A Journey to Crete, Constantinople, Naples and
Florence - Three Months Abroad by Anna Vivanti was published, originally for
private circulation, in 1865. Thus we embark on one woman’s… Read More
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Philip Spires Commonplace Book Blog
1
I have kept a commonplace book for many years. In recent times, it has become just a workbook to support my research on Philippine education. But now, via a blog, I want to recreate what it used to be, a place where scraps of impressions are filed for future reflection. It's not a diary, it's just a mental scrapbook, concentrating on book reviews, concert reviews, visual arts and some occasional pieces on travel.
poetry:to me
is about passing
images that
sometimes
stick but often
pass by only
to return
un:announced when le
ast expected
often it SlavishlY
conforms to
rules as opaque as
their… Read More
The
Work Of Nations by Robert B Reich was published in 1991, written, therefore,
prior to that year. In the book, the author describes the role of the business enterprise,
with specific refe… Read More
Concerts seasons often parade a procession of “great works”
calculated to promote ticket sales. Anything less well known is often regarded
as risky because audiences, though they… Read More
“Such stuff as dreams are made on, we are all spirits
and are melted into air” are words that ought to remind us of the ephemeral,
temporal nature of human life, that such good t… Read More
Some time ago, for a review of the concert in Alicante’s
ADDA auditorium, I used the headline “No superlatives”. I chose the words not
because I wanted to question the qual… Read More
A Long Way From Home is a
novel that takes the reader a long way from any comfort zone. It is challenging
in many ways and perhaps it is only a determined reader armed with perseverance
who… Read More
Unusually,
I am not going to write a full review of this. To say I was disappointed by the
book would be an understatement. It was clear what Ian McEwan was trying to do.
His problem was tha… Read More
Again the program looked familiar. The only thing that
appeared not to be predictable was the playing. And on that score, the ADDA
orchestra under Joseph Vicente, fronted by Trio Vibrart, we… Read More
When you have been to a lot of concerts - when you
reach a certain age! - real surprises are quite rare. Even new works fall into
expected groups when you have heard a lot of them. In over f… Read More
For the second time, Caroline and I have completed an edition
of the Concurso Internacional de Piano de la Ciudad de Alicante Gonzalo Soriano
con el Conservatorio Jose Tomas. One
hundr… Read More
Some concerts are different from the norm. Some turn
out to be different, some look different from the start. Last Friday in ADDA,
Aliante, our concert fell into both categories.
The start… Read More
I was unaware of Veblen’s ideas until a recent edition of In Our Time on BBC Radio 4 devoted an hour of discussion to his life and work. So stimulating did I find the discussion that I… Read More
Orchestras on tour often take some of their home
repertoire with them. In the case of the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra under the
direction of Andris Poga in Alicante last night, this took th… Read More
It is at least forty years since I heard a concert
performance of a Bach Passion. It is probably a decade since I heard a complete
performance. I am not a believer in Christian myth. I canno… Read More
This was a very special concert. It will live in the
memory for as long as breath continues. It was nothing less than a triumph of
artistic direction on behalf of Josep Vicent. All three fea… Read More
La Vida Breve by Manuel de Falla is a problematic
work. Its problem stems mainly from the fact
that it is an opera that lasts just over an hour. Productions of it generally
have to be combin… Read More
Something special was experienced by the ADDA audience
last night. On the face of it, the concert was almost conventional, as concerts
sometimes can appear on paper. There was to be a Beetho… Read More
The Hallé Orchestra has
a very long history and tradition. Part of its tradition is to develop long and
lasting relationships with its principal conductors. If history provides the
pa… Read More
This was a concert of
two halves, both superb, both contrasted, both within and between. Shostakovich
in the first half and Ravel in the second provided the between contrast between.
