Player Piano

Anyone who had a heart

One of Stephen Cox's sarcophagi (Interior Space: for Cheops)
at Houghton

I have returned to Houghton Hall of an evening.  It is delicious summer - panamas and linen, chambray and crepe - the style doesn't matter, it's how you carry yourself, darling.  So, though initially I feel that perhaps my faded jeans may be inexcusable, I begin to think I could, just, maybe, fit in.....

Anyway, I am not here for the craic.  Nor to flaunt.  Nor to engage.  I am here, seriously, for Illia Ovcharenko to test my hearing aids with his digital dexterity (and pedal power.....)

Reflections on a country seat

Illia Ovcharenko is a Ukrainian pianist, currently living in Hanover, who recently won the Honens International Piano Competition in Calgary, which seeks to identify the Complete Artist....

Under the auspices of King's Lynn Festival (Artistic Director, Ambrose Miller) and with the cooperation of Lord Cholmondeley for the use of Houghton Hall, it is a magical evening.   

A quickly executed oil painting of Illia and his audience (photography was not permitted)

On another occasion I might have said that the interval, with chardonnay libations, was the high spot of the evening, given the chance to roam at will amongst Stephen Cox's stones and the enchanting environs of one of England's grandest country houses (constructed in the 1720s for Britain's first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole)......  But (There is a but?  Ed) Yes, but, this is a concert to rival any (Oasis?  Glasto?  Ed). Yes, Ed, this is a concert to rival any.  

For a start, I was misled.  I mistook the piano for a Player Piano, and thought that perhaps we were to be subjected to rolls of punched paper honky tonk.  But, yes it was an innocent mistake - it was a Pleyel Piano, as grand as anything by Bechstein or Steinway.....

Manufactured using the skills built up over 210 years of existence and experience, Pleyel grand pianos are synonymous with French excellence in instrument making. Characterised by a romantic sonority which is the Pleyel hallmark, these instruments offer pianists unparalleled musical expressiveness.

Secondly, the setting was non pareil.  No Glastonbury Yurt could match the elegance of this room - from the decorations on the walls and mantelpieces to the views from the windows.  A perfect room for withdrawing, a perfect space for performance....

And the programme was out of the top drawer, too.  We started with Beethoven's Sonata  in B flat (Les Adieux), and then heard Liszt's transcription of the second movement of Beethoven's 7th symphony.  And then tripped toward the interval with Etudes by Schumann which took their theme from that same symphony by Beethoven.  I was spell bound as the notes spilled from the instrument, miraculously spun by the several hands and multiple fingers (or so it seemed) of the artist.

Outside the sun had begun to lapse into Lincolnshire and the evening reigned calm.  I saw the landscape as a continuation of the sculpture, or vice versa, and fell to wondering about the genius of creativity that gives us music.  

And I returned to photograph the shapes thrown by the artistry of Stephen Cox, my ears still full of Beethoven's astonishing deafness.  And I noticed how these converging slices of stone create a representation of an aorta, reminding me of the essence of life that is the circulatory system.  Dismiss this as spurious mental meandering, but as I have just got back from a serious consultation about my own sensitivities with a renowned cardiologist, I think I am entitled to some poetic licence.....

The aorta of life  (in stone)

We return to our seats, and Illia plays three pieces by his Ukrainian hero, Sergei Bortkiewicz, a composer to think of along with Chopin, and then, demonstrating his mastery of the piano, Illia finishes with Liszt's Piano Sonata in B minor, and I am struck by how this concert seems to fill all four dimensions.  The sound reverberates around the room, touching the lights, fluttering in the breeze that breathes through the open windows.  It is all around us, coming at us from different directions, totally different from the playing of music from a disc, in stereo or Hi Fi, this is in front of you, above, below, behind and beside you.  And then there is the fourth dimension.  Illia could be Beethoven, or Liszt, or Bortkiewicz....  The composers are revived and they play their music through Illia.  Time becomes meaningless as we experience an infinitely expanded present....

Illia Ovcharenko exits, stage left

You may well think this is over the top (You said it, Ed) but believe me I was overcome.  And, after the encore (a Chopin Polonaise) and after the applause had sputtered out like an exhausted candle, I made my obeisance to the piano.  But the piano was silent.  It was just a piano.  A Pleyel.  Not a Player. 

There are times when human ingenuity confounds.

And then, driving home, a lipstick sunset stains the sky behind the spire of St Mary's, and I fade to nothingness, my heart (which seems to be functioning adequately) filled with gratitude that there is love in the world.

Life would be flat without music. It is the background to all I do. It speaks to the heart in its own special way like nothing else. 

