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.

Drones

Paddy Ashdown, writing in The Times last week, was in favour of the use of drone missiles by the Americans for what I thought were very good reasons. This is war that is being fought after all and these drones are used sparingly to target terrorists though, unfortunately, civilians are also killed. But, he argued, they are not killed in great numbers and we must understand that in all wars people who are non-combatants do get killed. They have, he went on, been very effective in getting rid of some of the most "important" leaders of the various groups that come under the name of Al Queda.
You get the feeling from the article that this is the only effective way of dealing with such abominable people who kill indiscrinately in great numbers - indeed, the greater the number of civilians that they can eliminate, the better they like it.
But there are dangers. One is specified in a letter to Time magazine this week. Faroud Rahman, writing from Karachi puts the case that " a good number of innocent and unarmed civilians have lost their precious lives, yet the relentless attacks continue. The US is indirectly creating more militants after each bombing that does not wipe out its intended target. Please stop the heinous act; halt the carnage."
Another danger, closer to home perhaps is expressed in another letter to Time."Drone technology is spreading fast worldwide and one never knows when or how it will land in the wrong hands." (The inference is that it is temporarily in the right hands.) "The consequence could be dreadful..... Imagine what extremists could do if they managed to possess or control a fleet of armed drones.... Is there any pre-empting measure to contain proliferation?"

The News

I have to agree with a writer in yesterday's Times that she experienced great pleasure a few days ago when there was a strike of journalists at the BBC; it meant that many news programmes were cancelled or shortened. She nostalgically looked back to the times (of her youth no doubt) when there only a few news broadcasts compared to today when there are many. Not only many on regular terrestial channels but on others, not to mention the 24 hour news channels. I can look back further to a time when there was no TV at all: we had radio only and my memory informs me that there were even fewer news broadcasts. I recall one fifteen minute item at mid-day and one in the early evening and one at nine o'clock at night. I too am nostalgic about those times for I feel there's just too much news on TV; and not only is it on all, or most, channels but it is virtually the same news. One might, rarely, have a scoop but it's soon picked up by the rest.
The nine o'clock news to me was a time of a great treat: I think it lasted five minutes or so and it was followed by a serial version of "Les Miserables". We, my brother and I, would wait for the beginning after the news had finished with baited breath. It was always the same beginning: a voice - "My name is Jean Valjean...." It was the wonderfully sonorous voice of Henry Ainley. That's all I recall of the serial, Ainley's voice and the first few words, every Sunday evening for weeks on end. I have just read Wickipedia about Henry Ainlee: married three times (or more), five children (or more) two of them by a woman who was not a wife. Also, he seemed to have had a passion for the young Laurence Olivier which was not, according to Olivier's son, reciprocated.
I believe he liked his drink quite a lot and, if memory serves me right, his acting career's end was the subject of a play by Emlyn Williams.

Beethoven

I used to know a man who had a friend who "collected performances of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony". That is, he attended every performance of the work he could. I used to feel this way about Beethoven's Third Symphony and once thought: "that's what I'll do, collect performances of The Third." I never did. For one thing there weren't all that many performances in my neck of the woods; especially then, some twenty or thirty years ago when the nearest concert hall was in Bristol - in Cardiff there'd sometimes be a concert in The New Theatre (wholly inadequate) and occasionally they'd use The Sophia Gardens Pavilion (more inadequate); it wasn't until they built St David's Hall that good quality concerts came to Cardiff.
Anyway, Beethoven's Third was my favourite then. It isn't now: I prefer The Seventh. But I like them all. I think you could call me a Beethoven freak.
So it came as quite a shock to hear Howard Goodall's comment about Beethoven on Desert Island Discs a couple of months ago.
Now Howard Goodall is presently giving a series of  TV programmes on music: "Howard Goodall's Story of Music" and James Delingpole in The Spectator last week wrote this about it: "Let's not beat about the bush: Howard Goodall's Story of Music is landmark television, a documentary series that deserves to rank with such unimpeachable classics as Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation"......
As you may have gathered, I enjoy classical music.... some classical music.... not all. Not Berg or Webern or Stockhausen but Bach, Mozart and, most of all Beethoven.
So, as I said, it came as something of a shock to hear Howard Goodall on Desert Island Discs say what he did. When asked if there was any composer he didn't like, he said: "Well I'm not too keen on Beethoven." Or it might have been stronger than that: "I don't much like Beethoven." Why didn't he come out with what he really meant and say "I hate Beethoven" because that's how I interpreted his remark.
He doesn't like Beethoven! I can't listen to someone talking about music who doesn't like Beethoven.
Which is why I didn't even start to watch his series.

Valley of Song

Yesterday I went to see a film that was made in 1953 but which I felt gave the impression that it was set much earlier - about 1927. It was about a small town in the South Wales valleys which had a choir that was about to embark, as they did every year, on a performance of "The Messiah". But the choirmaster had recently died,. However, conveniently, a former inhabitant of the town was retiring from London to become the insurance agent and who had had experience with conducting London choirs. Why not conduct ours? asked the local Minister of the chapel. He seemed reluctant until the Minister mentioned the words "The Messiah" when his eyes lit up: of course he would be thrilled to come to their aid. However, one of his first duties was to distribute solo parts to four members of the choir and he made a fatal error of not choosing Mrs Lloyd for the contralto soloist, choosing instead a Mrs Davies. Feelings were hurt, quarrels began, and eventually turmoil: the whole village separated into two tribes: either you were for the Lloyd's or the Davies's.
I remember not this film but the radio play on which it was based: "Choir Practice". I also recall it being described as "a storm in a Welsh teacup".
I enjoyed the film a lot: heaps of homely fun and some fine singing from the London Welsh choir (incidentally my wife's uncle was a member at that time). It was no masterpiece but as we all know, some masterpieces can be difficult to take, especially film masterpieces - I am thinking particularly of those from Sweden some fifty or so years ago. No, it was not a masterpiece; it had no depth, it was rather silly at times and it depicted the Welsh as comic people which, I suppose, could be regarded as "condescending". But I ignored all that deep thought and sat back and enjoyed it like one does a cream cake.
It brought to mind a matter which we had to solve when putting on a panto at the college I worked in. I always wrote the script and a chap called Dave produced it. We did "Cinderella" one year and "Jack and the beanstalk" and "Sleeping Beauty" and so on. And every year the boss's secretary played the female lead because she could act a bit, sing a bit and, most required quality of all, she was pretty. But prettiness fades with age. And now we were going to do "Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs". "Who'll play Snow White?" I asked Dave. He thought deeply about for it about two seconds and said "there's a girl in the new intake who'll be ideal." I said "What about the boss's sec.? She'll have to be told." "I'll tell her," he said. But I knew he wouldn't. He couldn't. No one could, it would be too unkind. So no one told her. But it must have been "in the air"; she must have realised herself that she was too old for the part. She came to us one day and said she'd like to play The Queen. "No, you can't do that, Snow White surely" we said. "I insist," she said.
Problem solved. No Lloyds versus Davies's. Peace. Panto on with six male members of staff on their knees singing "Hi, ho, hi, ho ....." Big success. OK, little success.