Arnold Bax

I bought a book from Amazon recently called "The Symphony"; a set of chapters on great composers of the form: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Mendelsshon, Schumann, Liszt, Franck, Bruckner, Brahms, Borodin, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Mahler, Elgar, Sibelius, Vaughan-Williams, Rachmaninov and one other whom I did not expect to see there - Arnold Bax.
The book was first published by Penguin in 1949 which is about the time I first bought it. It was on my shelves for a long time but when I looked a few years ago it had gone, I don't know where. So I decided I needed it again when I recently heard Vaughan-Williams' second symphony, known as "The London". No doubt there are many other books from which I could have obtained the information I needed but I suddenly had a nostalgic desire to look again at this book.
It's very good. It's not written by one person but has different authors for each chapter.
As I say, I did not expect to see Sir Arnold Bax's name there; I can't recall that his name was there but, obviously, since it's the same book, not a revised edition, it must have been.
I didn't even know that he wrote symphonies. Elgar, yes. V-Williams, yes. But not Bax. I knew only one piece by Bax and that I think is his most popular work: Tintagel, a tone poem about a castle on the coast of Cornwall. Can't say I like it much. But I must try out a symphony or two of his - from seven - on Youtube.
His name came to mind last week when I watched David Lean's "Oliver Twist": Bax wrote the incidental music for the film. Jolly good too.

Wagner

Sitting here last evening looking at the blank screen of my computer and wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life - as one does when one gets to my age - I felt rather down in the mouth. I needed something to lift my spirits - I had already read On Line Daily Mail but that hadn't helped much, in fact it had done the opposite - when I suddenly had the bright idea to seek on Youtube a certain Wagnerian "number" with the title "Siegfried's Burial March". Now you wouldn't think that that piece of music from "The Ring" would do anything but make my depression even greater than it was. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong again. Try it for yourself - the Klaus Tennstedt's version with The London Philharmonic Orchestra. It is absolutely thrilling, moving and it lifts the spirits as no other work can do. For me at least.
But what can I say about the work better than Thomas Mann in his essay "The Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner".
"The overpowering accents of the music that accompanies Siegfried's funeral cortege no longer tell of the woodland boy who set out to learn the meaning of fear; they speak to our emotions of what is really passing behind the lowering veils of mist: it is the sun-hero himself who lies on the bier, slain by the pallid forces of darkness - and there are hints in the text to support what we feel in the music: "A wild boar's fury", it says, and : "Behold the cursed boar," says Gunther, pointing to Hagen, "who slew this noble flesh." The words take us back at a stroke to the very earliest picture-dreams of mankind. Tammuz and Adonis, slain by the boar, Osiris and Dionysus, torn asunder to come again as the Crucified One, whose flank must be ripped open by a Roman spear in order that that the world might know Him - all things that ever were and ever shall be, the whole world of beauty sacrificed and murdered by the wintry wrath, all is contained within this single glimpse of myth."

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.