Hills, Tents, and the Turning of the Year

Autumn arrived on Friday. It was a nice day, and the trees are still green; but there was just something about the angle of the sunlight slanting across the road at 8 in the morning which said to me that the year had turned. Summer has made a couple of late showings since, but it's on the way out.

Squirmle I is now eating raspberries, and we're trying to stay cool about his general faddiness (and aversion to vegetables). Squirmle II is trying to drink Mummy dry. We all had a great day on Bank Holiday Monday, with a picnic on the hills and a shared mint choc chip ice cream.

Our day trip to Greenbelt was also a success, though I think I only got to one complete talk, and spent much of the time chasing the Squirmle. I'm now catching up by listening to MP3s. I have again got the feeling that Greenbelt speaks more directly to me than any other religious gathering in my experience: its openness to discussion of practically any issue, its willingness to accept a huge range of liberal Christian viewpoints (and agnostic and non-Christian viewpoints), and its refreshing debunking of all the kinds of Christianity with which I have little or no sympathy.

Idylls of the Dad

Thursday was marked by one of my best moments since the day we were first sent home with a small pink alien. The weather was my favourite kind: a sunny day with a few clouds in a blue sky, and a decent breeze to make the trees wave and keep the temperature comfortable. I took Squirmle I up to the swings, a walk which started extremely slowly as we ambled along, pushing the empty buggy and inspecting plants, stones, and lamp posts. Eventually he tired of this, and requested a ride. We had an energetic swing in our favoured fashion (with me holding the swing back and counting to the requested number before letting go). As is now usual, this was followed by a short walk through the woods to the railway. As we reached the fence by the track, I noticed some discarded fruit on the ground, and a tree hung with small round yellow things. I thought it might be a crab apple, and sauntered over in case it would be a useful source for jam-making. It turned out to be laden with small yellow plums, just ripening, and twined below with a lethally spiky bramble, also just coming into season. Somewhat to my surprise, the Squirmle (whose unvarying response to raspberries and strawberries is to say "Daddy eat it") consented to accept a proffered blackberry and gingerly nibbled his way through it. He wasn't even perturbed by the deep purple colour of his fingers after this process. I ventured to offer a plum, and he solemnly ate that too, while I munched my way through about four, all the while watching him nervously hoping that he wouldn't swallow the stone. We were greeted by a friendly passing spaniel, whose owner said that he had played there as a boy and was off to look for his former den. And we saw five trains, including a goods train.

Gone Already

My latest gadget is a thing that lets my iPod play over my car radio. Thanks to I.B. for telling me about this gizmo, and also pointing me towards the first thing I have tried out on it: a downloaded Greenbelt talk by John O'Donohue, poet, mystic, and ex-priest. Having listened to him three times this week, I was surprised and saddened to discover that he died over a year ago. Of course, I couldn't find his poetry in the bookshop -- bookshops are full of such dross nowadays! -- so I'll have to resort to the Interweb. His sonnet on the Nativity is one of those poems that pulls a cord somewhere inside.

He is one of those people who can induce a kind of passive faith, like passive smoking, by the way he talks, not about "God" (which is a difficult word, twined around with unhelpful brambles) but about people -- or, as he whimsically calls them, "humanoids". There is something to think about in his paraphrase of Meister Eckhart, which I have added to my Words of Wisdom.

Jam and Pyjamas

The garden continues to produce: sour cherry jelly has been followed by blackcurrant jam and gooseberry chutney (to a wartime recipe), and as the loganberries ripen I'm stashing them in the freezer for a future jam-making session. The white agapanthus is starting to open, and some anonymous blue flowers (Brodiaea?) have sprouted in one of the bulb pots.

We're trying not to make too much of it, but we were very pleased by Squirmle 1's success in doing a poo in his potty. He has also helped to make flapjack and produced some enthusiastic paintings. He drives us mad by trying to treat everything as a game in which Mummy and Daddy have to chase him, wielding toothbrush, trousers, shoes, sun-hat, or whatever. Meanwhile Squirmle 2's progress in sleeping has suffered a setback caused by a cold, but he has now learned how to grab things, and can shove himself a fair distance along the carpet by lying on his back and pushing with his legs.

All the people my own age are older than me!

My college recently held a summer garden party for alumni, and we went along. Not many of my contemporaries were there, but meeting the few that had turned up did confirm the validity of a perception that has become increasingly clear to me in the last few months: at the time of life that I have now reached, all the people my own age are older than me!

