A Lark Ascending

I've only ever had a peripheral interest in Joplin's music but can't resist a film about music in the 60s/70s. Thought this was excellently done - told the tale in a plain and simple manner via the people who knew her. What a sad, sad life. The pressure to conform with teenage social norms (reinforced by commerce) can be crushing.

No 4. Hard to put out. Plus the three tone poems.

Regal

Macdonald wrote a wonderful series of books in the 70s/80s based around her interviews with veterans of the Great War, aware that they weren't going to be around much longer. I bought her 'They Called it Passchendaele' at the Sanctuary Wood museum outside Ypres on the first school trip I assisted with there around 1980. Had a huge effect on me. I'd been expecting a new book on 1915 last year but apart from several on Gallipoli there was nothing (whereas 1914 and 1916 have seen torrents, as will 1917 and 1918 I've no doubt). So I got a second hand copy of this one I'd not previously read. As ever a superb, very detailed account built round eyewitness testimony with Macdonald placing it in context of the wider events. She tracks the changing mood from the belief at the start that it would all be over soon to the realisation by December that it was going to be long and very costly. Neuve Chapelle, Second Ypres, Gallipoli and Loos are the main focus but you get interesting domestic coverage (including the awful troop train crash near Gretna). Macdonald was writing before the revisionism of the 90s began to present an alternative view to the 'Lions Led By Donkeys' interpretation; yet she is still very even handed. Her heart is with the troops, she points out the errors made by the generals but does not resort to the standard caricatures. A long read but utterly absorbing.

Collection of chamber and instrumental pieces from a young British composer. Good notes too - brief descriptions helping you see the structure and intent. This one lost me completely. Sat down to follow the libretto but by the end of Act I I hadn't a clue what was happening - even Barry states in the notes 'As to what the Intelligence Park is about I have no fixed ideas.' Played II and III without trying to focus. There's clearly some very skilled and intricate writing here but the singing is so shrill and agitated that I found it hard to take in. One to chalk down to experience, I suspect.

The final three parts. One of the lesser known Britten operas - the critics weren't too keen when first performed. I find it a very strong piece - clear narrative, the pace rapid, varied colours from full orchestra to small groups of instruments, strong themes of ambition and loyalty, love and duty, youth and ageing. There's a very beautiful song sung by the Earl of Essex in the first act, modelled on Elizabethan music, that reappears in the orchestra (as Elizabeth signs Essex's death warrant) in all its richness, the strings soaring upwards. One of those hair on the back of the neck moments.

Leveret (The Greystones, Sheffield) Sam Sweeney (fiddle), Rob Harbron (concertina) and Andy Cutting (melodeon) English folk music's Beaux Arts Trio (though no penguin suits). Dance tunes slowed down a bit, allowed to breath away from the strict tempo requirements of social dance. Simple AABB things in the main but carefully arranged to bring out a range of colours as they cycle through with restrained embellishment. They'd be a shoe in for the soundtrack of the next Hardy TV adaptation or film.

The Maw is a beauty - two string pieces, one with a featured cello. That strained chromaticism you get in late Mahler though quite un-Mahler-like in sound. Reminiscent in places of the Britten of the Frank Bridge Variations or the end of the Nocturne....Britten was ahead of the game in Mahler fascination. Maw is a wonderful composer who seems to be rather forgotten since his death - his massive 'Odyssey' is a tremendous piece of severe yet accessible music. Talking of Britten, he must have been familiar with Sancta Civitas...you can hear the War Requiem in its layered used of different choirs, trumpet fanfares and vocalists. I've had the Pohjola a few years - don't know him other than this. Hasn't really registered - very Shostakovich like in the faster music. The Bliss is from his enfant terrible days just after the First World War. Sound utterly unthreatening now - more in line with what was happening in France than RVW etc.

Not one of the BBC's better moments. Implausible plot line; lots of miserable people getting hysterical and shouting at one another. The only people I recall smiling were the police officer and her daughter. Watchable but forgettable.

Interesting that of all the areas of contemporary 'classical' music it's choral music that seems to have the greatest popular reach (well, maybe film music and minimalism too). Suspect it's tied in with the fact that it's also the area of music where the general public are most likely to be participants. Composers working in that field are more likely to write things people want to sing rather than things they feel they ought to hear. The music here is conventional (I've read many an aesthete get on his/her high horse about Lauridsen and similar composers) but I find it engaging and moving. Must be even more so if you are actually singing it. My favourite choral piece (Glagolitic). I didn't initially take to choral music but hearing this at a Prom in the mid-70s knocked my socks off.

