Gig-a-Blog™ (Rupert Luck & Daniel Swain [again], St Anne & St Agnes )

Monday 15 October, 2007

Rupert Luck, violin; Daniel Swain, piano. Parry: Complete Series of Sonatas (2). Parry: Sonata in D Major; Vaughan Williams: Sonata in A Minor, Op 82.

I've already ranted elsewhere about how great these performers are so I won't treat you to it all over again. This is the second in their series of All Them Violin Sonatas What Parry Wrote, an enterprise which is already shaping up to be a truly splendid way of spending a few lunchtimes. I wonder how many more there are? (oops, cue Sinking Feeling ...)

Vaughan Williams:

1. Fantasia, Allegro giusto. Dark, quite stern and driving, then lyrical-but-edgy, then back to quite fast, insistent. Lyrical moments again but all quite stressed. As the programme note says, it has its rural moments, but The Lark Ascending it ain't.
2. Scherzo, Allegro furioso ma non troppo. Love that "non troppo"! To be fair, as the movement develops it turns out it's needed as a safety precaution lest the violin leave the road while cornering at high speed. This is an incredibly aggressive, in-your-face movement, and unsettling in a way I'd expect from, say, Shostakovitch. Scary stuff. Luck and Swain did a great job here.
3. Tema con variazioni, Andante - Allegro - Tempo del preludio ma tranquillo. Wonderful plainchant-type melody. I am such a sucker for this. Just brilliant. Rupert Luck is waaay down low, pushing out oodles of tone. Obviously it can't last the whole movement (chiz) so we get a higher and more complex development of this material then move off into the fast section, before arriving at a more open, almost symphonic bit which leads to a long violin cadenza. Wonderful. Interesting how this work stays a touch, or more, brittle even when it's being (on the surface at least) somewhat more warmly melodic. This is RVW in less-cuddlesome mode.

Parry:

1. Allegro. Fiery, exciting
2. Andante sostenuto. Gorgeous, wonderful singing tunes
3. Presto vivacissimo. Busy, positive, life-affirming. Just as well they ended with this rather wonderful bouncerama and not the very much more edgy and troubling Vaughan Williams.

What a revelation this Parry series is. I used to think, oh yeah, Victorian church-music guy. But these sonatas show such a different side that it's quite startling. A great recital. I can’t wait for the CD.

Gig-a-Blog™ (Anete Graudina and Aya Kawabata, St Anne & St Agnes)

Friday, 12 October 2007

To my great delight I am back among the Lunchtime Lutherans. There is nowhere I would rather be right now. Work was a bit of a stress-o-max today and I very nearly gave up on the attempt to get to this concert, but I'm very glad that I made it.

Anete Graudina (violin) and Aya Kawabata (piano) were doing today's recital, kicking off with the Grieg Sonata in Cm, op. 45. I think I didn't know this work at all but it's wonderful.

There was such passion at the end of the first movement that I expected something to spontaneously combust. Perhaps me. It was an incredible contrast to then go into the sweet, transparent simplicity of the second movement's beginning. (Sure, it all starts to brew up again quite soon but the effect stands.) The last movement was enthralling - very exciting, pushing on hard to the end.

During the Grieg I noticed that Graudina, low down, has such beauty and body of tone that you could almost think it's a viola. (And yes, that is meant to be a compliment.)

Dvorak's Romance in Fm op. 11 is one of those pieces I claim I don't know... Then I hear the tune. Doh! Graudina played this beautifully.

Mazurek in Em op. 49, also by Dvorak, starts as a noisy, flashy crowd-pleaser but, fortunately, develops some lyrical moments to offset this. It got a lively and compelling performance from Graudina and the wonderful pianist Aya Kawabata, and if I liked it less than the rest of this concert then that's just me, not something wrong with the programme.

For an encore they did the very lovely tune from Gluck’s Orfeo. You know, that one. Yes, that one.

This was a great concert and I was very pleased that I'd done some minor redistribution work on the teetering mess that is my Work-Life Balance (ha) by managing to get along to it.

Gig-a-Blog™ (Eidolon Trio, St Anne & St Agnes)

Friday, 21 September 2007

Eidolon Trio. Walter Fabeck, piano; Khac-Uyen Nguyen, violin; Kim Mackrell, cello. Haydn: Trio in C, Hoboken XV:21. Shostakovich: Trio

It was rather fun coming to today's lunchtime concert. An account of why this was so has been privatized, spun off and outsourced following a management buy-out and, in order to maximize shareholder gain and cut back on customer service, will now be found nearby on a lavishly-subsidized brownfield site.

Meanwhile, back at the gig, let us see whether anything even faintly coherent can be reconstructed, after the passage of much time, from my incoherent, staccato notes:

Seemed like it may have been a slightly bigger audience than usual? Maybe Eidolon has ruthless marketing executives, a MySpace site, a huge fan club? Interesting. Or maybe I was just hallucinating, or it’s just the audience building from the season’s start. Or something.

Haydn:

1. Spirited, lively
2. Really beautiful - almost makes me wish I played a stringed instrument (ahahaha!!!)
3. Driven, energetic, fantastic: flying fingers.

Shostakovich:

• The idea of “Jewish lament” is mentioned somewhere, perhaps in the programme notes or in the ensemble’s introductory chat. Ah yes, see the Wikipedia article mentioned below.
• Nothing else sounds like Shostakovich. I had never before heard this fantastic work. It's a monster. I have to get a CD. Judging by the always–reliable (ahem) Wikipedia it’s probably Piano Trio No. 2. Or not.

