La Bohème en banlieue

Last night's Swiss TV/Arte production of Bohème, live using different locations in Bern, was amazing - a new genre in, what, opera verismo. It can be watched for the next seven days on Arte7.

http://www.arte.tv/fr/Echappees-culturelles/La-Boheme-en-banlieue/2790004.html

It is well worth watching, even if you're not the father of the Marcello!

Duruflé Requiem

The village choral society is bravely attempting the Duruflé Requiem, in a programme that also includes the four Handel Coronation Anthems. The Handel can be quickly passed over, for about the only musically interesting bits are the occasional hemiolas, Handel being a composer, or should I say having been a composer, who wrote far, far too much. GF's greatest sin, other than that of giving far too many top Ds (or worse) to basses, was to bequeath a certain way of writing hymn tunes to a myriad amateur hymn-tune writers, mainly from Yorkshire or Wales, with which we are still saddled in some quires and places where they sing. ('Ee, we allus sing Albert Snatterthwaite's tune for While Shepherds Watched 'ere. The tune come into 'is 'ead when 'e were muckin' out t'pigs, Albert used to say. He said it were Divine Intervention after he'd bin to see t'Halifax Choral do Messiah. He din't know nowt about music, Albert din't, but that din't stop 'im thinkin' up' that tune. Choirmaster rit it owt forrim, and wim sung it air since. Just at Christmas, like.')

But that is by the by.

The Duruflé is a rather different animal, ball-game, or kettle of fish, though. It is always a surprise to a choir when orchestra or organ get involved, usually at dress rehearsal, and launch into what sounds like a completely different work. A whole choral society's collective hair has been known to turn white in the space of 20 minutes.

Three skills are required of a choir person attempting this work -

1) the ability to count (though only up to nine)

2) the ability, and the desire, to see the conductor

3) the ability to go selectively deaf

I would add a fourth skill - sight-reading - but for some reason amateur groups have always placed sight-reading skills (or even being in possession of a usable voice) well down in the table of priorities, far below an aptitude for chair-stacking, tea-brewing or being on a Committee. And as for an ability to count, see the conductor or blank out disruptive aural influences, well, we didn't expect to have to work when we joined this choir, did we Mildred?

Mind you, if everybody in a choral society was an expert sight-reader the number of rehearsals needed for the next concert could be counted on the thumbs of one hand, and that would destroy the whole point of a local choral society, which is primarily social.

Duruflé's big mistake was to write his Requiem in Latin. It is a fact well known that no English person is capable, without years of tuition, of singing in Latin, especially if he (or she) learned about puellae in herba longa with pueri and that old viperas, which used to give us such delight in 2A when viperas was pronounced in the classic English tradition. The English tradition is not the tradition of church Latin, as Pope Pius X had to remind the unruly French in about 19-dot. Duruflé may have taken notice, but generations of English choral societies have carried on singing per-pet-chewer without benefit of clergy.

Still - and this is the unanswerable argument of your average choral society - the audience won't know any different.

But it's just such a shame for Duruflé, or Do Roughly, as I shall fondly think of him henceforth.

PS

Years ago I was drafted in at the final rehearsal to augment the basses in what was predominantly a school performance of Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, a work which I had not sung before and have not since, more's the pity. There was grudging respect from a few young 'erberts when I, an old git even then by their standards, managed the Hebrew text and complex rhythms at sight. albeit with most of my fingers crossed.

On that occasion the choir was well prepared, but the organist wasn't, and I think he must have been horrified at the complexity of the organ part, which he hadn't bothered to look at beforehand, being a teacher and therefore omniscient. The only things I remember about the concert is a splendid performance by a young alto soloist which rescued a most unholy mess-up, and falling gratefully into the pub-next-the-church afterwards in order to obliterate all other memories.

Ste Thérèse de Lisieux

It's easy to sneer at the RCs for queuing up to gawp at a few bits of a dead saint, but on the other side of the fence relics are considered to be extremely holy and objects of veneration in their own right. That we outside Roman Catholicism don't understand it is no excuse for sectarian sniping, which we can safely leave to the new religion of Atheism. Dr John Sentamu evidently has some reason for opening the doors of York Minster to Ste Thérèse, and that is good enough for me.

Mocking is easy. Respecting the practices of different belief systems is a lot harder.

The Beautiful Game (yer wo'k?)

I am belatedly coming to realise that what divides clergy from laity, vicar from curate, organist from choirmaster and bishop from dean is not doctrine or the role of women in the ministry or whether Amazing Grace should ever be sung in church at all, but something far more fundamental - the doings of football teams.

