Vaughan-Williams

Sir Thomas Beecham made many a sarcastic remark during his time as conductor of orchestras but none, I think, quite so nasty as the one he made about Ralph Vaughan-Williams's music: words to the effect that while a young man he composed a rather pleasant piece of music when he wrote his Variations on a theme of Thomas Tallis but that "he's been writing the same work ever since".
While this is shear ill will towards a worthy musical craftsman I have to say that there is in it an inkling of truth, not so much that he wrote the same work ever afterwards but that his style is very much that of the early piece. There is something unsatisfying about Vaughan-Williams's compositions, particularly his symphonies.
This week I attended a concert in whch Andrew Davies and the Philharmonia orchestra played his 2nd symphony which I don't think I have ever heard before and was surprised to read that it was one of his most popular works. Now it couldn't have received a betrter performance that that given here since Davies is a great champion of British music ([perhaps it would be more accurate to say "English music" since there is very little Welsh, Scottish or Irish music of a classical/symphonic kind) and the Philhramionia orchestra is one of the best in the world but.... well I was left with a feeling of being somewhat let down. I could see what the composer was doing in introducing snatches of themes but, unlike Sibelius, they did not come together in what I call "the big tune". There were a lot of little intros to tunes but never a culmination into something big, whistle-able, thrilling as in say, Sibelius's 1st and 2nd symphonies.
Maybe Vaughan-Williams worked better with other people tunes as with his variations on a theme of Thomas Tallis or with his Greesleeves with its tune from an original folk tune (though some say Henry 8th wrote it).
One of the problems of coming away from a concert with the snatches of his tunes in your mind is that they stay there for some time. I am still toodle-whodling and humming certain phrases but, like those in the symphony they rarely get anywhere.

Mrs Thatcher

I am Thatchurated: the Telegraph is full of her, the Times too; every where I look I see her face, young, middle-aged, old. Thatcherated, up to here (a point above my head) fed up with it all, the tributes, the what-a-wonderful-woman encomiums.
Mrs Thatcher was not a likeable woman. She was a sort of  female machine, a robotic creature with certain missions in her head and nothing was going to stop her seeing them through. Nothing: not miners and their families, not her colleagues who probably despised her as much as she despised them; not anyone daft enough to disagree with her - because she was right and everyone else who didn't agree with her was wrong. She could not compromise on anything because she was always right and they were wrong. She had no feeling for people, no empathy. At times she seemed to sympathise with ordinary people but this was always over trivial matters.
But she got certain things done for which we have to be grateful: she took on the unions which were just about getting completely out of control and won so that they became a spent force politically. She fought a war with a dictator who'd have over-run The Falklands and probably kicked the British out of there. And she helped Reagan bring down Communist Russia which I once believed would last for ever.
But she did all these things with a coldness that was as unfeeling as a boa constrictor.
Many feel she wrecked industry in this country, leaving parts of the North of England destitude.
She ordered the sinking of the Belgrano with all those young men on board. Maybe that was a turning point in the war but, I believe, she felt no remorse.
The odd thing is that while I dislike the woman I feel that she may have saved the country from open revolution - I believe it had got to that point when she became Prime Minister and I don't believe there was anyone else capable of facing up to it.

Rebecca West

There is a new biography published about Rebecca West. I can't imagine many people wanting to read it since Rebecca West is not well known these days. I know a few small things about her: she wrote a famous report of The Nuremberg Trials of the Nazi war criminals; she had a long affair with H.G.Wells in her twenties (when she was a "new" woman in the style and manners of a Shaw heroine - though her name Rebecca West is a pseudonym and is taken from Rosmersolm by Ibsen) from which resulted a son whom she neglected and who, in turn, got to hate her; she wrote many novels none of which are read now (I guess); I once read one of her novels, "There is no Conversation", and thought it pretty dreadful.
I do recall this very intelligent oldish woman on TV a long time ago, in The Brains Trust I believe, a formidable lady, tweedy in costume, informing us that she knew how Bernard Shaw had come to write his play "Saint Joan"; she maintained that Shaw's wife left books about Joan littered around the house, Shaw kept picking them up and glancing at them etc etc. Eureka! Shaw writes "St Joan". I only half believed it.

Thrush

I have not seen a thrush in our garden for about eight years; today I saw one, a rather large, stout one that stood on the top of a hedge for some twenty seconds. He (or she) looked as if it was studying something, it had an almost serious expression on its face. Heaps of speckles on its chest.
There used to be heaps of them in our garden eight or so years ago. They ate all the red currants which I couldn't bother to cover - anyway they probably enjoyed them more than I would have because I never knew what to with red currants except make jam out of them and that's a tedious job which, in my case, always resulted in disaster - too soft, too hard, too something.
Then, suddenly, the next season there were none. But there were, and are, plenty of magpies. If they don't eat chicks they certainly eat eggs; so they probably ate all the young thrushes and none came back. Until now.
Welcome wise thrush which sings his song twice over..... Hah yes:

"Hark! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops - at the bent spray's edge -
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never would recapture
The first, fine careless rapture!"

