Tuesday 5 March 2024

Brecon Cathedral

 Some photos I took of the cathedral on our latest visit to Brecon.











Saturday 2 March 2024

Babi Yar: Shostakovich at the Brangwyn Hall

 
     I have been attempting to compose this post for just over three weeks now.  It has been a tide-like process of repeated writing and deletion, but then, as it is written at the start of Frank Herbert's 'Dune', 'A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care....'
     So....on the 10th of last month we went to a concert in the Brangwyn Hall given by the BBCNOW under Ryan Bancroft.  There were two items, perhaps two disparate items, on the programme that night: Beethoven's Piano Concert no1 and Shostakovich Symphony no13 'Babi Yar'.  A work of 'terrible beauty'.  And now in fairness I must place my cards on the table - I am great fan of Shostakovich.  He is a composer to whom I return time and time again, and it was the 'Babi Yar' that brought me to the concert, and really I could talk about it to the exclusion of all else, but that would be highly impolite, and unfair of me.  So first to the Beethoven....
     The American Jonathan Biss was the soloist and we were very lucky to have such a talent to play for us.  Apart from the final, life-affirming, movement this concerto was unknown to me though I do know Beethoven's two final concertos well through the Brendel/Levine/Chicago Symphony recording. At times I felt a bit lost in the first movement. But before Ryan Bancroft sends the hired goons round for a little 'chat' that is neither comment or criticism of the playing; classical music can often be be baffling at the first encounter.  I have felt lost in Elgar, Mahler and Shostakovich.  It is one of things that sets Classical Music apart from Popular.  It often requires effort. 
     And so to the Shostakovich. For those don't know this symphony was premiered in 1962, during the time of the so-called 'Khrushchev Thaw', a decade or so of easing in the artistic life of the Soviet Union.   It is written for orchestra (large), soloist, and male chorus of some 30+ singers, and consists of five movements, each one a setting of a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko.  The soloist, James Platt, certainly looked the part with his bushy black beard like a Russian peasant or priest.  Indeed, at times I was reminded of Russian orthodox chant; and, perhaps, it is the most Russian of all Shostakovich's 15 symphonies. It is also not for the faint-hearted, for both the musical language of the symphony and the lyrics are challenging. The first movement, for example, 'Babi Yar', starkly confronts Antisemitism in all its historical forms.  The later movements, particularly 3 & 4, convey the grinding life of the Russian people under the Soviet regime. Shostakovich was the only composer, I think, capable of looking the enormities of the 20th century in the face.
     This was an all piss and vinegar performance, snarling with anger and bitterness. Perhaps the most overwhelming performance I have yet experienced in the concert hall, provoking a physical reaction in me.  (Shostakovich is the only composer I know with that effect.)  Breathtaking.  But it was made all the more moving considering the current increase in antisemitism in the UK.  Only that morning it had been reported in the press that the Jewish chaplain at Leeds University, and his family, had been forced into hiding after threats of rape and death.
     I remember watching Leonard Bernstein's documentary on twentieth century music (it was on BBC2) where he placed Shostakovich (along with Britten) in the second league; on the strength of this performance alone I would say Bernstein was mistaken.

Thursday 29 February 2024

Own work: Covehithe Church

     My latest collage; 'Covehithe Church' on the coast of Suffolk. A vast church that was partially demolished in the end of the 17th century as surplus to requirements, and a smaller, much smaller church erected within the ruins. A rather M R James sort of place. 22cms x 10.4 cms on watercolour paper.



Sunday 25 February 2024

Exhibition

   

 

     I am pleased to announce my next exhibition will be at Aberglasney Gardens, Carmarthenshire 22.03.24 - 28.03.24.  The gardens are open 10am-5pm everyday.  Do pop along if you can!

'The Jewel in the Crown'

     '....the spectacle of two nations in violent opposition, not for the first time nor as yet for the last because they were then still locked in an imperial embrace of such long standing and subtlety it was no longer possible for them to know whether they hated or loved one another, or what it was that held them together and seemed to have confused the image of their separate destinies....' 

       In 1977 Barbara Pym, after years of critical neglect, was shortlisted for the Booker prize for her late novel 'Quartet in Autumn'.  The prize however was in the end awarded to Paul Scott for 'Staying on', a novel set in post-independence India.  Being a Pym fan I've often regretted that she lost that November evening in 1977, as she never seemed quite to have received the acclaim due to her in her own lifetime*. 
     However reading 'Jewel in the Crown' - the first novel of the 'Raj Quartet' - I have modified my opinion.  Scott was obviously a profoundly talented writer, well deserving of such public recognition, which seems particularly poignant when one considers that he was too ill to attend the award ceremony - cancer and alcoholism.  He died the following March.