1. Incredible high cello harmonics go on for ages. An incredible section. Typical accelerando then surprising jollity.
2. Jolly but always goes off outside that – is there ever any real happiness in Shostakovich? Discuss.
3. Very slow, massive lament , big violin solo. Quite still, empty, desolate almost - no passion.
4. Maddish dance. Sounds Russian. ("Sounds Russian"??? Did I really write that? Good grief.) Almost macabre. Angular. Maybe angry? Plenty of passion, certainly. Huge climax then big tune on strings with piano arpeggios behind. Impressive. Odd quiet bits of piano plus col legno strings – unsettling.

My notes give out at this point, so let us assume I enjoyed the rest of the last movement and got safely back to the office … maybe I was too carried away to write anything more. Who knows? It is one H*ll of a piece and it got an incredible performance from this great trio.

Gig-a-Blog™ (Rupert Luck & Daniel Swain, St Anne & St Agnes

Monday, 17 September 2007

Rupert Luck, violin; Daniel Swain, piano. Parry: Complete Series of Sonatas (1). Parry: Fantasie Sonata in One Movement for Violin and Piano; Elgar: Sonata in E Minor for Violin & Piano, Op 82.

A really enjoyable lunchtime concert with excellent performers and a fine programme.

• Parry - lively, passionate. I've never heard this work before: I really loved it and will be very keen to get the CD when it comes out. See www.parrysonatas.com for more.
• Luck has a wonderful warm singing tone. His performance is exciting, committed, yet precise: he's extremely listenable-to. Pianist Daniel Swain is also a fine and sympathetic player. Together - hallelujah! - they achieve a very, very good balance so, even with my hearing and even seated right at the back, I get to enjoy the loud bits, the quiet bits and all the pretty colours in between.
• Elgar - I'm short on notes here, but I've written that I rather liked the slow movement's almost-Mahler bits with great rubato, almost-café sounds, wandering off towards the almost-informal. But then it all shifts and you're off back to a more restrained form of Englishness again. I know I enjoyed the rest of the work too, but neither my memory nor my PDA can tell me in what way exactly.
• (I should explain that for reasons of too-much-stuff-going-on-osity, the last two lunchtime blogs have broken, quite badly, my rule about writing up the same day. Tsk.)
• The only other thing of note is that one of the Grumpy Old Men™ spoke to me today and was nice, friendly and sympathetic. As you can imagine, this threw me a bit. If this goes on I may have to reconsider their status. Mind you, my attempt to say goodbye to them when I left seemed to fall on deaf ears: but then perhaps it really did - fall on deaf ears, I mean - and thus doesn't count. Watch this space: maybe within a fortnight we'll be New Best Friends and then I will have to refer to them as the Formerly-Grumpy Old Men™.

Ho hum. All very pleasant: great players, great show. Another SS A&A sanity-saver for the stressed-out.

Gig-a-Blog™ (Christopher Evesham, St Anne & St Agnes)

Friday, 14 September 2007

Chris Evesham guitar. Works by John Dowland, Joaquin Rodrigo, Joaquin Turina & Agustin Barrios (it says here).

Christopher Evesham is a guitarist who not only plays beautifully but also comes across with great personal charm. He does good introductions with interesting composer backgrounds and the like, and in his playing he really knows how to tell a story in music, or let it tell itself.

• Villa-Lobos's Prelude No. 1 is one of those pieces that takes me by surprise: at first I think I don't know it but then in comes the Big Tune and I go "doh!" because it's incredibly familiar.
• (Maybe I should explain that for a knuckle-dragging trumpet player I know more guitar music, and have more guitar records and CDs, than you'd perhaps expect. This is because my Bruvver, the very wonderful Dr Dave, plays the guitar, so I've been exposed to this distinctly unbrassbandlike cultural influence since a relatively tender age.)
• Three pieces by Barrios: Evesham tells us that Barrios had a successful career as a guitarist in South America. Well good luck to him. I've had a Barrios LP for years and really love it.
• Julia Florida was engaging and songlike; it sounds contemplative but happy. Fantastic warmth and fulness of tone. Just gorgeous
• Mazurka Appassionata: does what it says on the tin. Very nice.
• Un Sueno en la Floresta: a dream in a magic garden / forest. Beautiful. Fabulous tremelo and lots of clever harmonics.
• We then heard about the Spanish influence in the guitar repertoire - the role of Segovia and so on. This led on to Granados' Le Maja de Goya which was certainly revelling in its Spanishness. I loved a particular effect, a clever short bass pop thing that is sort of thunked and instantly stopped, a bit like slap bass. So you get fantastic contrasts between this and when it is allowed to resonate. Almost a dark/comedy effect. Lovely piece! Nice almost-waltz tune.
• Turina's Fandanguillo: very Spanish - full of "effects". Some fruity harmony with lots of Added Somethings. Yes Colin, added fruit, if you must, but actually I meant ninths or thirteenths or whatever. This piece was nice enough but not my fave rave.
• Koshkin, Usher Waltz: the most contemporary piece in this concert. It refers to the E.A. Poe story of the Fall of the House of Usher and aims at the style of the great piano waltzes eg Liszt, says the composer. My notes say, "Unusual ideas. Slap effects. Madness depicted." Sounds great, eh? Actually it's very enjoyable - one for the CD rack, if it's been recorded.

All in all this was a great concert and Christopher Evesham a bit of a star.