Popular science book explaining recent (at the time of publication) research on how the brain processes music and delivers its pleasures. Very clear about what is commonly accepted, what open to competing theories, what is still speculation with only a limited evidence base. Written in a straightforward and unpretentious way for the lay person (though my ageing brain couldn't lay down the memory traces on the bits of the brain and what they did in order to make full sense of what was explained five pages later!). Nice to read about the impact of music in this matter of fact way - we tend to discuss it in a terminology that goes back to 19thC Romanticism (at least!).

Really enjoyed this. Heart-warming, sentimental fairy tale of an alternative family forced to confront the real world. Though they're not as 'alternative' as dad likes to think - his cultural choices for the kids would be standard things to be seen reading or listening to at any of The Man's expensive private schools.

The third three parts.

Two very entertaining discs of recent music. First has some very attractive small group pieces with prominent winds; second is more zany in a Looney Tunes sort of way. (Apologies for the size of the second image) I keep reading about the 'more severe' style of King Priam compared with earlier Tippett but this strikes me as the most immediately appealing of his operas. Maybe it's the more straightforward plot - Tippett's other operas are a bit odd, to put it mildly (especially the hippy-ish later ones). A fair sized orchestra but only occasionally unleashed in full - he makes marvellous use of solo instruments for extensive periods. Some beautiful guitar accompanying Achilles sulking in his tent.

No. 3. My favourite. Danish Vaughan Williams. Nice programming of three pieces from the same world but with contrasting forces.

The second three parts.

Corrie Dick's Impossible Things (Lescar Hotel, Sheffield) Felix Higginbottom (percussion), Conor Chaplin (bass), Matt Robinson (piano), Joe Webb (organ), Alice Zawadzki (voice, violin), Joe Wright (saxes), George Crowley (saxes), Laura Jurd (trumpet), Corrie Dick (drums) Excellent young band, mainly in their 20s (at a guess). Song based with carefully constructed arrangements. Rather than the usual jazz thing of skeletal arrangements allowing the soloists to cut free here a lot of care was taken to construct written musical narratives out of which the solos could emerge before dissolving back into whole. Yet avoided that over-precision of a lot of larger group arranged jazz - they know how to make the written themes ragged. Had me thinking at different times Carla Bley/Liberation Music Orchestra, the Ogun bands of the 70s, Loose Tubes, even Robert Wyatt in the unusually structured songs. Laura Jurd is probably the best known name there - very much a rising star with a foot both in the jazz and contemporary classical world. Dick and Chaplin are also in her marvellous Dinosaur band. Venue is Sheffield's other main jazz centre, not as high profile as Sheffield Jazz (and only £8 a ticket). Very impressed - another back room of the pub situation which I prefer to formal concert halls, I will be back.

Op 114 of the latter.

First three parts. The Dove is a real beauty. Written in memory of a young man who drowned. Very much of the world of Britten's 'Spring Symphony'. I don't know its performance history but I would imagine this could be very popular. The forces needed - orchestra, choirs, vocal soloists- probably prevent it from being a regular with local community music groups. But it's immediate enough to get a place there.

Where you going in Devon? Overcast here in the morning but cleared in the afternoon if a bit hazy. Still very hot.

Dave O'Higgins with the Andrew Wood Trio (Worksop Library, Nottinghamshire) Jazz in Worksop shock! I've been here 25 years and this is only the second jazz concert I've attended here. There are half a dozen a year run by the same organisation that does the Nottingham gigs but this is the first I've been to (Tuesday night was nigh on impossible in my working days). The library is actually a nice venue - a new, open plan building with the gig off to one side in the cafe area and plenty to read if you get bored. O'Higgins was very complimentary about the acoustic. The trio are a local (to Nottinghamshire) so this was not a working band situation. Standards and a few of O'Higgins' own tunes. Nothing to shake the rafters but a very nice evening of boppish/hard-boppish/mainstream jazz. And I could walk there in 15 minutes. Audience of about 50 which the organiser was very pleased with. Worksop is not exactly a centre of arty-fartyness (market-come-ex-mining town). New word of the night (thank you Mr O'Higgins for the explanation) - never knew that a composition like 'Ornithology' built over the chord structure of a well known tune was called a contrafact. Hearing jazz in a library clearly has an extra layer of education.