(Football, in case there are readers of this blog on the planet Uranus, is a game in which a lot of people, usually grown men, kick a ball around a field and try to get it to pass between two sticks with a lid on while somebody else tries to stop them from doing so. There are a few more rules, but that is the general idea.)

Now I have searched for any reference to this activity in the Old Testament, and in the New Testament, which is more up-to-date, but in vain. The tribes of Israel might, in their wanderings, have dropped in on a game of buzkashi ...

(Buzkashi, dear Uranian reader, is a precursor of football played in Central Asia, either on horseback or yakback, the aim of which is to pick up the carcass of a headless goat or sheep and deposit it in a designated place. It is a jolly interesting game, unless you are a goat or, for that matter, a sheep)

... but, if so, there is no record of it. And certainly there is no record of their ever having played football. For one thing, they were far too busy avoiding being persecuted, enslaved or exterminated to have the time to spend on such trivial pursuits.

So, if there is no biblical precedent for it, why is it the dominant topic of conversation in any place where men foregather, such as the choir vestry?

Child Protection

I know this is a delicate subject, and one which nobody dare say anything about in case of reprisals from the Government's Department of Lunacy, but the latest proposals from Nanny should be enough to strike fear into the hearts of every parent. Not fear of perverts doing nasty things with our children, but fear of the fear of it, which is now setting us one against another, and making us not only suspicious of each other, but suspicious of ourselves. The vast majority of fathers (and mothers, for we should never forget Myra Hindley), whether of boy children or of girl children, are as protective of the children of other mothers and fathers as they are or were of their own, and the networks of parental friendships and trusts are something which binds us together as friends and even co-parents (in the sense that when you entrust your child to us we behave as we think you would, so that they are comfortable and trusting wth us.)

None of the protective measures which have been set up at enormous cost has made, is making, or will make, a ha'porth of difference. The sort of people who want to prey upon children don't behave in ways that governnments can legislate against. They will control their urges until they've got clearance, and then they will have a field day, with an entree into any youth group that takes their fancy. They are, as our bumbling Minister for Children admits, very clever at getting what they want.

They can spin their words as much as they like, these nannies of our alarmist State, but the fact remains that for possibly the first time in this country a lot of us adults - 11,000,000 or so - are presumed guilty until the electronic apparatus of the State says we're innocent.

It is an awful fact that about one in ten children will have been abused in one way or another by the time they reach puberty. But it is also a very relevant fact that the majority of such abuses are committed by family members or other children, and they are not covered by this massively expensive grabnet. So this draconian measure isn't going to do much for them.

What I fear is that it will be a golden opportunity for nasty neighbours to make malicious complaints about people, and have those complaints recorded and used to blacken someone's record. This isn't hypothetical, for last year someone falsely accused me and my wife (and two other families) of persecuting him because he is gay, and we were all hauled up before the local 'Safety Partnership' to explain ourselves. And there will be no redress for victims of false accusations under the ISA scheme, for the information about you will be kept secret and the basis of a bureaucrat's - not a court's - decision not to allow you anywhere near a child will also be kept a secret.

Sensible adults, even those who have been CRB checked, make sure that they are never alone with a child, and not only for the child's protection but their own, for far too many people's lives have been damaged by false accusations.

The ISA was set up in the wake of the Soham murders. Matthew Parris, writing in The Times, had this to say:

Those murders would almost certainly never have happened were it not for the incompetence of the police, social services and education authorities. The result is that in consequence of the failure of three state authorities, a fourth state authority has been set up.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article6831413.ece

And today Libby Purves picks up the baton:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/libby_purves/article6832993.ece

What can we do? Well, we can stop electing halfwits, for a start, especially when they might be daft enough to become government ministers.

Local restauRANTS - I

I was a bit bothered when I saw, in the foyer of a much-lauded local restaurant, a hastily pinned-up A4 sheet bearing the slogan "We no longer accept cheques for under £100" (and I probably paraphrase), and only mildly reassured to learn that the North West Development Agency had been involved in funding a pretty serious refurbishment, because the true test of a restaurant, as opposed to a caterer, is not the ambience but the taste of the food, but we'll come to that later.

The best eatery that ever assaulted my plastic and flirted with my palate was, without any doubt, my old friend Rob Moss's little bistro (or brasserie) in New Hey. Rob, who had worked for far too long for the sake of his soul and his happiness in insurance, and had hated every minute of it, eventually gave up the soul-sickening graft of conning people out of their loot and opened this little bistro in a converted terraced house to share his love of northern French cuisine with local punters, only about 16 of whom could be accommodated in his nosh-house at any one time. I don't know whether Rob ever had a commis chef - I think his kitchen was too small for more than one person at any one time - but with so few covers he could cope on his own and the place was always nearly full. We used to go with our friends Kim and Bill about once a month (both of them mean cooks) for the two years that the place was there, then Rob was called to higher things and became a postman on a Scottish island where his wife Carol ("Brain") got a job teaching deaf children.