Sorry this blog entry's a bit late, bitty and messy. As noted elsewhere it was written up after the passage of more time than is wise.

Heartmelt moment

The other morning I was in Coldfall Wood walking my canine companion and reflecting, as I often do, on how very much more pleasant it is now they've done a load of coppicing, among other excellent works. I probably ought to write about Coldfall properly some time, but not now. Anyway, it is now lighter, greener and nicer in every way without detracting one jot from the wooded parts: indeed it enhances them by providing contrast and improving the views.

I came across a young couple — very young — sitting on a bench, in a sunny clearing, with their baby. The latter was either asleep or feeding and I wasn't about to stare closely enough to be sure which. We said hello (well, actually I said good morning and they said hello but that's not actually class or intergenerational warfare per se, you understand) and I carried on.

They just looked so sweet and it was such a nice and optimistic and heartening scene. I won't trouble you with a whole load of detail or analysis at this point, though of course I am not unaware of some of what was going through the back, front or middle of my mind. It was all over in 10 seconds but was such a very, very nice moment that I will treasure it for rather a lot longer.

A Cotswolds Saturday, another concert, and the road homeward

Saturday, 18 August 2007

Events seem to have conspired to prevent me from finishing writing about our almost-week in the Cotswolds. I have a bit of a backlog-o-blog developing, with a number of topics I wanted to write about having to wait a while. This is exacerbated by my current rather horrid period of having too much to do. So, before I forget it entirely here's a quick(ish) summary of that last day.

There was, obviously, a fair degree of packing and cottage-fettling and so on but the main thing of interest while we were still based there and before the concert was (of course) going for a nice walk. For a change this was not from the excellent Country Walking magazine site, but from www.countrywalkers.co.uk, a little personal site I'd found by accident while googling around for Guiting Power references. It offers "Country walks around the Malvern Hills and Cotswolds" and it does precisely what it says on the tin. We did Walk 9, "Naunton and Guiting Power".

It's a great walk and has excellent instructions which are very easy to follow: the author uses such detailed descriptions that ambiguity is pretty much absent and, as someone has commented, you could pretty much dispense with the map. Not that you actually would, I add hastily. But it's impressive that in theory you more or less could.

The walk as described on the web pages is a circular walk from Naunton, with Guiting Power at its farthest point. It causes no serious brain stress, however (even to me) to reorder it and start at the bottom of p2, sortafing, then wrap around as required. Ahem. Yes. (Admittedly I would probably rather have cut and pasted it, either on a Computing Device or in real life [yes Colin, actual scissors and glue!], but since this is not a "has Vogel actually got OCD or is he just a tw*t?" blogentity, let us hastily draw a convenient veil over that one and move on.)

• The weather wasn't great. But hey - we were used to it by then. Past caring, walk-enjoyment unstoppable. Oh yes.
• The walk was fantastic. Very little road and at that quiet, almost deserted.
• It's great walking from the cottage: no driving. You start off up the side of that gorgeous church: what could be nicer?
• There's a rather good stream/dam/pond/valley/thingy bit early on. The walk page talks about some phenomenon of being able to see the water above the dam's lip, but we didn't.
• Nearer Naunton is a beautiful, green, partially wooded river valley: you walk along high up on one of its shoulders. It's exceedingly pleasant. It is pictured at the top of this entry.
• Naunton is a pretty little village with a spectacular restored dovecote looked after by a community project to whom I would give 11/10 and a gold star. (In the walk description it's derelict but things have moved on since then, hurrah.)
• One house there, appropriately between the church and the boozer, is called "The Old Band Room". This made me stop and think a bit.
• Coming out of Naunton it's a lovely climb through fields and woods to an excellent bit with that sudden, open, "upland" feeling. Just great.
• Towards the end of the walk the weather really was not kind so we had the picnic back at home, having failed to find anywhere sheltered enough to eat it.

Once we were back at the cottage and had lunched, there seemed to be very little time before we needed to leave for Oxford. Martha, you'll remember, was on a music course there and this was the last day, the evening concert and the collecting of kids, possessions and so on.

I bade this cottage an inordinately fond farewell: I'd very much enjoyed being there and having it as our base and sanctuary for a short week. It will be a long time before I forget the feeling of being out in its back garden for the first time. I will not go on about it too much or I will start weeping again like a Big Girlie chiz and you will have to shuffle your feet and look out of the window a lot. Let us therefore preserve your present image of me as a rough tough nutter hardman type, and not, as they say, go there.

So off we chugged to Oxford. The previous day, while there for Martha's lunchtime concert, we'd sussed out where there's a car park (Worcester St) close to the Wesley Memorial Church in New Inn Hall Street for this evening's concert, so we parked there. It's a bit crowded, even late in the day - Oxford has quite strong anti-car policies so there aren't ever that many spaces. There were people hanging around the car park: Deb ended up paying a young homeless man a, er, consultation fee for his advice on the (rather obtuse) payment system, and later on there were, it seemed to me, slightly less benign presences there too.

Anyway we parked up and left our precious cargo of computer, collie, trumpet etc to take its chances for a while. I wasn't ecstatically happy with this, as you'll probably imagine, but we reached a compromise which involved us having a quick dinner then me doing more dog-and-car minding and attending the concert's second half, and Deb seeing the whole concert.

