A Lark Ascending

Missed this when it came out. Enjoyed it. Got confused when Pierre from War and Peace appeared as a nasty overseer.

Disc 2. Great with mid morning tea and tiffin. The servants like it too.

Malija - Liam Noble (piano); Mark Lockheart (saxophones); Jasper Hoiby (bass) at Bonnington Theatre Nottingham Beautiful concert from this UK jazz super group (I know, jazz is a small pond and British jazz even smaller, but...). Intricate original compositions - not the standard circling of 12 or 16 bars but a real sense of variation being written into the music. Then, improvising that didn't just happen with the soloist in the spotlight - Noble in particular seemed to be in constant flux even when Lockheart was to the fore. Reminded me of (and almost certainly inspired by) the Giuffre trios of the 50s and 60s. All carried out at a quiet to moderate volume which allowed all the instruments to be heard in a beautiful acoustic. The word 'energy' gets bandied about in approval to a lot of jazz; well this group are in a different area. Passion, yet, but they never felt the need to flex their chest wigs. A shoe-in for ECM, I'd have thought (though Edition records seem to be colonising that area quite nicely in the UK). On tour all over the UK in the next few months. Highly recommended.

Suspect you had to be there at the time for that last one!

It'll be good...if the things she played at a concert in November are anything to go by. Seeing her again next week (I'm not stalking her....she happens to be playing somewhere where I have free evening between two other concerts).

Derbyshire, England - A horse wears a warm coat following snowfall on the hilltops between Glossop and Buxton http://www.theguardian.com/news/gallery/2016/feb/03/photo-highlights-of-the-day-a-rush-hour-raccoon-a-duchess-glasses As I was driving to Sheffield yesterday you could see the Derbyshire hills behind sprinkled with snow. Snow free in Sheffield and north Notts. What a difference a bit of altitude can make.

Haven't heard her more recent records (too many releases, so little time). ********************************* Some strong Brit-folky releases for late winter/early spring. Just out: Songs of Separation is stunning. Yet to hear the new Leveret. And up soon... And a third album from Maz O'Connor. A young singer with one of those voices and good song writing instincts - she's been in the 'new talent deserving attention' slot for a few years. I suspect this might see her moving into the mid-league of the folk world (assuming it's good!). Jim Moray is involved - hope he hasn't swamped her in synths!

Compelling story telling. Kept me gripped throughout - I liked the way it followed the arc of an investigation from its early uncertainties through the growing tensions as the scale of the issues became apparent. No unnecessary side-plots either.

Tim O'Brien at the Greystones, Sheffield First stumbled on O'Brien headlining a night at the Cambridge Folk Festival with his sister and band 20 years back and have more or less kept up with his records since. Wonderful performer able to charm a crowd all by himself for a couple of hours (with some vocal help from his partner on a few songs). Bluegrass slanted Americana - songs from that tradition and originals. Superb guitarist (he talked at length about Doc Watson, a big influence). Also played mandolin and, best of all, scratchy/scrapey old time fiddle. Delightful concert played to an enthusiastic sell out audience.

I'm not holding my breath. The only Santana record I've enjoyed since the mid-70s is Stevie Winwoods's 'About Time'.

BBC 4: Music Moguls: Masters of Pop (Episode 3) Final episode on the role of PR. Ended wondering about all my ideas of musical value - you tend to be aware of the more blatant examples of hype but as a number of commentators mentioned, PR is only working when you don't see it. Covers from the way Hendrix's image was managed to break him in the US up to Taylor Swift today. Has you thinking about not just they way that PR promotes the careers of living pop/rock performers but also the way record companies manipulate image with their back catalogues of 'classic' artists in jazz, classical, folk etc. Interesting bit on how New Labour learnt many of its promotional techniques from studying pop PR. Otherwise still following Deutschland 83 (remains utterly improbable though gets a nice feel for the time), War and Peace (enjoyable but, as expected, quart into a pint pot - situations that develop over many, many pages in the book pass by in seconds), Spin (enjoyable though nowhere ear as good as Spiral [must be 'Vortex' next]) and The Good Wife Series 6 (which I'm also enjoying).

Don't know about those 'second thoughts'. Did Brahms revise the serenades? I'm quite new to Brahms - although I've known three of the symphonies (1, 3, 4) since the 70s he's someone who never clicked with me until three or four years back (a chance hearing of the Violin Concerto on the radio).

One of the beauties of digital photography is that you can take several at different settings without it costing you an arm and a leg as it did back in the olden days....sometimes it happens! New England: one of the Earth’s greatest spectacles http://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2016/feb/02/new-england-one-of-the-earths-greatest-spectacles-in-pictures Wrong season, I know. But these shots are beautiful - there's a wonderful sequence at the bottom of the page linked above showing a single tree across the seasons. Very Monet (well, on a longer time scale!)!

