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.