Been a bit quiet...

....this week, what with restarting the studying, the piano and reading Martin Amis' 'Experience'. More about that as soon as I have finished it; suffice to say that I am very pleasantly surprised after hating his 'Time's Arrow'.

The piano is moving along gently; have reached my first Bach and Beethoven...ok, Beethoven wrote this particular piece aged 13, and it will be some time before it is fluent, but nevertheless, we've got past the awful children's songs. Let's hope we'll bypass 'Fuer Elise', too. Being a bit of a retiring sort, I hate using the pedal on the piano - with all that noise ringing out.... Also today found a Bach flute sonata which seems to be feasible on the flute.... with a lot more practice (gee, when? my poor neighbours); so that's all quite promising.

My friend Jessica's new book came out today, 'Alicia's Gift'. It's her second fiction book, although she has written plenty music books, such as biographies of Korngold and Faure. Come to think of it, I am sure I have read or even own a book about Korngold; not entirely sure how this came to be - I wonder if it is Jessica's? Her day job is/was writing articles on music for the Guardian (formerly) and the Independent (these days). You won't believe the people she has interviewed for her articles. And of course she has her own, highly respected blog. Her first excursion into fiction, 'Rites of Spring', was, whilst a fairly easy read, a tortuous excursion into a severe family break-up with anorexia, music (guess which piece) and post-holocaust trauma thrown in. 'Alicia's Gift', like 'Rites of Spring' also features the back of a skinny young girl on the front cover. I gather it is to do with a talented child musician and associated pressures. One can kind of imagine the scene....Not that any of my family would know about that; the only really talented person was, I hope, under not too much pressure (apart from that non-ending choir singing at prep school).

International Women's Day today - here in Georgia it is a public holiday (5 days after mother's day). On Sunday a friend and I will be setting a feminist hash trail - still trying to work out how to make flour look pink......

Tagged!

Looked at my blogpatrol stats just now, and was a bit surprised to find 60 readers today. Where did they all come from? The only likely source could be Jessica's blog which I know has well over 100, if not over 200 readers per day.

And indeed, she has a book tag (not enough that I am doing Helene's reading of 5 unread books before the end of January [3 down, 2 to go], now there is this book tag, too). It goes like this:
Find the nearest book.
Turn to page 123.
Go to the fifth sentence on the page.
Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
Name the book and the author, and tag three more folks.
So, ignoring a technical manual lying on the settee behind me, I grab a book from the shelf of yet-to-be read books, and find not only that it is in German, but that the area specified involves a recipe for an Indian dish - which I cannot possibly translate from German. It's Kiran Desai's 'Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard'. This probably does not count. Try again in the shelf of yet-to-be-read books.

'They reabsorbed Roman Gaul - or allowed themselves to be reabsorbed into it. The conversion of Clovis proves that the ancient Gauls, who had become Germans and Franks, readopted the values and the political system of the Roman Empire. And if, at the time of their return, the Franks did have to fight, it was not against the Gauls or even the Romans (whose values they were absorbing); it was against the Burgundians and the Goths (who, being Aryans, were heretics), or against the Saracen infidels'.

No, it's not from Caesar's 'Bello Gallico' ('Gaul is divided into three parts....') , but Michel Foucault's 'Society must be defended', a collection of lecture texts. Looks quite interesting, but it has been sitting on that shelf for some time.
I tag Helene, Grannyp, and ... I am scared to do another book blog because I worry what other tags I might get involved in.....Are we having too much spare time?

The talk of Aryans reminds me...for Christmas I was given two antiquarian books on Georgia (by the Black Sea). One is from the 'DDR' (East Germany') and apparently describes a visit or visits to that country by their socialist colleagues from Germany. The other, by A Sanders, a history of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, was written in Germany up to 1942 and published in 1944. My edition is of the second printing batch (11,000 to 20,000 copies) - during that time while Germany was being bombed to smithereens!

The book starts with a chapter on the 'rassisch/voelkisches' (basically 'race'), and a discussion on 'Blut' and 'Boden' (blood and earth which I think might have been major points of consideration in Hitler's philosophy). The chapter goes on to describe how during those migratory periods, during the stone, bronze and iron ages, these Aryan indo-german people migrated from, roughly, Germany, everywhere, east, south, north.It goes on to suggest that the Indians went to India from somewhere in the Iranian corner of the world. This chapter ends by saying 'in each of the indogerman peoples the values of the soul of the nordic race have expressed themselves in a particularly model and exemplary fashion'. Of course, this is a book about the Caucasus - but isnt it frightening to see how a perfectly normal history book is not only influenced itself by the prevailing philosophy, but also in turn is able to propagate and support such a philosophy? I am sure that this can be the case even now in a different context. En passant I had always thought that many of the migrations had started in the Indian corner of the world, but I really know nothing about it.

Music news

Hot from reading two issues of 'The Strad' on the plane (left one copy behind, annoying that), I can tell the breathlessly waiting world the following news:

1. Anne Sophie Mutter has announced, shortly after her divorce from A Previn, her retirement from performing when she is 45. Her agents will be frantically examining contracts and checking bookings that may already have been made for beyond that period. She's only 43.5 just now - I thought she was nearer my age (have not seen 43.5 for a while). I suppose she has been working at the fiddle since the age of about 5 or so, so that would be a 40 year working life - well going for anyone. And maybe she does not know anything else? I wonder what she will do?

