balm  and  unfolding wonder  which makes Kovacevich sound abrupt.  But  there  is  a proportioned  passion  about Kovacevich which  makes  him  more direct on every level.  He brings both animation and longing to even  the most wraith-like apparitions, and better than  anyone else he lays bare the inevitability of it all.

Where  does  Afanassiev  fit?   Absolutely  nowhere.   This  is playing  that  couldn’t give you a scale  of  C  major  without reading   The  Flying  Dutchman  into  it.   Opus  117  brings mountainous  labour  to  the task of missing  every  point:  an obstacle  course of battles to be won for no other reason  than portentous  novelty.  Opus 119 is a campaign at  half-speed  to find  spurious  voices and tolling bells in place  of  Brahms’s own, wonderfully subtle sonority.

When  every  gesture  is a gasping mannerism,  the  most  basic elements  of music are eroded to nothing.  This is a sermon  on pieces which speak for themselves.

If  you  want  all these works on one disc, Radu Lupu  gives  a performance  in  which any trite option  is  turned  aside  and almost  every  page says something new.  The  sound  may  be  a little  dated,  and Lupu now plays these pieces  with  an  even sharper fidelity.  But after Afanassiev, the musicianship is in a different league

      ISBN 1-86205-016-3         

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FANTASIAS, PAVANS & GALLIARDS

English  music for keyboard by Byrd, Johnson, Philips,  Morley, Bull, Randall, Farnaby, Gibbons, Tomkins.

GUSTAV LEONHARDT (harpsichord and virginals)
DDD
59’ 47"
Philips 428 153-2

Full (three * * * star) recommendation

Think  back to a different world, where music drew its strength from  a  community  of song and dancing, and the  modern  prima donna  was  unknown: where art was defined  by  brightness  and vigour.   To us the keyboard works of the Sixteenth  and  early Seventeenth Centuries may suffer the stigma of early music, but to  its  contemporaries it was the currency of a  sophisticated and  bustling  culture; with the devices of later  composers  - counterpoint, chromaticism - in place ready to be picked up for whatever purpose its successors might happen to favour.

These are works which are uniquely English in their secular and businesslike manner, in crispness and candour alike.  True, the Pavan  was  described by Morley as "a kind  of  staid  musicke, ordained for grave dancing" and almost all the pieces are  what we  should  now  call  four-square.  But listen  now  to  Peter Philips’  Passamezzo  (a form in which common  chord  sequences were  used  as  grounds for variations in the form  of  a  fast pavan)  with  its  volatile runs and strident  fanfares  -  and acknowledge a muscularity to the construction, which  is  every bit  as  virtuosic in its imagination as it is in  its  demands from the performer.  Philips, one of so many Catholic whipping-boys,  was  imprisoned  following a conspiracy  to  assassinate Elizabeth  I; and the brutality of that time (Tregion  died  in prison: others were exiled for their "immorality") adds a gloss to the tart sentiments expressed in its musicianship.

But listen again to Orlando Gibbons’ miniatures, with something of  the  quality of sculpted seashell, and you’ll  realise  why Glenn  Gould admired so much yet another composer we’ve shunted off  to  the  backwaters.  The titles of the  pieces  -  toyes, fancies,  fantasias - hint at the inventive  freedom  concealed within  an  apparently sober idiom: a sense  of  fantastic  and exuberant  convolution  through which the  thinking  is  always clear, as if constraints themselves defied the writing to press ahead and say more.  Philips and his command of resources might surprise  you; but hear the Galliards and Almans of John  Bull, and prepare to be disarmed by charm.

Leonhardt  brings none of the assault and battery  that  lesser harpsichordists  apply to this era.  His  rubato  and  rhythmic inflexion  is of the subtlest kind, and it informs the  driving power  and  natural  sweep of a conception  in  which  a  First Division  musician gains the most by playing music just  as  it was written.

We  need to value works of this eager appetite for life.  Never again  would  England have such an impact on  composers  across Europe.

Volume 3

CHOIR OF ST PAUL’S CATHEDRAL/SCOTT

(Hyperion CDA 66618)
TT: 66:15 (DDD)

* * (*)

A state of awe, as emotions go, is a limiting commodity; and it makes  a  tundra out of everyday living.  Yet it’s the hallmark of  English choral life.  Think of the milkiness Fauré  brought to  church  music,  and you can see what the English  tradition gained.   Think  of Monteverdi’s Vespers or even Rachmaninov’s, and  you realise how immeasurably more we have lost.  You  have to  come prepared for fluent mediocrity, the bland expertise of Walton’s  Set  Me a Seal.  Perhaps it is a matter  of  changing fashion  that Elgar’s Give unto the Lord begins to  sound  like the  school  song of an Edwardian borstal; less so that,  in  a palpitating echo, its rapid fire of oratory just doesn’t work.