Ludwig van Beethoven

Note (Me neither, Ed):

Hermann Minkowski exploited the idea of four dimensions to discuss cosmology including the finite velocity of light. In appending a time dimension to three-dimensional space, he specified an alternative perpendicularity, hyperbolic orthogonality. This notion provides his four-dimensional space with a modified simultaneity appropriate to electromagnetic relations in his cosmos. Minkowski's world overcame problems associated with the traditional absolute space and time cosmology previously used in a universe of three space dimensions and one time dimension.

Wikipedia

Desert Island Discs

Variations on a theme by Roy Plomley

Perchance to dream…..

The concept of being cast away on a deserted island plucks plangently at the heartstrings.  Humans are social beings, and being in company informs the structure of society, from tribal cave times to the Islamic State, from Downton Abbey to Scott’s Expedition to the South Pole.  With few exceptions, David Blaine perhaps being a rare one, St Simon Stylites another, we yearn for company, at least part of the time.  So the idea of being cast ashore on a remote piece of land, with no one to talk to, strikes deep into our reservoir of fears.

On the back of books and films about such isolation, Roy Plomley invited his guests to consider such a fate, and to take with them eight samples of music that might console them in their exile, completing the dream-game with a book and a luxury.

Such was the success of this as broadcast entertainment that the show still goes on, half a century after its inception and many years after the deviser’s demise.  Now the radio archives are available on line, and it is possible, should one so wish, to sift the choices of the famous and to generate a list of the most-requested desert island discs…..

The formula is so simple and so successful that it has become, I believe, an after dinner parlour game, one that causes merriment galore in the withdrawing rooms of the cultured, most especially when one is on holiday with friends…..

With this in mind, and finding myself marooned on Coquet Island, a scrap of Northumberland that lies low in the North Sea (more about this very soon), I thought I would play…..

The first thing that came to mind was the enormity of the task.  The choice is (almost) infinite.  So I invented a rule, which was that the discs had to be from my own collection (it would have been even easier had I restricted it to my ipod).

The second realisation was that anyone’s selection could depend on time, mood, day of the week, etc, and so there had to be a time limit, a rule of some spontaneity. If you committed yourself to trying to change the world by your pick of eight records, you would never make it.

So, Roy, here I am.  Alone, with my gramophone, the seagulls crying over the waves, and my eight discs.  Which to start?  Well, Roy, since you ask, I would like to hear Maria Callas, singing Casta Diva, from Bellini’s Norma.  Do not be fooled into thinking I chose this because I am an opera buff, and my fondest moments have been spent in boxes at Covent Garden, but it’s not like that (the closest I have been to a box in Covent Garden was when the market was still there).  I have never seen Norma, never saw Callas, and still don’t know what the song is about.  It’s just the thrill of that voice, that music, the rise and fall of strings and vocal chords that stirs something in me.  I think it is beautiful and sad. It conjures the glittering world of make believe that is the theatre, and within that artifice, that house of candles and gold paint, lies a key to the human soul.  Large numbers of diverse people can be brought together to forget the outside, to be together in a fairy tale, and to then turn to each other and say, Wasn’t that fantastic?

Louis Armstrong’s personal history shows that with perseverance it is possible to realise potential.  The odds in 1900 were not in his favour, but he worked at his music and mastered it, and shone as one of the brightest stars in the music business.  OK there was some schmaltz (and a lot of sweet smoke) toward the end, and I wouldn’t want to have What a Wonderful World on the Muzak of my island (though I really love it….) but the breezy optimism, gently chilled delivery, and superb musicianship of On the Sunny Side of the Street take a lot of beating.

And thank you, Roy, my next choice is from Beatles for Sale.  Again, as with Callas and Armstrong, I never saw the Beatles live, but when I was growing up their music was all around, and both on the radio and on TV we caught glimpses of them as they grew into their fame.  I sat through A Hard Day’s Night twice in succession in Watford (a dare devil thing to do, believe me) and played the album over and over with friends at school in our lunch breaks. I’ve chosen Rock and Roll Music, from the subsequent album however, because, although it may not be as brilliantly light and cool as Chuck Berry’s original, it possibly conveys best what the group was really like in the clubs of Hamburg, or the Cavern in Liverpool.  It is difficult now to explain the excitement they generated, but this number, and its enduring endorsement of rock and roll, sums up a change of attitude in young people that, at least in Europe and America, will never come round again.