We found a nice, quiet Italian restaurant and had a quick but very delicious pizza, then I walked Deb around to the church before strolling back to the car so Daisy and I could keep each other company. The car park was somewhat lively at times: lots of frustrated car drivers driving round and round (and round and round again) competing for the rare space as it became vacant; lots of noisy shouty people being shouty and noisy, possibly assisted by everyone's dear friend Dr Alcohol; and more disconcertingly some quiet creepy people just creeping quietly around.

I didn't actually enjoy my Worcester Road Car Park Experience™ all that much. (Oh, you guessed.) But I assure you that spending three or four hours worrying that the dog might not be there when we got back - absolutely one of my worst and most haunting childhood fears - would not have been all that great either. Vogels are not at their best under this particular flavour of stress. Mrs von Neustadt and I frequently have to, ahem, agree to differ in this area (as it is less messy than duelling pistols): basically Mrs von Neustadt feels that all is frequently for the almost best in this approximately OK of certain possible worlds, whereas, broadly speaking, I think there are monsters under the bed and they've got it in for us, and we need laser cannon, now.

I have once or twice intimated that she might perhaps have married someone a touch calmer and more relaxed. Or maybe, indeed, someone who is not actually a raving paranoid lunatic. But she just smiles enigmatically, possibly because she's not listening: who knows. Ah well.

Anyway, and yet again anyway, there were Daisy and I in the car on a fairly miserable evening so we did the obvious thing and went for a walk. As we left the car-park two young men were wandering round the cars, having a very careful look in each. Upholstery enthusiasts, I imagine.

This is in danger of becoming an essay so I'm afraid that we're back to bullet points. You know you love it really:

• It turns out that Worcester Street car park is an excellent place to start a walk, particularly if you like canals.
• I like canals.
• Worcester Street car park is in fact a former canal basin: a not unserious lobby says it could and should be one again. I'd vote for that.
• So it's just a skip and a sneeze across the road and you're suddenly walking on a canal towpath. Obviously the Hythe Bridge Arm that you're on is a cul-de-sac, and ever was and will be whether or not they restore the basin.
• It is, however, exceedingly pleasant. It's all long-term narrowboat moorings. Some even have tiny gardens, miniature hedges and a few flowers.
• Looking at the boats they seem to represent quite a wide spectrum from posh to not, but I thought the most common type was probably the slightly-hippy looking boat with home-made bits rather than the mega-smart fresh paintjob ones that look - and this is perhaps unfair - as if someone has won the lottery. The hippy-looking boats are instantly loveable and make the area feel lived-in and safe. To be honest, though, if I won the lottery I'd probably buy a super-dooper new one with all the trimmings.
• We spoke to a nice, scruffy man off one of the more - ah - rustic-looking boats. He liked Daisy and she him.
• It was horrible drizzly weather but a great walk.
• After a while the arm meets, at a lock, what I think may be the main line, or nearly it.
• It's quite a confusing area, with waterways seemingly in all directions. I think that you can get to the Thames from here (lots of signs with dire warnings about river conditions) as well as to the rest of the Oxford Canal. There seems to be another waterway of some sort next to you for ages. I'd need to see a map to follow it a bit better. I wonder if this attempted map will help. (Hmmm... sort-of.)
• It is all very picturesque and there's a gorgeous diagonal iron bridge to let the arm's towpath join the main line (or something).
• Whatever, it's a beautiful piece of metalwork and took me straight back to other canal experiences in my remote past.
• There's one rather sad thing which is that a boatyard there was recently closed, over howls of protest, so that the site can be redeveloped. All you can see now is hoardings and a load of "no mooring" buoys. I don't know the local issues but the protestors' site is quite compelling. The depressing image they label "Welcome to Oxford" is pretty much how I saw it.
• I am ashamed to say that till I took this walk I thought that the 0xford area "Jericho" was a Philip Pullman invention, part only of Lyra's Oxford, not this one. Oops.

And that's pretty much the walk. Very very nice indeed. After Daisy and I had chatted for a while longer it was time for me to brief her on the car-park's security situation and nip round the corner for the second half of the concert.

There I heard the whole group do a performance of Elgar's Introduction and Allegro which I thought very fine indeed. It's a fabulous piece anyway but they really did a great job on it. I was also lucky to hear Martha's quintet doing the Allegretto from Mozart's Bb quintet, K174, which I didn't know previously but really enjoyed. I probably ought to get/find a recording of it and yes, I freely admit that my knowledge of string chamber music is still shockingly limited. There were, of course, plenty of other quartets and quintets in the second half, with a wide and enjoyable variance in playing levels from Slightly Struggling to Really Pretty Serious. I don't want to go all Doting Parent on you but I will confess that I was proud that, had there been a pecking order, Martha's quintet would've been well up toward the upper end of it. She played beautifully.

I'd only been there for the second half of this concert but I was very impressed with what I'd seen and heard, and what Martha added later about how the course had been. I thought the approach and atmosphere excellent and Martha seems to have found it socially good too. I should try not to become nauseatingly dewy-eyed about international friendship, but, you know, that too. This sort of thing has played such a huge role in my life so naturally I enjoy it when I see all my kids reaping the same benefits. Next year's YMI, it being a transatlantic affair, is in San Francisco and I know that Martha is hoping to be asked. All good stuff.

Once the concert was over there wasn't much more to do. We went back to the school which was the course's base but it turned out that what we were driving home was the Royal Luggage rather than the Infanta Marfs herself. The latter had, along with some of her friends, done a deal for an extra night there at the school in exchange for help tidying up, and she was coming home by the Oxford Tube the next day. So Mrs von Neustadt and the Hound Gänseblümchen and I had a journey back which was rather quieter than expected. We'd had a truly excellent week in Guiting Power and had very much enjoyed the concert(s) in Oxford, and I drove home in cheerful mood.