      'This is the story of a rape, of the events that led up to it and followed it, and of the place in which it happened.'

     'The Jewel in the Crown' is set in those turbulent years at the end of the British Raj. In particular it focuses on the events in the fictional north Indian city of Mayapore at the midst of World War II when in the wake of the Viceroy's declaration of war against the Axis Powers and the successful Japanese assault on Burma the Indian National Congress mounted the 'Quit India Campaign'.  In the resultant violence two English women resident in Mayapore are assaulted, one sexually.  And it is this period in the history of India that Scott experienced first-hand as an officer in the British Army in the subcontinent and Burma.
     'The Jewel in the Crown', which has no single linear narrative as such, pieces together from various witnesses the story of these two women.  There are letters, diary entries and records of conversations; the result is more like a dossier.  However the compiler of this dossier, whether journalist or academic, remains unknown, though we can surmise that this research is undertaken some years after independence.  The result is compelling; a dazzling piece of literature.

     Mayapore consists of two areas; the original city and the cantonment which housed the British military and civilians.  I think I should add here that these cantonments were  constructed all over sub-continent in the wake of the Indian Mutiny/Rebellion of 1857.  In the case of Mayapore this segregation of communities is further enforced by the presence of a river and a railway line between them.  The characters and therefore the plot, however, inhabit a third, intermediate, space between those two sometimes harsh realities.  I do not mean these characters are necessarily outsiders; Lady Chatterjee for instance is certainly no outsider, being very well connected socially in both communities; but others such as the perceptive Sister Ludmilla, who is rather like an Orthodox yurodivy (a fool-in-Christ), most certainly are.  She is rather like a piece of drift wood that the tides of life and fate have left stranded in the city.  
     It is through her eyes that we first encounter Hari Kumar, oddly Nehru-like** and adrift between cultures, and Ronald Merrick, the local police superintendent, on what is their first meeting; and through her observations of that inauspicious event we learn that Merrick is homosexual:
     'It was so with the policeman.  The policeman saw him too.  I always suspected the policeman.  Blond, also good looking, he also had sinews [like Kumar], his arms were red and covered with fine blond hairs; and his eyes were blue, the pale blue of a child's doll; he looked right but didn't smell right.  To me, who had been about in the world, he smelt all wrong.  "And who is that?" he said.  "Also one of your helpers?  The boy there?  The boy washing at the pump?"
      I would argue that from that passage (with its sly, 'under-the-radar' homo-eroticism) in which sister Ludmilla stresses the similarities between the two men, and from what is said later in the novel that Kumar too is homosexual.  As I was working on this post, and in particular this passage, I began to wonder about Scott's own sexuality; it turns out that although he was married (unsuccessfully) he was himself homosexual.  I cannot help feel that somehow that knowledge, for me at least, changes the dynamic of the relationship between Kumar and Merrick and between characters and author. Perhaps not in a comfortable way.  
     Both men, however, regardless, or because of their sexuality, attempt to pursue a relationship with clumsy, awkward Daphne Manners, and it is this fierce little tragedy played out against the vast flow of history that forms the core this novel.
     There is something of the French and Russian nineteenth century novel about 'The Jewel in the Crown' in its scope.  A vast, sprawling sort of book echoing a vast and complex setting. In a sense it is an attempt (perhaps in the manner of Dostoevsky) to understand, or even define India, which is as much a creation of the British administration and British and European political thought as much as anything else.  It is a hybrid polity.  This search is something that also occupied the mind of another British writer of the 20th century, E M Forster in 'A Passage to India' - it must be either audacity or hubris that made Forster think he reduce India to 'God si Love', but then he was one for the apophthegm. One gets a sense, particularly towards the end of the novel, not only that 'India' is something that the British could not, or would not, understand but that the leaders of the independence movement were little different.  But then the struggle for Independence was at some level a conflict of elites. India was, like Post-War Britain to be a seed-bed for elite-driven utopian planning. For Nehru, schooled in late nineteenth century British socialism of the Fabian variety, India was to be transformed into the image of the nation whose rule he rejected.  Indeed the whole process of independence was fraught with paradox. That isn't meant as a criticism.  We all exist in some sort of paradox; it's all part of the human condition.


* There is a marvellous, gently melancholic drama of that day, 'Miss Pym's Day Out', written by James Runcie for the BBC series 'Bookmark', and starring Patricia Routledge.  It's quite easy to find on YouTube.

** Hari Kumar was educated in England at the fictional public school Chillingborough, before the death of his father caused him to return to India. Jawaharlal Nehru was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge.  He jokingly referred to himself as 'the last Englishman to rule India'.