My elder brother and I fell under the spell of Bob Dylan very early on.  I bought Freewheelin' on its release and Tim Binding, a friend at school, lent me Another Side of Bob Dylan, which immediately enthralled me with its raw directness.  Years later some friends met in Leicester Square to see Pat Garret and Billy the Kid and, possibly due to an excess of pink gins, ended up in Leighton Buzzard…..  The combination, whatsomever, of Peckinpah and Coburn, Dylan and Texas, burnt a hole in my mind that still glows round the edges.  Billy, they don't like you to be so free…..  Of course, as my friend Ben Timmis has reminded me, the Nobel-deserving Dylan's canon is so vast that this seemingly simple sample does not really do the poetry justice, but I maintain that the lauding of a freedom-seeking anti-hero in such plaintive and haunting tones, together with the calling out of murderous, and faceless, authority, coupled with Peckinpah's striking use of location and Coburn's mesmerising performance (we'll gloss over Kristofferson at this point) all come together for something that would do a lot for me on my deserted island.  [For my funeral, either Blind Willie McTell  or Every Grain of Sand - but that's another matter.....]

And your next choice?  I bought Joe Cocker’s I’m so glad I’m standing here today, when I lived in Italy and at the time I was experimenting with Super 8 film and working with a group of students.  This song seemed perfect for a sort of pop video (I had just featured in one that was directed by Charlie Borromel in a Villa on the Via Appia Antica, which apparently was very popular on TV, though I never saw it myself).  To illustrate the Cocker song Jessica Giuffre, daughter of two well-known Italian actors, wandered about St George’s English School catching the morning sun, blinds being drawn, etc.  It was clichéd, but as a dramatic coincidence of fate Jessica’s mother was killed in a car accident just before we were due to start, so I expected we would cancel the project.  Jessica did not bow out, however, and despite her grief, turned up punctually for our shoots, and we eventually put the song onto a soundtrack and it went on show to great effect.  Brave girl.

And your sixth choice?  This is Bob Marley and the Wailers, Three Little Birds.  And there are three reasons why I would dance to this on my island:  one, it’s a great tune, frothy and funky at the same time; two, I love birds; three, I met Bob and the Wailers on their first tour of the UK.  I was helping a friend’s band as a kind of volunteer roadie and they were the support act.  After the show we spent some time in the dressing room, listening to Catch a Fire….   And that, sadly, is about all I remember.  My one brush with stardom!  Enough said.

Carrickfergus?  It is a wonderful song, and this performance by the finest musicians Ireland has produced since O’Caralan is sublime.  Although my claim to Celtic ancestry (my mother’s father was ‘Irish’ and I have cousins in Mayo) is hardly pureblood, I cherish that part of me, and Irish music and Literature run through my nerves.  I’m drunk today, and I’m rarely sober…..  What an honest (if completely deplorable) line to sing?  Oh but I am sick now, and my days are numbered, come all ye young men, and lay me down…..  Bold to face the truth, and right in calling out youth to take on responsibility.

And your final choice?  Chopin.  Almost any nocturne would do, but F sharp’s as good a key as any!  It’s the perfect music at the end of a busy day, the romance sparkling out of the upper register while underneath there is the brooding of the dying artist looking out of the window at the sea and the rain, the Mediterranean at its most hostile beating on the shores of Mallorca…..  As with Callas, etc, I never saw Chopin, but I can just imagine his long fingers a blur across the ebonies…..

Now you will get the Bible and Shakespeare, but you can choose one other book.  This is easy.  I can imagine that long hours on the island might eventually cause some sort of depression, thinking of the worst, etc.  There is one book that can cure that, with its anarchic simplicity but enduring optimism.  Nothing can better the power of Svejk to survive the most desperate situations, and on my island I fear I may need his help.

And one luxury?  I was going to ask for a supply of yeast, so I could make ginger beer – or something stronger perhaps – but I changed my mind.  Could I have a piano?  And would it be too much to ask for Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier to go with it?  That will keep me busy…..

Paul McMullin, it is yours…..

Thank you, Roy, it's been fun.....

1 - Maria Callas - Casta Diva - from Bellini's Norma
2 - Louis Armstrong - The Sunny side of the street
3 - The Beatles - Rock and Roll Music from Beatles for Sale 
4 - Bob Dylan - Billy 1, from the soundtrack album: Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid  [Of course Main Title Theme (Billy) would be a nice alternative as a Karaoke version.....]
5 - The Crusaders and Joe Cocker - I'm so glad I'm standing here today
6 - Bob Marley and the Wailers - Three Little Birds
7 - Carrickfergus - Van Morrison & The Chieftains
8 - Chopin - Nocturne in F-Sharp, Op. 15, No 2