Some years ago a friend gave me a set of two CDs of music connected with the history of Jerusalem. Their range is vast, stretching from the remote Jewish past across the centuries when Jerusalem was a Christian city and a destination of medieval pilgrims, the Arab and Ottoman city from the thirteenth century, its modern status as a city of asylum and exile, and most recently the establishment […]
Read moreAmong the plays by Shakespeare we studied in first year English at University, The Winter’s Favourite was the least well liked. Putting aside its great length, a feature scarcely likely to endear it to undergraduates, and the apparent weirdness of the plot (how seriously are we to take what seems to be a resurrection scene?), the lecturer made clear his distaste […]
Read moreAustralia and Canada are similar countries in obvious ways, and comparisons between them throw up interestingly different strengths. At a guess, Canada has a deeper intellectual life, the countries are about equal in literature, Australia excels at sport (for whatever that is worth), and it may be ahead in the level of its composers. But Canada surely reigns supreme in the performance of […]
Read moreI’ll never forget the first time I heard a performance of the setting of Psalm 50 (51), the Miserere mei, Deus, composed in the seventeenth century by Gregorio Allegri, a member of the papal choir and sung thereafter in the Capella Sistina. I was listening in another chapel, a dark one, and the soaring top line was sung by one of those boy sopranos […]
Read moreA group of friends, on the verge of leaving school, has come together for a barbeque at a campsite on the edge of town. It’s a significant time, for they are poised on the brink of independent adult life, ready to create their own identities and shape the world around them. Someone has brought a tape recorder, and as they […]
Read morePerhaps not as well known as the nearby choirs of St John’s, which certainly sings the best Evensongs in Cambridge, or King’s, which basks in the glory of incomparable architectural splendour, a concert during a tour of Australia showed the strength of the choir of Trinity. It began with Arvo Part’s marvellously fast paced Bogoroditse Djevo, that already sounds a though it has always […]
Read moreIt was wonderful hearing a product of the Queensland Conservatorium of Music who has gone on to become an international star, Piers Lane, play a number of Chopin’s piano pieces with panache and sensitivity. The concert hall was lit by candles in an attempt to suggest the ambience of a salon of the early nineteenth century that may have been more clever than convincing, […]
Read moreAll I know is that music is a sine qua non in my existence. It reinsures what I sense to be, or rather search for in the transcendental…Neither psychoanalysis nor deconstruction nor post-modernism have had anything revelatory to say about music. This is crucial. These language games of subversive decipherment, of suspicion in the wake of Nietzsche and Freud, are virtually impotent before music. […]
Read more…music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts. (T. S. Elliott) In a time of darkness the pattern of life is restored By me who make all transience seem an illusion Through inward acts, acts corresponding to music Their works of love leave words that do not end […]
Read moreIt’s always good to be introduced to a new composer, and a quartet by the Hungarian György Ligeti of 1953/54 superbly played by the Goldner Quartet proved a fascinating introduction to his work. It’s an intense piece, spare and dissonant while remaining tonal. Doubtless Ligeti’s style owes something to a need to define himself against Bartok, a towering figure in Hungarian music, but the political […]
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