Perelandra the Opera

Attending this musical event last Friday evening was an agreeably entertaining experience. However, I am afraid that I must disagree with the overheard opinion of one earnest C. S. Lewis devotee: "Beautiful beyond belief!". It might be possible (though rather difficult) to make a musically and dramatically compelling stage version of C. S. Lewis's most theological of science fiction novels; but (as much as I love his music) Donald Swann was perhaps not the ideal composer to attempt it. It is a pity that Gustav Holst died nine years before the novel was published.

Don't get me wrong: much of it was really rather good. The opening scene, in which the book's internal narrator with his doctor friend (identified as C. S. Lewis and Humphrey Havard) stumble into Ransom's cottage on a dark night to await his return from outer space, was a successful chunk of modern-day musical theatre, though I consider that obscuring the words by having more than one character singing at the same time is a flaw in an otherwise naturalistic piece. The musical style was generally what one might hope from a modern opera: supportive without being intrusive, occasionally pungent or angular without being objectionable, and orchestrated with much tuned and untuned percussion. However, as the line "I cannot imagine Perelandra" soared on a thread of eminently singable but slightly too predictable melody, I couldn't help thinking that Mr Swann had stepped a little too far in the direction of his more natural habitat on the West End musical stage. If you are aiming for something on a par with the chamber operas of Holst or Britten (and Swann occasionally does come quite near this), it is distracting for the listeners to find themselves suddenly in a musical world closer to that of Salad Days.

As we went on, the music continued to wander around between styles in a way which the producer, in his programme notes, lauded as eclectic, but which I found to be something of a distraction. Every now and then, Swann's enjoyably scrunchy harmony would suddenly culminate in a cadence so conventional that it could have come from a Victorian church anthem. The result seemed as much of a jolt as if a Flanders and Swann ditty had ended in a Schoenbergian discord. The use of uneven Balkan rhythms was an occasional feature, but its contribution was limited, and added nothing that composers such as Holst had not been doing long before: in an orchestral tutti near the end, the omission of a beat every few measures felt like mere affectation.

In word-setting, odd rhythms can be more of a hindrance than wholly irregular barring, and surely few serious librettos are best set to dance rhythms of any kind. One particularly beautiful passage, in which a solo flute undulated above soft chords, was let down by the banality of its melodic development; it rose wonderfully, but came down exactly the same way as it had gone up. (Then, even so great a composer as Vaughan Williams could suffer from such a momentary lack of inventiveness.) The name "Maleldil" is several times set to an irritating three-note phrase, and an exceedingly prosaic choral comment ("Day and night, night and day, the attack of the enemy continues") has a correspondingly plodding tune. (I'm pretty sure Swann himself sang this section when he gave an illustrated talk to the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society in the 1980s, and I think I thought the same then!) In general, the orchestration -- by Max Saunders -- seemed excellent to me (what do I know?), with harp, piccolo, and (as mentioned) percussion used to particularly good effect. Occasionally, though, the harmony felt somehow bottomless, despite the presence of double basses, horns, trombones, and bassoon in the orchestral line-up. I wondered if this was the result of orchestrating the work of an essentially pianistic composer, for whom sustained bass lines might not be a natural mode of writing.

The partly-spoken scene in which Weston arrives on Perelandra in his spaceship would benefit from lighting effects such as projection: even without them, it did manage to evoke the atmosphere of a black-and-white film version of Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, which is very much where the figure of Weston is drawn from. Much of the action was recounted by a narrator (John Amis), leaving the singers only to comment on it before and after. The most successful sections, I felt, were Ransom's accompanied monologues, where the singer expresses the character's wrestling with his conscience and the perils of the situation against an accompaniment which skilfully catches the mood. Less successful were the songs of praise to Maleldil. It just seems to be hard for composers to recapture the fine, careless rapture of Haydn's Creation in any later musical idiom, and as the King and Lady of Perelandra echoed each other in a pious tableau, I was reminded of the stilted stained-glass attitudes of Elgar's Apostles. The grand finale was stirring, though, and the whole piece was shot through with occasional delights.

The word "tableau" puts in focus the dramatic problem. Opera is not a medium well suited to the clear depiction of complex and violent action, and episodes such as the fight between Ransom and Weston (the Un-man) were recounted in narration by the chorus. The title "opera" seems less appropriate here; this concert performance was presented as a "dramatic oratorio", and I can see why in the second attempt to produce this work it was termed a "music drama". In terms of potential staging, Perelandra falls into that awkward region inhabited by such works as Purcell's Fairy Queen or Handel's Acis and Galatea: not a straight concert-work, but not quite satisfactory as a stage-work either. My own thought was that it would be best served by mixed-media presentation, part chamber opera, part modern ballet, with costume and lighting effects, but without an attempt at realistic theatre: the dramatic sequences could perhaps be best realized by the technique of representing each character by both a singer and a dancer (as in Birtwhistle's Mask of Orpheus).