 But  there’s more to the story than shock-waves of new and great  music  finding  their  reverberations  in  a  provincial puddle.   Craftsmanship has always been  the  ability  to  make something more than it is; and what the English tradition wrung from  its limitations was aching, crepuscular intensity.   "The valley  of the shadow of death" repeats Stanford; and nostalgia is  at  the  core  of this music: not in its  modern  sense  of sentimentality with a bank-balance, but in the remembrance of a lost and golden age which strikes the heart in its transfigured desire.   If  sorrow,  said  Dorothy  Parker,  is  tranquillity remembered in emotion, nostalgia is a sublimation of  what  was worthwhile and then, through conflict, lost.  The image of this music  is of summer evenings dwindling into twilight,  and  the twilight  of  an  era  caught in haunted, suspended  time  -  a longing  compounded of surrender and despair, lifted  by  noble regret for the passing of what had never been.

And  this is quintessentially English.  If Stanford’s  The Lord  is  my  Shepherd  rises from a  pang  of  melancholy  and relapses  into valediction, it is worthy too to take its  place amongst  the Romantic lieder from which its lessons came.   Not the  Shepherd on the Rock, perhaps: but it was from Wagner that Stanford learnt to write a score where every part is equal in a whole; and everything glows together.

John  Taverner emerges as well as anyone.  Lavish  in  its dissonances,   revelling in a welter of sound as canonic  parts throb  together - modern, yet in the same tradition  as  Wood’s liquescent  Expectans  Expectavi  and  Harris’s  Faire  is  the Heaven,  which follow it.  It’s the consistency of this  thread of development that proves fascinating, as different influences worked  their effects: the music of the First World War clearly the  same  stuff from which Walton’s orchestral works  were  to come.  There is a strong and muscular vein of curiously English ardour and English craftsmanship.

But you have to wait for the Victorian Renaissance to find anything  worthwhile.  Attwood’s Come, Holy Ghost  is  everyday Georgian unctuousness; his thirty-two operas are something you would  have  to be nailed to the floor to endure.  Wesley’s  In Exitu  Israel  is  a  mole’s conception of  bliss,  tangled  in counterpoint.   Disappointments are inevitable  in  a  disc  as adventurous  as  this.   I wish I sensed a trace  less  English tweeness and mustiness in Saxton’s hand-me-down Berio, which at last  breaks  free  from its origins into something  more  like Milton’s  adamantine fire.  The best composers  are  those  who play  to  the acoustic.  Parry’s There is an Old Belief  bursts into  fanfares, polychromatic splinters dissolving  on  silence yet changed within their last seconds.

Arthur  Hutchings  used to say this music  lay  under  the mange of revulsion.  It still does.  Only Hyperion’s issues  of the Worcester Cathedral Choir offer any of the same pieces, and they  do  reveal Scott’s tendency to gush on a line.  Where  in the  Elgar  St  Paul’s protests too much,  Worcester  gives  it elegiac space, its transitions luminously composed.  St  Paul’s is  strikingly disciplined, and registers are more secure;  but there  is  a metallic hardness to the trebles that does  little for  the  sense  of rest which is this music’s enduring  state. Significantly,  though, Scott eases the  Stanford  down  better than anyone; and it’s in pianissimos that his imagination seems to  have  freest  rein.   The result is music-making  which  is limpid with fugitive, glistening effects.

Even  to  those of us for whom their beliefs have crumbled into  a  cipher, the anthems leave like nothing else the vision of resonant air and boundless, limitless, numinous peace.

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EIGHT FAVOURITE OVERTURES

Handel: Arrival of the Queen of Sheba; Beethoven: Leonora No 3;
Mendelssohn: The Hebrides; Brahms: Academic Festival  Overture;
Mozart:  The Marriage of Figaro; Schubert: Rosamunde;  Rossini:
The Thieving Magpie; Berlioz: Le Carnaval Romain

ASV Quicksilva CD QS 6076)
TT: 69.52 (DDD)
Mid-price

* * (*)

Every favourite overture?  Well, A Midsummer Night’s Dream  and William Tell are missing; but the rest are present and correct.The  Arrival  of the Queen of Sheba lacks the effervescence  of authentic  instruments,  of course.   The  oboes’  articulation keeps perky and crisp, but a modern orchestra’s range and  tone is  something  which promotes sleek refinement.  Yet  it’s  not just  beside John Eliot Gardiner that Batiz seems glossy.   The brio  of   Beecham’s famous gallops up and down the scale  have gone  as  well.  In their place there is urbane and  fastidious smoothness, whose allure is considerable.

The  growls at the opening of Leonora No 3 are a bit of a paper tiger  -  but Batiz knows how to hang on to a note, letting  it take  its  time,  whilst tension gradually  screws  itself  up. Halfway  through the Beethoven you realise what  to  expect  of this  disc: balanced between sophisticated diction and  winning intelligence   in  seizing  musical  opportunities,   with   an occasional  excess of civility.  If the mountainous  growth  of the  Beethoven  is somehow underplayed, it ends with  a  proper headlong exultation, only lacking that bluff, abrasive edge.