Amateurs

Matt6hew Parris wrote a nice piece in The Spectator last week: he attended a concert given by the Chesterfield Symphony Orchestra and was surprised that he enjoyed it so much. He had the impression, before he went, that it would be sort of OK but not much more than that; after all "the demise of local performance looks so strong" - before broadcasting, the internet, before easy transport to the nation's great venues, local amateur groups performing music or theatre was something to look forward to. But now? Who'd want to hear second rate performances rather than first rate ones - on Radio 3 or You Tube or on CD? Well it seems that a lot of people still do.
You just have to put up on Google a list of amateur dramatic companies near where you live to realise that things are going well. OK, they don't do some of the great works - probably not much Shakespeare being done but what they do is likeable and often well attended.
When I was a young man many moons ago, the local drama group in Blackwood, South Wales did perform some quite heavy stuff. I remember them doing Shaw's "St Joan", Macbeth", a Greek tragedy, Strinberg's "The Father". And they were not exceptional.
I happen to write plays for amateur groups; I get some published on line where, of course, they are advertised world wide. I have had plays perrformed in America, Australia, Canada as well as in this country. I have only ever seen one production - of my short play "The Return of Lady Bracknell" at a place near Evesham. I thought it quite well done.
But performances are never quite as good as the one that you have in mind when you've wrttten it and I'm afraid it will always be something of a disappointment. I won't be going again though it was pleasant staying in a very good hotel in Evesham. But the weekend was spoilt to a certain extent when a police letter came a few weeks later telling me that I had exceeded the speed limit (I was doing a mere 36 mph for God's sake!) and was fined £60 with 3 points off my licence. O yes, I also left my M&S umbrella in a pub.

Bach

"Many people feel that he floats outside history altogether. That's why listening to Bach confers a mysterious sense of coming home, as if he's both the origin and the centre of classical music. All the great composers who come after him acknowledge that." Thus writes Ivan Hewitt, the Daily Telgraph's brilliant music critic (but I wish they wouldn't show his face above the feature - turns me off my gruel).
I have a slight problem with Bach. It's not quite the same problem Bernard Levin had when he wrote that all his music was in the minor key; this assertion was soundly confuted by a prominent music critic of the day (?) who called Levin's statement bunk. Well, replied Levin, it always sounded like minor key music. I know what he means about some of the music, especially the religious music, the Passions, the Masses and so on - Hewitt mentions his own music professor grumbling that "Bach is always on his knees". But surely not the concertos, the suites, the Brandenburg concertos for example. What's more lively than the last movement of the double concerto for violins and orchestra?
Hewitt mentions "all the great composers who came after him" held him in high esteem - not Stravinsky early  in his career, though he later praised him. I'm not so sure about that; many of them seemed to despise anything that smacked of classical form, rather like modern poets dislike rhyme. I can't imagine Schoenberg liking or even approving of Bach since Schoenberg developed a form that defied the classical form.
I have done my best with Schoenberg - and Berg and Webern - and I'm not going to waste any more of my time on him. I feel in sympathy with the music critic who listened to Schoenberg for a while before getting to his feet and leaving the room with the words: "Enough, enough, enough".
Quite!

Hitchens

Whenever I read anything by Christopher Hitchens I feel that I haven't been educated well. He mentions authors whose works I think I know quite well but writes about them in such an elegant and stylish way that I feel inadequate to talk or write about them any more. Take his piece (a review of a book by Fred Kaplan who, if he made the mistake of reading the review, might have decided to give up writing now) on Mark Twain. He brings up stuff that I never knew yet I have read a bit of Twain at various times in my life: "Tom Sawyer" and "Hucklebury Finn" for example; "Quaker City" and "Innocents abroad" - never heard of them. Then there's Twain's atheism. Never imagined he was so hostile to organised religion. Hitchens writes; "What is it about Twain that made him not just an agnostic or an atheist but a probable sympathiser with the Devil's party?"
The review of Kaplan's book is followed by a review of Upton Sinclair's most famous novel, "The Jungle". Now, I read this book a long time ago and it had the desired effect on me of making me believe that being "on the left" was the right (excuse the pun) place to be. Hitchens described Sinclair as a "socialist realist" which, he admits, is a bit unkind since the two words put together "evoke the tractor opera, the granite-jawed proletarian sculptor, the cultural and literary standards of Commissar Zhdanov...". He compares the work with Dickens and Zola expressing a notion that it is a greater work of damning the powers that be, or were anyway, than either of those two writers were capable of. Mmmm! "Hard Times" ? well, yes, I agree. But "Germinal"? Contentious surely.
Upton Sinclair has gone out of fashion - though there was a film made a few years ago based on one of his novels, "Oil": "There will be blood". Good film but too long, I thought. He's been out of fashion for some time; maybe this has to do with the advances societies have made in making working places less hell-holeish than they once were.
I wrote to Cardiff library a couple of decades ago urging them to put a few of his books on their shelves. They may have heeded what I suggested for some time later there was the complete set of his Lanny Budd books available to borrow. I borrowed one and didn't finish it.