The singers for the most part did an excellent job. Neil Jenkins (Lewis) was in fine voice, though he might have done well to clutch a Pavarottian handkerchief in order to suppress that urge of the aging recitalist to express his musical feeling (or to feel his way through the music) with conductor-like gestures. The years have perhaps dealt less kindly with the larynx of Rupert Forbes (Humphrey), but he provided a good enough foil. Leon Berger (Weston) was splendid, even though the low tessitura of much of his part was clearly a little taxing and did not always carry. Hakon Vramsmo (Ransom) was engaging, lyrical, and mellifluous, and Alexander Anderson-Hall (King) produced some of those wonderful top tenor notes of the kind that stir the hairs on the back of your neck. Jane Streeton (Lady) was graceful and appealing, though occasionally overpowered by the orchestra, at least from where I was sitting. Clive McCombie (Spider) had a suitable gravitas for the king of the creepy-crawlies, and also covered some bass solo sections in the chorus part. (I remember his name from a rare performance of Swann's unpublished "South African Song Cycle" at the University Church in about 1983, though I wouldn't have recalled his face.) The brief solo aria for treble was nicely done, if (as with most boy trebles) quiet and a bit colourless, with uncertain tuning through a couple of Swann's ornamental twiddles. The choir dealt capably with what was clearly, in places, quite a tricky score, with only a few minor disagreements about final note-lengths, and the occasional "piano-crescendo" entry betraying that collective uncertainty which with all choral singers are only too familiar. The soprano solos from within the choir were accurate and atmospheric.

As for the venue, the elegant Sheldonian Theatre lived up to its reputation among Oxford music-lovers as the most uncomfortable concert hall in Christendom. I cannot think of any other auditorium where not only each row, but entire sections of seating can be reached only by treading on other members of the audience. Long ago I vowed never to sit on someone else's feet in the steeply-sloping upper gallery -- unless the concert was so poorly attended that I could stretch full length along one of the narrow shelves that passes for a row of seats (as I once did to listen to a student performance of a Beethoven symphony). Old acquaintance with the row numbers (from having been a steward for Music at Oxford concerts) enabled me to select a seat with a back, but leg-room was still severely constrained: the only proper seats are the chairs, where the floor is level but the prices are steep, and the acoustics are not great. Opening a window for ventilation on a warm evening wafts in the raucous cries of drinkers at the "White Horse" and the "Kings Arms".

Donald Swann is said to have considered Perelandra his masterpiece. Certainly it seems to be the only thing he attempted on this scale, but I fear it is inevitably doomed to stand alongside Sir Arthur Sullivan's Ivanhoe and Scott Joplin's Treemonisha as a noble effort in serious opera by a composer whose light music will live for ever.

Growing infants and vegetables

Life is too busy to blog now...

The Squirmle had his first Terrible Twos Tantrum as he reached the age of two to the minute! How tragic can it be that Daddy is too busy to lift you into your high chair and Mummmy does it instead? He had (and helped to blow out) a 2-shaped candle on his birthday cake, though no party, as we thought that going to four friends' parties was quite enough excitement for the season. For the last few weeks he has been expanding his repertoire of second syllables and final consonants (now saying "boo-KH" with gusto), so there is some hope that he may be able to communicate outside the home (though he may not wish to: he refused to speak to the staff at nursery when visiting a new room last week). He has also completed his 15-piece Big Bus jigsaw practically on his own, which is pretty impressive. His counting is still enthusiastic, even though there can be few cultures in which the numbering system goes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 14, 14...

Meanwhile Squirmle II has developed a beaming smile which he deploys occasionally after a feed, but is still scarcely capable of sleeping if not actually lying on Mummy or Daddy. He has the endearing habit (apparently not uncommon in breastfed babies) of saving up all his poo for two or three days, and then letting rip with a ghastly burbling sound which registers rather a long way up the Richter scale.

The roses are starting to come out now. 'Kathleen Harrap' has been out for over a week, 'Graham Thomas' has started, the yellow climber on the fence is going fit to bust, and the two red ones will be out soon. The single delphinium has been eaten by slugs, but is making a comeback thanks to the application of some 'eco-friendly' slug pellets. The gooseberry has lost half of its leaves to small green caterpillars, and something is eating the choisyas. We've had our first home-grown salad leaves, and some of the tomato plants may not be dead yet. Living off the land is a long way off, though!