2. Daniel Hope's Bach CD is reviewed rather negatively by Tully Potter, as in ' I don't think Bach would have recognised his music had he heard it being hustled along'. I did think at the time that the historically informed brigade (or as someone once called them 'the Dutch baroque dweebs in sandals') might not entirely approve of this recording. Interestingly the same reviewer is much more positive (in the lost December issue) about a recording by Monica Huggett of almost the same concertos, who, as it happens, generally uses the historically informed approach, gut strings, bow held half-way up the stick and so on. We know which side the reviewer dresses on then, don't we.

3. Jessica Duchen was lucky enough to interview the Fine Arts Quartet at the end of their two-month Europe tour which had started in Vilnius in June this year. It was their second visit to Vilnius, the first one having been a bit of a disaster Not Of Their Making due to lack of advertising, but this one, within the context of the Vilnius Festival, was much more successful and almost sold out. Not that I can remember what they played - oh yes, I do, some piano quintet with a very young Lithuanian pianist (notes are at home). The guys are really nice, and very well travelled (all but one emanating from Eastern Europe, though, Jessica, Bocio is Ukrainian methinks, not Russian).

4. Carlos Maria Solare, a permanent attender at international viola congresses, with fluent German and very fluent English (his turn of phrase is very impressive), very positively reviewed Tatjana Masurenko's recording of British viola concertos (Beamish, a new version of the Walton and the Britten Lachrymae). The Lachrymae is a reverse theme and variations, with the theme, a very sweet Dowland song, resolving only at the end the tension created earlier in the piece. It's strange because usually you listen for hints of the theme when you listen to variations, but here you cannot do it. Tatjana Masurenko organised a very nice German viola day in Leipzig a couple of years ago, and it was a great opportunity to visit Bach's city (beautiful place!) and even the Thomaskirche. She also gave a performance of a Bach cello suite, to mutterings from the Historically Informed Brigade 'no-one plays Bach like that any more'...

We are famous!!

Passing through Jessica's blog I see a reference to an article by Norman Lebrecht on classical music blogs. Lebrecht, it should be added, has a tendency to controversy, often criticising the music business (cannot remember whether he finds it too elitist, or he considers it to be dumbing down). Anyway, he describes Jessica's blog, including husband and her cat Solti, and refers to one of her regular correspondents a viola player in Vilnius. Who is? Of course?....

Obviously he did not come across this blog, but just wait....

As a regular reader of two particular blogs, www.jessicamusic.blogspot.com, and also vilniushhh.blogspot.com I find it very odd that when I access my own blog, there are no new messages - and I have to put them in myself!

So, I have just finished reading in German A.L. Kennedy's 'So am I glad'. I am sure the title is a quotation of something...biblical? religious hymnal (she would not dare to do that in Scotland, surely)? musical? It's a book about a young woman in Glasgow meeting up, and falling in love with, with a reincarnation of a rather high profile French person who lived a few hundred years ago. Can't say more than that without giving the story away. An interesting book, mixing past and present, though I also wonder whether it was not a rather nice opportunity to do lots of research in sunny France. The narrator describes her childhood as having been rather odd, and I wonder how Kennedy's parents felt about it all. It's very readable, and has lots of little funny moments, in a quite Scottish way. Previously I had come across only very brief bits of her writing and felt that she let her skill with words get in the way of what she was trying to say. But here the story chunters on and it is fairly unputdownable. Knowing the Glasgow scene and the little details of Scottish life, even though these are a bit backgroundish, helps a lot, I think. When I think of Jessica Duchen's 'Rite of Spring' set in Jewish families in middle-class London the difference is really, really striking. I am not sure if Kennedy's book could be an Aga saga (is there an urban equivalent of an Aga? - if they drive four-wheel cars all over London, maybe they have Agas too in urban London homes) in the same way that Jessica's book is. Jessica's book is much more accessible/identifiable in that it describes some perfectly ordinary dysfunctional families, and it is a light(ish) read, though compulsively unputdownable. Kennedy's main character is much less identifiable with but the book also describes a chunk of real Scottish life.
This is beginning to turn into a 'compare and contrast'..... The other nice bit about Jessica's book is that, what with Jessica Duchen being a very highclass music journo who has also studied music, is that the story line develops along the lines of the 'Rite of Spring' (the piece by Igor Stravinsky, Russian composer etc) and the action drives relentlessly forward to its conclusion, much like the music. Kennedy's book is paced very much more gently and the there are more options for the end until quite close before it.

Whenever I read a book in translation, particularly from English, I often try to work out how a particular sentence or expression would have sounded in English. Some translators are brilliant (but it's too late to go and look up books I read recently); this book is a bit so-so. It would have been interesting to know whether the Scottish dialogues were written in Scots or in English. Translated, the speakers all sound quite well spoken. Possibly not the most inspired translation I have read.

Now, the ultimate putdownable books that I have read recently, and many continue being put down, are the books by Orhan Pamuk; peace prize winner or not, they are extremely hard work. Due to luggage going missing on a recent trip I found myself on the way to Tajikistan without any reading materials, and found Orhan Pamuk as one of the few books available to me at Istanbul airport. I really did not need to buy that one, too.