I mention this because there is a point, measured by the number of mouths to be fed and the competence of the chef, where cuisine stops being cuisine and becomes catering.

And at this much-lauded local restaurant that is what we got - catering (plus a barney about whether or not we had ordered chocolates to go with our coffee, which, by the way, tasted of acorns.) But the barney was about a couple of quids'-worth of choccies (most of which were consumed anyway by the Vicar's wife, who is a connoisseuse of such things), which in the light of takings of something like £500 from our party, plus the profit from the bar and the wine list, is mere chicken-feed unless you are an accountant by trade, knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

The starters were fine - my smoked salmon was delicate enough to let the taste of the prawns get through, and the dill sauce was subtle, and it all worked beautifully together.

But the best thing I can say about the entrées is that they were bland enough not to frighten the taste-buds of your average Daily Mail reader. Ann's lump of lamb was huge, but too fatty, and with no hint of rosemary or even oregano to give the occasional morsel of lean meat a bit of a lift. My chicken breast was tough, and pink in the middle, which with chicken is always a bit of a worry, for it suggests that it has been cookd on too high a heat for safety. And the veg! The promised cauliflower cheese was strong in cauliflower, but wet with cauliflower cooking juice in which floated a few blobs of something yellow which might have been cheese, but which didn't taste of anything. Cauliflower al dente is delicious, but we all know what the cooking liquid smells like, and we don't really want that stuff swimming around on our plates.

Desserts were all right. My pancake (oh, all right, crêpe) was limp and soggy, and flopped slimily like a jellyfish over the ice-cream. A touch of buckwheat flour might have put some lead in its pencil, but nobody had thought of it. And everything was swimming in the juice of the black cherries so it was sloppy. Ann passed me her dessert to finish, but the toffee lattice was burnt and bitter.

But the coffee! It was truly awful. I have never tasted anything so disgusting since a Mormon friend gave me a cup of Caro. If you have to cheat and use instant, at least use something that smells a bit like like coffee, even if tastes like acorns. And anyway, who in their right mind would finish an evening meal with coffee (even what English people think is coffee) and risk nightmares on top of indigestion?

Oh, and another thing. This restaurant - refurbished (with the help of the NWDA) in something approaching Art Deco style - thinks it perfectly acceptable to blare incongruous Karen Carpenter songs at you so loudly than you cannot have a conversation at your table. That they turn the volume down when you ask is no excuse - their sin is to assume that you want OAP muzak in the first place. Loud muzak is about as acceptable in a public restaurant as Lynx aftershave or foot odour.

Michael Winner - I hope you are reading this.

OVERALL MARKS

ambience - 8/10

service - 9/10

food - 4/10

wines - 7/10

VFM - 6/10

Recycling rage

Recycling bin day today. Put out big green bin (garden waste) and green box (plastics, glass and metal.) Green box new - last one disappeared in 50mph gale (green boxes not very heavy when empty), so thoughtfully left lid on to reduce aerodynamic properties and as afterthought placed heavy brick on lid on account of strong winds of about 51mph, with worse forecast.

Went out for day on coach trip to Buddhist temple. Om.

Returned 6:30pm. Brick OK, but no sign of green box, nor of next-door-neighbour's green box.

Green bin on side propping up car. Green boxes probably blown into Irish Sea for all I know. Om.

"You would think, wouldn't you..." but question rhetorical. Bin men nowadays are paid to complete round in fastest time possible, not think, or stick thoughtfully provided heavy brick back on top of empty green box. Om.

But questions remain. If I placed large objects on pavement outside my property on any day other than bin day I would be deemed to be obstructing said pavement, in case mums with pushchairs are forced into the road because of them and get squashed by a passing steamroller or charabanc or blind people fall over them, and I would probably be collared or at least rebuked by a constabule, but council bins seem immune to the consequences of obstruction-causing behaviour, as do their masters. Om.

And if I drove along the street scattering plastic bottles and tin cans willy-nilly I would face an on-the-spot fine for littering, but council waste disposal operatives seem similarly exempt from such due process of law, so residents have to spend much of bin-day removing the rubbish deposited on our streets by council vehicles and returning it to the same bins it came from, ready for the next Brian Rix farce in a fortnight. Om.

I have a suggestion to make. Wyre BC could save an absolute fortune by cutting out the middlemen. Residents could just empty their bins straight into the street and save the bin-men the trouble of doing it for us.

Om.