---

Cotswold-o-dex™:

1. The Power of Guiting

2. A Wednesday walk

3. Strawberry Yoghurt - Daylesford Creamery organic yoghurt with strawberry compote

4. A Thursday of Longwalkness

5. Incidental moments of deliciousness

6. Friday (mostly) in Oxford: a sort of Missed-the-Gig-a-Blog™

7. A Cotswolds Saturday, another concert, and the road homeward

Cobblers!

At the entrance onto our site from Charterhouse Square, the road surface has been getting into a terrible state. I think it was getting pretty worn out anyway but then the extra traffic caused by development work here has, aha, taken its toll. Certainly most of this traffic comes in by the back gate but there have been periods when that has been unusable, and I am sure that on one or two or more occasions they have had to use the front gate to overcome particular access problems for some of their specialist kit or vehicles.

Anyway, when word came round that they were going to resurface the roadway outside the front gate I felt a mixture of pleasure and apprehension. Clearly it needed doing, urgently, as the cobbled surface was breaking up badly and becoming unsafe: on the other hand I was concerned that some cheapskate would decide to ditch the fiddly, labour-intensive cobbles and resurface it with some elegant modern finish like, uh, tarmac or concrete.

In fact, I am delighted to say that I was wrong. Something has protected the surface - I don't know if this was magic, conservation area, the council, the Charterhouse itself, some combination of these factors and others, or what. What I do know is that a couple of blokes have just spent a couple of weeks meticulously replacing the whole thing by hand. They took the whole lot off, laid a new concrete bed, then cemented in the cobbles. For a while the builders had a "little man" sculpture, made out of hard hat, gloves, boots and the like, laid peacefully there amusing passers-by. Then (first removing the little chap) they filled in the gaps with sand and stamped it all down and removed their fences and went away. This was proper skilled hand-tools-only craftspersonship. It looks great. Several rousing cheers for the people who carried out the work, and for the people or policies or bodies which enabled it to be done so nicely.

In Rainbows

I just bought the new Radiohead album In Rainbows.

B*st*rds! How dare they challenge me to be morally responsible about what I pay for and how much!!?? Tsk! They are probably communists or something. If this sort of thing continues, it must stop.

I have not yet listened to it, but am looking forward to doing so. Yeah and woo, babay.

On the other hand ...

Sadly, Mrs von Neustadt is still wretchedly ill. I should have been being a better husband (mind you, she's a lousy patient!) but I had to get this news file done, or face meltdown. Seriously. I will try being nice to her this evening but will wear special flea-in-ear protection just in case. Incredibly, she has cancelled teaching, which is frankly apocalyptic. I bet you a million quid that she would resist any suggestion of Dr and indeed she would probably be right, as he will say "it's viral!" and advise fluids and rest and Radio 3 or 4 and so on. But it's horrid having her all unwell. She doesn't really believe in being ill. This used to happen only once every ten years and now I think it's up to maybe once every four or five. Hmmm. Horrid.  :(

In more cheerful news, Aidy Babes (our regular Midweek Visit Bloke) was here last night and made stunning veggie stew stuff which cheered everyone up and made the house smell delicious. It was excellent to see him again. Three rousing cheers for AB! It is not the same while it's not term-time and he is not here.

Hurrah!

One and a half rousing cheers. Last night I sent in to my good mate Dr Gary M the news file for the January edition of our splendid publication du trompettisme. (I was going to write "august publication" but let's not try to get funny here, OK?) This means a number of things:

• I am almost up to date and feeling less guilty than I have for a while
• I have to do this (meet a news file print deadline) twice more, in (roughly) mid-December and early February, for the March and June editions. And then I am done: my last day of work is April 11th and that's before the June deadline for October, so the new editor and I will share the creation of that news file, but it will be they, not I, who submit it.
• That's only 2½  more news files and 2 deadlines to go. I can do that!

Tonight when I get home I still have to submit the photos that accompany the text file. This, though, is easy. It's one of the things that I have done with my systems, and databases, and attempts to be a good and organized person, that actually WORKS. I just zap a report out of my database, save it as html pages, copy a few photos (maybe a dozen or more), link them, and I can then upload a whole mini-website, fresh out of the microwave, from which my colleagues can get the pics themselves, the captions, and any comments/warnings/etc that I wanted to hand on. It really is easy peasy and I am slightly proud of it. So I do not have a difficult evening ahead - a large glass of some nice red wine and a bit of database fiddling rather than hours of sweating and swearing. Excellent. Feels like a holiday in comparison.