Evocative pictures, Steve. I share your preference for small venues like that (regardless of the type of music being performed). I've only been to a stadium once - you'd not get me back even if you promised me the Beatles doing Revolver.

I meant the Serenades themselves are 'light' by comparison with the grander orchestral pieces (intentionally so...that's what serenades were). I just find the first in particular wonderfully mellifluous. I know Brahms was a great champion of Dvorak - I'm not sure of the chronology but I wonder if there might have been an influence on Brahms there in the sense that I often hear something deeply rural in Dvorak. What is odd is the serenades were traditionally night music - these pieces just seem to evoke Arcadia in all its daylight glory. But I'm undoubtedly reading that onto the music. These Bax quartets really are something. Over the years I've acquired rather more Bax than is sane without ever being fully convinced by him. Some pieces I love ('November Woods') but more often than not I find myself really liking certain passages, then feeling disengaged by what feels like filler. The smaller scale here seems to really suit him.

This will break your heart: A 7 year old from the gypsy community recorded in the 50s. Shirley Collins chose it on one of the programmes mentioned above. Less than 2 minutes - pure bliss.

Talking of tough slogs I'm finding 'Moby Dick' hard going. Can only manage it 10 pages at a time so I'll be lucky to finish it by the summer. There are times when I get really engaged....and then you get chapters of deviation that go on for ever. I think I can see why it has a literary reputation - it seems very modern in places, almost changing its form for a chapter or two e.g. the section where he has the entire crew commenting almost like in an opera. Seems like a book to study rather than read for pleasure. I vaguely recall DH Lawrence writing very enthusiastically about the book. I'm determined to finish it having given up once before - unusual for me as I generally won't persevere after a certain point with books I'm not enjoying (unless it's something I have to read for professional reasons. No longer an issue!)

Disc 1: Douze Notations; Sonatine; 1st Sonata; Le Visage Nuptial Very taken by the first two pieces, drifted in the third and lost the plot completely in the last. Think I might have been helped in the first by seeing a performance last year with a very good programme note. Anyway, this set is for the long haul. I'm sure this box was on Amazon as a download for a while - seems to have vanished. Hope they've not decided to limit circulation to make it collectible. Should be there for the curious indefinitely. I love these two pieces, especially the first. They don't seem to get out much - probably considered 'light' compared with the symphonies (What? No Great Utterances?!). You can hear the roots of some of Mahler's more bucolic moments here; even had me thinking of Elgar in things like the Serenade for Strings. Timed perfectly after a heavy fall of rain and then the sun emerging.

I only read Schnabel's version.

War and Peace is not a difficult book - just long. Until the last 200 or so pages (can't be exact - it's 40 years since I read it). There Tolstoy shifts off the story to a long philosophical treatise. I got through about half of that section and then admitted defeat. A pity as I'd made it that far (mainly on trains going to interviews). I really enjoyed the bulk of it, especially the depictions of battlefield chaos and the fog of war that enveloped everyone from ordinary soldier up to the supposed tacticians. I felt 'Anna Karenina', which I read just before, had the edge just because it had a unity to it without that preachy voice at the end. I don't re-read many books but I'd like to read them both again...maybe the end of W&P will make more sense at 60 rather than 21!

Especially enjoyed 2. Sounded bizarrely like Bartok in the opening movement!

One neoclassical piece; and one bit of 70s multimedia avant garde post-modernism. Interesting music. BBC 4 TV: Pierre Boulez at the BBC: Master and Maverick Seems like a programme cobbled together in the last month - clips from the BBC woven into a narrative with Tom Service wandering around the BBC and then London in between segments. Interesting if nothing particularly new or incisive (though I'd never heard the story of his being arrested for a few hours in Switzerland in 2001 as a terrorist suspect, related to the old 'blowing up the opera houses' comment). Some nice clips of his Roundhouse Proms in the early 70s - a Ligeti piece with hurled tea tray (the interpretation there was particularly fine). Covered his career as composer, champion of the contemporary and conductor of more established repertoire. He was, as it happens, the bus driver at the first classical concert I ever went to back in 1974 - Mahler 3. I feel like I should say something like 'such touch, such tone' but I hardly remember anything about it.

I've read that Cumming's book (and another by him) - enjoyed them. The only Sampson I've read was 'Winter in Madrid' about the Spanish Civil War and that one put me off him - think it was an improbable love story which wound me up (had the same reaction to 'Birdsong' at the start though that one got better once it got to the trenches). Furst is superb. His books cover the 30s and 40s but have the good sense to explore the nooks and crannies of the period rather than aiming for the big events. So you end up in odd places like Bulgaria and Macedonia as well as Paris, Britain, Russia etc. You can read them in any order as they don't follow a chronological or thematic sequence though they do overlap in places - I think I'm right in thinking that at some point in every book a situations happens in a bar in Paris with a bullet hole in a mirror.