Friday 16 February 2024

'Bluebeard's Castle'

 Last night we watched 'Herzog Blaubarbs Burg' (Bluebeard's Castle) a relatively unknown film by Michael Powell, the British director, that he made for German broadcaster Suddeutscher Rundfunk in 1963. It was, essentially, a cinematic production of Bartok's one-act opera of 1911, 'Bluebeard's Castle', starring Norman Foster as Bluebeard and Ana Raquel Sarte as Judit and what a visually stunning piece of work it is.  'Bluebeard's Castle comes at a point when after the failure of his 1960 film 'Peeping Tom' his was according to Wiki 'ostracised' by the British film industry and he fund it hard to find work in the UK.
     The film virtually disappeared after broadcast until last year (2023) when, after restoration, it was released as a dvd by the BFI. The result if an absolute real visual treat.  The sets are spectacular but ethereal, the work of the designer Hein Heckroth who had worked with Powell and Emeric Pressburger on 'The Red Shoes', 1948, and 'Tales of Hoffman', 1951.


Bluebeard's Castle

1963

Director                 Michael Powell
Cinematogrpahy  Hannes Staudinger
Producer               Norman Foster

Tuesday 13 February 2024

Peterborough Cathedral II: The Minster Precinct


     I have a vague recollection of my first visit to the Minster Precinct - the name Peterborough for the close.  I was with my mother and my aunt, and I was very young though walking.  I think that we must have driven to Peterborough in my aunt's car, because we had walked from the car park in Bishop's Rd., the one, I think, that stands on the site of the Derby Yard.  That first visit became something I wanted to repeat on subsequent trips to the city. A bit of a treat. It may have been there that I cemented my love of architecture, that and the many family holidays in Scotland.  Perhaps afterwards I was taken to Woodcocks* on Bridge St. for tea. 
     It shouldn't be a surprise, then, that the Precinct is a favourite of mine.  There is something so eminently civilised about the place, and it is still after all those intervening years a real pleasure to walk through, even though it appears that many of the houses are now rented out as offices and there are too many cars parked about. But a refuge still from the surrounding city. 
     Historically the Precinct was much larger, running s to the river Nene, while to the north there was a deer park.  You could think of the whole complex as a model of the Heavenly Jerusalem.
 
     Anyway the Precinct comprises a number of distinct areas. To the west of the cathedral is a large open space, originally the great court of the Abbey.  Now called the Galilee Court, it appears to have been called The Close or The Minster Close until at least the end of the 19th century.  Buildings line the s and w sides. The west side contains, amongst other buildings, The Outer Gate that leads to the city centre, the former chapel of St Thomas a Beckett, and a fine terrace of brick houses built by the Earl Fitzwilliam in 1726.  The long range of buildings on the s, partly Medieval and partly 19th century, contains the proud, Medieval Bishop's gate that leads naturally enough to the Bishop's Palace.  Both gate and palace were originally built to serve the Medieval abbots. The north side is mainly occupied by the stout garden wall of The Deanery.  Alas as a piece of urbanism the Minster Close doesn't quite work; the city intrudes a little and there isn't enough enclosure and the space just bleeds away in places.  In the 18th century the effect was perhaps quite different for the western part of the great lawn was planted as an orchard.
       North and east of the cathedral is an extensive churchyard: the Lay Folks, and Monks Cemeteries. Beyond that is a ring of large secluded houses for the cathedral clergy.
       Finally to the south, and my favourite part, are the remains of the monastic buildings with all sorts Post Reformation houses built in and around them.  The cloisters were destroyed in the Civil War by those in pursuit of the Second Coming, leaving only the w and s walls standing; the entire e range including chapter house has gone and a later house occupies the site. However the space, sometimes referred to as Laurel Court, remains, and it this amalgam, this bricolage, of architectural styles and periods, narrow lanes and enclosed public spaces that is so deeply satisfying. I am reminded of those beautiful topographical watercolours, by the likes of Cotman and Turner of Medieval buildings as they were around 1800, before they were restored by those searching for architectural purity.  

     And that m'dears is yer lot for now on Peterborough as in Laurel Court my phone died and you'll have to wait until my summer trip to London for pictures of the cathedral interior.


























* Woodcooks was a proper sort of place, with a shop on the ground floor selling baked goods & confectionery, and a wood-panelled cafe upstairs with white linen tablecloths on the tables.  It was, as far as I managed to discover, one of two branches in Peterborough.  There were other branches in Oakham, Uppingham and Stamford, and much further east in King's Lynn.  The Bridge St building was itself a bit of a confection being, to judge from photographs, a Victorian version of 'Merrie England' with half-timbering, oriel windows, and steep gables.  I don't know when it closed exactly - late 60s/early 70s?  The building was subsequently demolished and some wretchedly utilitarian structure put up in its place. For shame.