Jeremy D.

The Stars! The Stars! (for Peter) The stars! The stars! They're just like cars, Without the seats or wheels; Also without the people in, The brake lights, wigs, or eels. The fridge! The fridge! It's like a bridge For beer and cheese and milk; A thoroughfare for Tupperware And creatures of that ilk. The sheep! The sheep! They're just like sheep; No difference at all, Except that these are very big While those are very small. The dark! The dark! It's like a park Where Absence goes to play, And Blankness dreams pernicious schemes Until the break of day.

As this year's #NationalPoetryDay theme is "play", I thought I'd share this.

The orchestrations often centre on a love duet between oboe and clarinet, the canonic principle played out between single reed and double reed. I have an instinctive conviction that one is Robert, the other Clara.

Dugga doo?

I'll be listening!

"Can that be sung?"
Nope.
"Write it like that anyway?"
Yep.

YouTube video by SP's score videos Wilhelm Stenhammar – String Quartet No.5 "Serenade", in C major

I can't pass up this opportunity to post a link to Wilhelm Stenhammar's String Quartet no. 5, a piece that surely has Haydnpockets. The Fresk Quartet are the players.
youtu.be/eRJEUYG3r9Y?...

Victor Meldrew (Richard Wilson).

Non credo.

I guess I'll be ripped in half and the German Jewish side of me will be sent in that direction – not strictly "to live" in that scenario.

Two cats (black and ginger) inspecting an empty kitchen before the old tiles came out. The ginger cat looks over his shoulder: "why?"

Ginger cat exploring where kitchen cupboards used to be.

Black cat in a small cardboard box for "Beschläge / sundries", resting her chin on the side. It's not really a big enough box for her, but what can you do?

Reminds me of when we got our kitchen done... At least Chloe got a new cardboard box out of it. Otherwise the whole process was incomprehensible.

Simplify a couple of consonant clusters and, hey presto, here's modern English "such". (The meaning has shifted too.)

Is there an alternate fingering that makes that F# A# easy at speed? Using one of the side keys? I'd have to dig my clarinet out to remember the details.

You're not going to find one in the inside pocket of a dinner jacket, are you? I've been known to take one off at a later stage of an evening when I want to look vaguely louche, and find it there several months later.

Quote with a gif from the last show/movie you watched

Extraordinary!

📌

I enjoyed this! Lovely violin solo in the "Hermit".

It made me think a bit of the fifteenth-century English "London Lickpenny", with its early scenes set in Westminster Hall – a plaintiff from out of town can't get anywhere because of legal rapacity and mumbo jumbo. Maybe there's a running tradition of this kind of satire?

Interesting to read that this was popular enough that Schubert reworked it for publication fifteen years later (I guess you had to be there.) I wonder if anyone's recorded the 1812 version? Suspect not, but I'll have a rummage.

The Auryn Series XXIX. Joseph Haydn: String Quartets vol. 10 of 14. Op. 64, nos. 1-6. Auryn Quartet (Tacet).

#NowPlaying Haydn's String Quartet in B flat, Op. 64 no. 3. I don't know the Opp. 50s and 60s quartets as well as those before and after, so it's been lovely getting to know them, albeit at nowhere near the rate of #A-Haydn-A-Day. This one is astonishingly good.

The highlight so far! Really lovely. I know the date is conjectural, but if 1812 is about right, the pace of Schubert's musical development is extraordinary.

I cheated and got ahead, so I'll listen to both again today. Duet version is a pretty little thing.

Rather lovely, both of these, and Van Hoorickx's piano accompaniment is so adroit that I'd no suspicion it wasn't Schubert's own.

I don't know this one! Onto the wishlist with it.

I'm pretty sure my introduction to the Nonet was the Dartington Ensemble on Hyperion in the early 90s. That kept me going for a decade maybe, when I bought a Czech Nonet CD. In the age of streaming I'll gladly listen to any recording there is! It never fails to lift the spirits.

Likewise!

PS At the same time, the apparently senseless killing of the innocent birds is a crime against nature, implicitly aligned with parricide.

That did make some sense to me. Its central interest is in the state of mind of the parricide after the killing, rather than the act itself: the conviction that the birds were accusing him is the externalized but unacknowledgeable voice of his own conscience. A pity about the moralising last stanza.

"The poem is piffle by Pfeffel." I'm rather enjoying the gleeful self-assurance of GJ's put-downs.

I wish you catharsis. It's an exceptional recording, I think.

Brahms by Arrangement vol. 2: Orchestrations by Robin Holloway. Variations on a Theme by Schumann, Op. 23; Symphony in F minor, Op. 34; Schumann: Six Canonic Studies, Op. 56. BBC SO / Paul Mann. Toccata Classics.

You'll all know this already I imagine, but for a xylophone-free experience, Robin Holloway's orchestration of the Piano Quintet / Sonata for two pianos is rather wonderful, as is the whole album.