Other matters arising:

• I did not get my own piece of writing finished in time. This was a report on the Proms Brass Day with nice photos from two helpful horn players.
• This cheeses me off a bit, and in a way typifies one of the reasons why it is time for me to move on from the editing job. I love writing. I love editing too, but in a different way. In this job, as a rule, the editing of other people's work has to come first. It would look like some kind of dereliction of duty, or inability to prioritize, or something, if I was putting up my own reports while others' were left unpublished. So, given that there is often a backlog, my own ideas nearly always come last, often to the point of simply not getting done.
• I am not claiming that after I leave the editor post I will suddenly become the most productive trumpet journalist ever seen, of course. It's just that at least then I could, if I chose, work on my own stuff without the guilt/duty Imp of the Right Shoulder constantly telling me I can't. I really would like to do some more writing and if it turns out that some of it is useful then that's a bonus.
• Anyway, I will do the Proms piece when I get a moment or two. If it could keep till January it can keep till March. And of course there's no deadline for the web so it can go up there as soon as it's ready. So it is annoying but not the end of the world.
• The backlog is of course all my own fat stupid fault anyway but, blimey, it has been tricky sometimes. It seems to take very little by way of a gig or two, a holiday, something nice or tricky or both with the family, some crisis at work; and it's all building up remarkably fast. Maybe I will come back some other time to the issue of who is and is not suitable for this job, or vice versa.
• At the moment most of the backlog has evaporated. Hurrah, and hurrah again. Flag-captain, break out the celebration-grade strawberry yoghurt and give the villagers some small coins! Very late last night I went through the database looking at a query of "stuff that needs attention". Some of it was just ooooold and clearly going nowhere and with some pleasure I changed its status from "live but quiet" to "dormant, maybe dead" which makes it drop out of view, largely speaking. If I then look at what remains after this cull, it really is very few stories. Most have the note "BIHC" or "BITC" which means "Ball in his/her/their court" - in other words, they need to get back to me before the story can happen. Often they do not, because they have got too busy, or can't be bothered, or thought I was going to do their job for them, or the thing is too far in the past and they have moved on to other stuff now. A few are difficult problems which have rumbled on for a while and now I have time to think, I will need to do some cutting of Gordian Knots (possibly using Occam's Razor). (Yes, I know that is an old joke, but, d'you know what, I like it anyway.) Some may need quietly killing off, others a little nurturing. And of course there is my Proms story in there too. But this is all doable. It's only about 8 weeks to the next deadline so (he wrote with fingers crossed) not too much more should come in and with luck it will be more straightforward. This could give me the chance to really clear the rest of it out, which would just be great.
• Tricky stories are much much easier to deal with when there's no backlog. The existence of the backlog makes everything worse. All the things that could/should be routine - queries, rejections, requests for change or other photos, and so on - are just fine when dealt with promptly and a disaster when left too late. If I leave it late then I desert the moral high-ground and it is much harder to sort out difficult things with a perhaps-difficult story submitter - though, to be fair, 98% of them are as nice as pie.
• The other 2% can be quite spectacular at times though. The stories I could tell you, m'dear!
• Yes, I know all of this "don't get behind with your work" stuff is a bit basic. And I am supposed to be an adult. Sigh.
• Another thing that would save much, much pain and give me more of a toehold on the said moral high-ground would be to have clear guidelines for story submitters. I have a sort of project going on in draft but I need to bite the bullet, write down a few more things very clearly, and publish. Even if they are not quite right at first it would be (roughly) 1000000% better than the current setup, which just encourages trouble.
• The ITA has or used to have the most incredible news guidelines. I don't think I dare go that far - it's basically a whole style book - but it was impressive, in a somewhat anal-retentive kind of way! If I find it, I'll link it. Ah yes, here we are. Make sure you read the para on capitalization!
• The other thing I want to do is to tidy up the structure of the news site. It is a historical mess. I have ideas on this but I am not sure if I can manage it. I'll give it a lower priority than the other stuff and see how it goes. In any case, my successor will be getting things in a happier and clearer state than I did - I am determined about that.
• Redoing the news structure would also trash people's links, unless the server and its daddy can do symlinks - I'm not sure about this. It seems a bit unfair to spoil incoming links, but the thing really, really needs sorting out.
• There is interesting talk about the news editor succession but I cannot yet blog about it. I'll tell you something as soon as I can.

And finally:

• It feels great to be this up to date!

Grrrr and grrr again

I am at home, having taken another day's leave in order to try to make more progress with my trumpet news editing job nightmare backlog from H*ll. This means I am in a terrible grump, but not all the time. Here are some grump and non-grump points: sort them out for yourself:

• A job I loved doing is becoming a millstone
• That's three days' leave this year for this, which is three days too many. I feel that it is very very very very bad practice indeed to take leave for a voluntary job like this: the repercussions do not bear looking at too closely.
• I like being at home!
• It's gloomy miserable weather. So I am gloomy and miserable.
• I took Daisy round the wood this morning. It was sunny and cheerful then, so I was too.
• Mrs von Neustadt is horribly unwell with sore throat, cough and everything.
• I have a large glass of red wine here. This too is bad practice, but hey.
• And some olives!
• The Infanta Marfs is on her way home, Religion having been cancelled. I was a bit alarmed by this at first, wondering whether the new government has perhaps gone a little far this time. It turns out that what has been cancelled, however, is this afternoon's lesson on that particular academic subject. This is a bit easier to grasp.
• The said Infanta is going to stop en route at the emporium of Messrs Sainsbury and acquire Things, Delicious, Luncheon for the Purposes Of. Yeah babay.
• I am actually making progress with the ***** ******* ******* ******** news situation. It reminds me that I quite enjoy it when it is going well. HA! I say, and HA! again. Fool.
• And whose fault is all this? Yep. And yep again. Welcome to the Department of Self-Inflicted Wounds. Gah!
• I have had some nice music on the radiophonic broadcast receiving apparatus and now, in its great versatility, it is playing me a Compact Disc (a modern type of gramophone record). This CD is of Pavel Haas' String Quartet No 2 performed by the Pavel Haas String Quartet. (Er? ... yes.) It is entirely wonderful and has the probably-USP that its last movement features a drum kit alongside the more usual stringy thingies. It is so wonderful that you should buy it at once if you do not already possess it, and if you do you should buy another copy and give it to a friend.
• The weekend was rather good though insanely busy, and may get blogged about sooner or later.