These  are  the features that make Batiz’s Brahms  so  natural. Its  opening  bars are given an ideal fusion  of  gravitas  and forward impulse.  Klemperer may have stressed the monumentality of the Academic Festival Overture, of inexorable growth towards the  last climax.  In its place, Batiz offers a breath of fresh air.

I  began  to  be troubled by a sameness in orchestral  balance: predictable  and muddled, the woodwind well forward.   This  is sound    which   contributes   to   a   pervasive   sense    of undercharacterisation.     Transitional    sections     seem underpowered.   Batiz  is  not one of  those  conductors  whose musicianship  is  so  diverse that  he  sounds  like  different interpreters in different works.  There is a performance of The Hebrides by Peter Maag (an underrated Mendelssohnian) in  which the  central  episode slows to a shivering torpor.   You  won’t find  imagination as individual as that here, despite eloquence which  never  ceases to be satisfying.  At the  finale  of  the Berlioz  there is none of the burnishing that Maazel brings  to orchestral showdowns; instead, a sort of flabby geniality.  The Thieving   Magpie  lacks  swagger  and  wit:  it   needs   more insouciance  than this.  Rossini Rockets sound best  when  they start  from  demure beginnings.  It pays to hold  back  on  the starting blocks, rather like the little girl with the  curl  in the middle of a sulk.

This  is  too  harsh, but it’s in the less bravura pieces  that Batiz  is  most distinguished.  With Rosamunde, the crepuscular quality  of  Schubert’s  music  -  the  heavy  wistfulness  and infinite longing of Romantic sehnsucht, dripped through  Goethe and  Heine  -  aches;  and how well Batiz  grasps  the  fragile quality of Schubert’s idiom (its use of telling silences,  its asides  and subtle agitations), caught seemingly between ardent hope and the inevitability of failure.  It is a performance  to set well ahead of the field.  The Marriage of Figaro too is  as enjoyable as I’ve heard: lithe, electric energy almost free  of freneticism.

There’s more to music than the fizzy bits.  But if this is  one of  those  discs  which Classic FM plays before  its  ping-pong results,  Favourite  Overtures surmounts  its  purpose  through craftsmanship.  You can’t ask more than that.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------GERSHWIN

Rhapsody  in  Blue  (jazz  band version):  Michael  Finnissy
arrangements: The Gershwin Songbook: Piano Concerto in F

MACGREGOR (piano), LSO/DAVIS

(Collins Classics 13622)
TT: 76.09 (DDD)
Medium price

* (*) Rhapsody  in  Blue  (jazz  band version):  Michael  Finnissy
arrangements: The Gershwin Songbook: Piano Concerto in F

What  is authenticity?  Something deeper than the Hallelujah Chorus  being  sung by a cast of thousands,  all  reared  on black  pudding.   It  has to do with any music  finding  its right voice.

"Being  true  to yourself" is a recent stigma  for  creative people to be lumbered with.  The reality is likelier  to  be Telemann writing background music for his employer’s  meals, or  Gershwin  hoarding melodies against  frantic  deadlines.  But  in  the Twentieth Century, the prestige of that sterile label,  Composer  and  Serious  Artist,  carries  ever  more irresistible magic.   For Gershwin,  begging  lessons  from Ravel, it must have been near the end of the rainbow.

The  one  dire  passage on this disc is  when  you  come  to Michael Finnissy’s arrangements of songs, transplanted to  a strange  inert  world, its aspirations  beyond  Debussy  and Rachmaninov,  without the innovation or vitality  that  made either  feasible.   Finnissey acknowledges  that  Gershwin’s genius  was to catch a changing moment; so here is  a  gummy amber  in which passing insects can be trapped for  ever  in durable  form.  You can’t make a fossil out of  spontaneity. The  more the music wilts, the more messages are thrown  out with  the  medium.   I was reminded of the apparitions  that used  to afflict Bram Stoker after a surfeit of crabs.  It’s times  like  this  that  cause  you  to  slump  under   your headphones,  and contemplate the long dark tea-time  of  the soul.

But  Gershwin’s own improvisations, crushed too under  their Sunday best of modish chromaticism, have a range that  makes tunnel vision read like a panorama.  Shura Cherkassky  could make it all sound fabulous.  It takes very special talent to beguile you in song after song: voluptuary flair, agile  and volatile, with its quiet retrospections and special  timing: knowing  when  to play for sincerity or race for  burlesque. You  need  to  sound like someone going on a  spree  between satin sheets.

Now, this is just what Carl Davis has; and he makes you feel the Rhapsody must be the music that made New Yorkers glad to be  alive.  Real  tabasco,  as  P  G  Wodehouse  would  say: calculating  the  right  dusty haze  of  lasciviousness  and ennui.    But  so  much  is  ripely characterized,  so  much happens  in  the orchestra that the soloist won’t  take  up, that  the  tail wags the dog.  Modesty suits Ms  MacGregor’s style well, but she is polite where there should be the dash that with Gwyneth Pryor - playing these works on Pickwick  - makes them dazzle.

It  is interesting that where Ger