Old Fogey’s Favourites

Some months ago I went across the river to Peckham, to where my grandmother was born. At the age of three she was taken by her father to Salford where she remained the rest of her life - till she died in 1984 aged 87. I was searching for her grandfather’s grave, my great-great grandfather’s. I was unlucky. The cemetery had recently systematically cleared out the graves abandoned from before 1920. I did, though, find a reference there in the records - as Alfred, died age 64 in August 1914.

Charlie Chaplin was eight years older than my grandmother. He was born in Peckham. His early life there, the poverty and distress, was terrifying. I’m glad my grandmother escaped it - into something relatively more comfortable, though I’m not sure we’d think of it so now. Her life, a Lancashire miner’s wife, was hard enough.

There’s a sculpture of Charlie there now. It’s not up to much, but it marks a remembrance.

This is Charlie’s composition ‘Limelight’ - into which he, by his genius, was able to escape to live, and my grandmother and great- great grandfather weren’t.

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Music for the season, by Cecile Chaminade. She was a French composer, mainly of piano music, who spent the first half of her life in the nineteenth century and the second in the twentieth. She would never be called one of the so-called ’serious’ composers. Her music is too unpretentious for that. It is intimate, nostalgic, dreamy and quite disarming. She’s usually judged as  a composer of ’salon’ music, of charming trifles. Well, maybe she isn’t Beethoven, Chopin or Liszt. There are no grand gestures, no angst or pain. But in its unassuming, simple and modest way, this is perfect. I love the way she weaves around the charming tune the bustling of the wind and the leaves.

It is played by Eric Parkin.

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1971 - my third year trying to teach skinheads in East London - and drowning. This is Leon Russell, from the same year, complete with false start. The song, a blues, is by Bob Dylan. The lyrics are typical Dylan whimsy - and don’t mean very much. It is given substance by Russell’s self command and chainsaw vocal. He lags fractionally behind the beat, in that way characteristic of blues and jazz. It’s not something consciously learnt, but absorbed, as by a child, from the sounds of the world around him.

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Another evocative choral sound - and a quite extraordinary one. A Russian folk song, sung by a tenor (anonymous) in an almost impossible high falsetto across a ground of deep basses. It’s like a distant animal cry, a wailing carried on the wind across the endless Russian steppes. There are moments when the voices of the other tenors straining into falsetto too move up towards his, and surround him like a flock of starlings. Utterly strange and haunting.

It is sung by the Don Cossack Choir conducted by Serge Jaroff, recorded almost fifty years ago.

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In 1991 the BBC put out a series of TV programmes, ‘Bringing It All Back Home’, about the influence of Irish music on American folk and country music and the cross fertilisation of American music back to  Ireland. Naturally, given the history, a lot of the songs were about emigration, and the experience of loss and longing, on the part both of the emigrants and the ones they are leaving behind. Here is a heartbreaking example, from the same series.

This song ‘Sonny’ is about the other side of this - of the one who didn’t leave. It tells of the fear of the mother that her son will, like those of so many other mothers, leave her alone. And when at last it is he who is left alone, it’s as if his life had had its meaning taken from him. It is sung here in a famous recording from 1991 by Emmy Lou Harris, Mary Black and Dolores Keane. The wailing uillean pipes, Ireland’s equivalent of country music’s steel guitar, seem to speak achingly of Sonny yearning for something he could never have and which he has no words for.

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For some unaccountable reason, travelling into London today on the Tube, the memory flickered across my mind of 7/7, four years ago, when I was on the Edgware Road train blown up by home-grown Muslim terrorists. My memories are of darkness, confusion and silence - and, out of the silence, the strange animal sounds of human distress. I didn’t know what was happening. I emerged dirty and bewildered, stumbling across confused and bloodied passengers, to make may way out into the daylight. It was only some hours later I fully understood what had happened. Here is a fuller account of my experience that day.

Anyway it gives me an excuse to play this heartfelt song, written and sung by Eddi Reader. She is waiting for news of friends who, like me, were caught up in it.

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Without doubt the finest version of this Bob Dylan song ever. It’s by Irish singer Sinead Lohan. There is a YouTube video here of her performance, if you prefer.

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Wednesday evenings see me down the British Legion Club in Ilford for a jazz workshop with several other old fogies, all pretending we can play. Like most jazz players we are a pretty ill-disciplined bunch. It can take an age to settle on what number to play, whose choice it is and the order of solos. When frustration starts to set in with me (my tolerance level is lower than the others) I shout for this number - ‘I Can’t Get Started’ - in the hope that the others will get the irony and stir into action. Doesn’t always work.

We play in a vacant room at the back of the club, out of harm’s way. But a few Legion regulars come in and bring their drinks with them. Not so much, I think, for the music, but to witness the amusing real life spectacle of us getting on each other’s nerves.

Anyway, here’s the best version, by Bunny Berigan. He was a beautiful trumpet player. His heyday was in the 1930s - but his day didn’t last long. He was dead at 34. He was almost the equal of Armstrong in tone and invention - more tender too. He also could sing, which he does here, in an engaging offhand manner. When he plays the melody again at the end, in the higher register, it is spine tingling. Recorded in April 1936.

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Eight years ago, 8 October 2001, I was at a concert given by the mezzo-soprano Alice Coote and the pianist Julius Drake at Wigmore Hall, London. She was just starting out on her career then, as one of the BBC’s sponsored Young Artists. I’m not up to speed on where she lies in the current firmament of classical sopranos, but in a recent recording of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, with Mark Elder and the Halle Orchestra, she’s a radiant Angel.

Schumann’s Meine Rose is one of the most popular encores for sopranos, and Alice Coote sang it at the end of her recital. The recital was broadcast by the BBC and this is from my recording of it then. I’ve left in the applause and the announcer’s voice over at the end.

‘At your feet, I would like, to you as to a flower, silently pour out my soul, though I do not see your blossoming joy.’

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For the last twenty years of his life, the years of his superstardom, it became difficult to see much beyond the the rather grotesque, larger than life notoriety of Luciano Pavarotti. ‘Nessun Dorma’ fixed his fame in the wider public’s mind. It became hard to do justice to his real talent. His gargantuan size made him seem ridiculous. Opera fans began to disdain him in direct proportion to the growth of his world wide fame.

Pavarotti, for me, was simply the greatest tenor voice of the twentieth century. Others may have had greater dramatic talent - Jon Vickers, Placido Domingo to name two. But few, I think, had Pavarotti’s delicacy, and none his voice.

I’m not sure that it was in the big arias of Verdi or Puccini - ‘Nessun Dorma’ the most widely associated with him - suited him naturally - though his ‘Che gelida manina’ would rightly bring the house down. He was at his best, in my view, in the gentler, more reflective and wistful music of Bellini and Donizetti - the bel canto repertoire in vogue before Verdi’s dramatic revolution.

Here he is singing ‘A te, O cara’ - ‘You, beloved’ - from Bellini’s ‘I Puritani’. Nicolai Ghiaurov and Giancario Luccardi join in, with La Stupenda - Joan Sutherland - mooning about up top.

At his best.

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