Harry Resigners

What all this recent crisis mismanagement leads up to is that I have resigned from my trumpet news editing job. If, as I intend, I put my last story up on the web on 11th April 2008 then it will be five years to the day since I put up my first one. This seems quite neat, a reasonable amount of time to have served, and generally OK in a number of ways. It also gives my colleagues (who are also some of my dearest friends, which makes it all more difficult in some ways and nicer in others) six months to find a successor.

I will write more about this some time. I have pretty mixed feelings but am confident it is the right decision. It fits quite neatly with the mid-life crisis in which I may or may not be indulging. It's OK, really it is. Having said that, you'd think that in the short term I should feel better having resigned but actually the opposite is true. It's harder than ever and this is largely because I am determined to leave with all flags flying and on the best possible terms, with the service handed over in very good shape. It would be much easier if I now just hated my colleagues and the role and the organization and so could simply do a Cartman (screw you guys, I'm going home) on the whole thing. As it is I now have deadlines and goodwill and conscience to wrestle with and it is all a bit much right now. But I will get through it somehow, and it is worth the current temporary discomfort for the feeling that I am getting back a chunk of my life. It's been great doing this job and I would not have missed it for the world, but it is also a good time to stop.

On 12th April 2008, let me tell you, we are going out for a STONKING good meal somewhere. Oh yes! :)

Le Weekend

In other news, my Dearest Muvver the Dowager Duchess von und zu Neustadt has her birthday on Sunday. Marfs and I are going down to the South Coast tomorrow to help celebrate it by eating what I hope will be a suitably expensive and delicious luncheon at the Sussex Pad.

It would be highly unchivalrous for an officer of my aristocratic background to reveal a lady's age so I will just vaguely hint that she was somewhere around 85 last year. I know you're supposed to like your Mum anyway so I am hardly an unbiased reporter but she really is a bit of a star.

Last time we were at the Pad the Infanta Marfs (I really must try to get a grip) was really quite unwell with fluish type symptoms not helped by the car journey and the erratic driving of Boris the Mad Chauffeur who kept shrieking "revenants in the trees!" and trying to go off-road after them. As far as I recall she was eventually pretty much off her face on painkillers, stugeron and a couple of Kirs Royals (oops bad parenting alert voop voop). So it might be quite nice for her to see the Pad without purple Alsatians' heads sprouting through the ceiling and the pot plants singing witty rustic ditties as the floor gently undulates in time, or whatever.

After that we shall drop the Duchess back at Chichester and zoom back to London, as the rest of the weekend consists of editing, rehearsing, rehearsing and more editing. Sigh. In a more relaxed world I would make a nice weekend of it in Sussex.

Oh dear, another concert-free lunchtime

One result of my current very poor coping with Stuff (as well as doing some nice/good things) is that I have not been to a SS Anne & Agnes lunchtime gig for a couple of weeks and that I am not going to get to it today either. This is an important, sanity-preserving part of my working week and I feel sorely aggrieved with the idiot who has put me in this position. Yes, Tamsin, that would indeed be me.  Gak!

Ollie

My oldest daughter's elderly Palliative Care Fostercat died last night, after a year in her care. Although it was undoubtedly time for him to go it does not actually make the grief any easier or less real, as any pet owner will agree.

(Hint: unless they exhibit unusually high levels of empathy, don't even bother trying to discuss this issue with non-pet-owning civilians. In the nicest possible way, they simply don't know what you are talking about: you are not speaking, despite appearances, the same language. And DON'T ever try to make parallels with human-related grief, except in a very limited way among other pet owners, and extremely carefully at that, unless you want to find yourself in horrible trouble very very rapidly. I know whereof I speak.)

Ollie was a nice old thing. His last year consisted as far as I can see of vast amounts of veterinary care, treats, unlimited unswerving affection, and getting to rule the roost over a whole household of lesser beings, which I think an old chap like that must have rather liked. I think we may safely say The Boy Done Good: and well done Becca, very very very well done indeed.

Aaaargh dammit!

My good friend Laura texted me to say would I like a free ticket for a concert tomorrow night. It says here: 'Sergei Nakariakov will be visiting London this October to perform the UK Première of a 20 minute piece called "ad absurdum" by Jörg Widmann. It comes in a concert by the BBC Symphony Orchestra who also play Bruckner 7.'

I would so love to go, and I so can't because my trumpet editing job is at a critical phase and I really have to be at home working on it. It's, like, "not optional". There is no way in a million years I can justify bunking off to go to this gig. But aaaargh, and dammit. :(

Kipferl (Rush-a-Blog™)

Kipferl - excellent Austrian cafe at 70 Long Lane, London EC1. Dash in, grab a nice coffee and something delicious (Linzertorte, say), quick (optional) German practice, dash out again. Delicious. They also have sit-down space and deli sales, and will sell you a whole cake (e.g for my birthday at work, I think I got a L'torte, a Sachertorte and some nice little epis or other). Yes indeedy. Undeniably fab.

When I get my "life" back I am going to rush less and then it will be more of a Leisurely-Lunch-a-Blog™ when I am over there sitting down and tucking into a plateful of something nice.

For now though I am still in a rush. Tell you what, continuing the Germanic theme I may just dash over to the brilliantly-named Kurz & Lang, sausage specialists also just round the corner, and grab a brattie. Mensch, das schmeckt lecker!!

You have to see this - Matt Shulman

Matt is an interesting, clever and nice person. And now he has released a trumpet video on YouTube which has melted my socks with sheer delight. Please go and watch it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05SNZwhpbAA

Ah yes. Really very very nice.

... and here is Matt:

http://www.mattshulman.com/

... and this interesting and ingenious thing is him too:

http://www.shulmansystem.com/

... and here he is on something called MySpace which I understand is enjoyed by certain persons under 50 years of age:

http://www.myspace.com/mattshulman

He is, in fact, The Man.

(Yes, I am still on a break)

Blog on official go-slow ... plus Gig-a-Blog-in-passing™ (Haydn Chamber Orchestra, St John's Wood Parish Church)

I now need to devote a serious chunk of time to the screaming nightmare that is my trumpet editing job. (More on this some other time, perhaps.) As a result, there might be less going on here for a bit. There are a few pieces more or less done and nearly ready to post - mainly St Anne & St Agnes Gig-a-Blogs™, and a few firm ideas for things I want to write about, but these will be appearing gradually rather than, er,  all in one strand (as the deeply unpleasant and unrepeatable joke puts it).

I currently have rather a lot on at work, and also imminent are a Salomon Orchestra concert and a trip oop t'North to retrieve my dear Mama from those icy wastes and return her safely to the balmy shores of, ah, Chichester.

So I am a bit of a stretched-many-ways bunny (eeeuuuwww nasty mental image) at present and even the time it takes to put blog entries up can be difficult to find. And yes I still write them mostly on the Tube or on the Wagn railway (or whatever they are calling it this week) but putting them up and making them nice (or nice-ish) can take a wee bit of time, though not always. So I must ask my many thousands (hem hem) of enthusiastic readers to please bear with me till I find a bit more of the said time.

The good news in all this is that I do sort-of get a couple of days off. The trip to Northumberland is simply too long to just drive there and turn straight around, unless in emergency, which this is not. So I have taken Thursday and Friday off and I will drive up there after work on Wednesday night. We can then do touristy things and go out for nice meals on those two days before the Saturday, when we'll bid a regretful farewell to the lovely village and head for Chichester (which is quite a long way). The bad news at that point is that I cannot then stay the night - there is orienteering on the Sunday morning in Ally Pally and it would be a huge shame to miss it, and then there's a Salomon rehearsal in the afternoon anyway. This means that when we hit Chichester on the Saturday I will certainly stay for a cuppa or two and make sure Mum is OK but then I really have to drive back, no matter how little I feel like it! Ah well, it is a small price to pay for a long weekend in an exceedingly  nice neck of the woods.

In other (brief) news: an excellent Haydn Chamber Orchestra concert in St John's Wood last night. I was very very excited and pleased because my wife, Mrs von Neustadt to you, came along, which is not usual and was very much appreciated. I played in Brahms Symphony No 1, which was great. (I used to detest Brahms symphonies, but they seem to have grown on me, along with whitening hair and several stone in extra weight.) However the actual reason I was there was the Britten Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. I couldn't bear to think of not being in an HCO concert containing this most perfect of works, even though the trumpet part is notable for its really very sparse writing. (Goak here.) Despite this terrible oversight by Ben (yeah right, we were on first name terms) it affects me more than most other music. It was played utterly fabulously by my friend Keith Maries (odd link, yeah I know) and gorgeously sung by Allan Clayton (somewhat rough link, sorry, could find no better) whom I loved though Deb was (slightly) less taken with him. Something about his vibrato in the Dirge, which I am one day (when I have time) going to obsessively compare on x different recordings till I see what she means. I thought it was wonderful, vibrato and all. Tsk. The conductor was the highly wonderful Robin Ticciati who though seemingly about 11 (from where I am sitting anyway) has a very, very wise musical head on those youthful shoulders and clearly will go spectacularly far. Oh and Mr Clayton looks engagingly much like a Hobbit, which I feel can only be a very good thing.

Oddly, the concert flyer names Robin and Allan but not Keith. I find this surprising - I wouldn't buy a recording of it (and the Lord knows I have bought plenty) with an anonymous horn player. Oversight or policy? Your guess, my guess > equal worth.

Aside: the Serenade is the only piece of music where I find it necessary to pronounce the punctuation, thus: Serenade for Tenor Comma Horn and Strings, although I am not sure how common is the misunderstanding which I am ostensibly trying to avoid. Maybe, like so much else I say and do, it is just a joke which is starting to wear a bit thin. Or maybe I really did hear it the wrong way the first time: I am not sure. The number of people who "get" this may in any case be vanishingly small.  

Oh and we did the Brahms on interesting German/Austrian rotary-valve trumpets, because my good friend and 1st trumpet bossman John Parker likes them and has two. I played John's Monke Bb and he played his incredibly exquisite Schargerl C. Great fun, weird, educational, etc. We do this quite often: I like it.

Afterwards we went to a very nice party at Phil and Mourijn's, which I enjoyed. I had a great chat with people I hardly knew, about jazz, coincidentally enough a subject I hardly know. But hey. Suddenly after yet more splendid chatoidalness (basically, everyone we know was there) I realized that I was going to fall over quite soon, and so I went home and Deb followed a while later, which was all very fine and civilized.

And that's it for now. More soonish, but please don't hold your breath. :)