The wor… Read More
Gustavo Gimeno conducted the Orquestra de la Comunitat
Valenciana in the latest concert of ADDA’s Pasions season. The program juxtaposed
two symphonies that were premiered about thirty… Read More
Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony is one of those works I can hear anytime I want. I play it to myself
in my head - at least, I think I do. It's
a work I and many others have heard so many ti… Read More
Philip Spires
Author of five novels, short stories and book on rugby league
http://www.philipspires.co.uk Read More
Philip Spires
Author of five novels, short stories and book on rugby league
http://www.philipspires.co.uk Read More
When writing reviews, the pressure to express opinion
often leads to overstatement. It is a position. I usually try to avoid, and I
do so by concentrating on the positive aspects of the obje… Read More
For the third time this season, Alicante’s
ADDA audience heard a major piece by Richard Strauss. The Violin Concerto is an
early work, written when the young man was a teenager and sti… Read More
Philip Spires
Author of five novels, short stories and book on rugby league
http://www.philipspires.co.uk Read More
Surprises come when least expected. On entering the
ADDA auditorium, it was at least a shock to see so little of the stage
occupied. So used have we become to seeing a platform crammed with… Read More
When it comes to star billing, in the world of so-called classical music, there is no bigger ticket than Antonio Pappano directing the London Symphony Orchestra. The maestro, who perhaps wil… Read More
Philip Spires
Author of five novels, short stories and book on rugby league
http://www.philipspires.co.uk Read More
The word memorable is much overused. It now tends to signify something that is rather bland, an experience unworthy of being labelled “world class”, “incredible”, &ld… Read More
ProgramaRichard
Strauss, Muerte y Transfiguración Op.24 23:00
Hector Berlioz,
La muerte de Cleopatra 22:00
I. C’en est
donc fait! 03:00
II. Ah! Qu’ils… Read More
István I. SzékelyIstván is a concert pianist and internationally recognised teacher. He is Professor at the Conservatorio Superior Katarina Gurska in Madrid and professo… Read More
The
Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafaq is a novel about Cyprus and its recent
history. Via the love affair and developing relationship between Kostas and
Defne, the author examines the r… Read More
I remember watching Gore Vidal on television, usually
on one of those talk shows he seems to view with contempt. He seemed to be a
living opinion. Switch him on and opinions stream out. But… Read More
The
word “delicacy” can mean many things. It can signify refinement in a
personality, something good to eat, or describe something too fragile to
handle. Situations can be delica… Read More
Mixing the familiar with the less familiar is a common
programming tool. The popular work brings them in, and you broaden the audience’s
taste - or even surprise them! - with the less… Read More
Surprise, surprise might seem an incongruous title for
the review of a concert which seemed to offer a-middle-of-the-road programme.
Sibelius’s Finlandia began the evening – it o… Read More
Thirty-Five Poems by Herbert Read, I repeat
Stavesacre – a larkspur plant or its seeds
Benison - benediction
Sodality – fellowship, concgregaion, association for
chairty
Cinc… Read More
Sally Rooney’s Normal People is a hugely successful
and very widely read novel about millennials. It concentrates on the
relationships that develop in a group of school graduates as th… Read More
Concert programs nowadays are often themed. Sometimes
the idea is obvious, sometimes trite, but even attempting to present such a
program is preferable to a parade of pop classics. Sometimes… Read More
Some time ago, Hillary Hahn played the Sibelius Violin Concerto in Alicante’s ADDA hall in a way that I described as utterly new. Though I had heard the work many times, at least hundr… Read More
Much thought nowadays is devoted to the construction of concert programmes. A mass audience, almost by definition, is dictatorial. The old favourites are always safe, and the need for poster… Read More
Dreams From My Father is Barack Obama’s early autobiography, written before he went to law school. It details his early years and basically presents his pre-lawyer years in three phase… Read More
Concert programmes can often appear rather conventional at first sight. A well-known Romantic symphony in the second half, preceded by an equally well-known piano concerto, and, to start, a… Read More
Sometimes a program does not seem attractive. Since I generally prefer more modern sounds, particularly contemporary music, a program that lives in the first half of the eighteenth century i… Read More
Douglas Stewart won the Booker Prize for Fiction with Shuggie Bain, an autobiographical novel about a child coping with an alcoholic parent. Shuggie is a wee lad - the novel is set largely i… Read More
Puccini’s Madame Butterfly is a very well-known, much loved, and indeed popular opera. The genre is replete with femmes fatales, Butterfly, Tosca, Manon, Carmen, Lucía, Violetta… Read More
Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a much-reviewed and well-known classic novel. So can a novel that is a hundred and fiftyyears old still have anything to say about lif… Read More
John Banville’s Snow was resplendent at number one best seller in the airport bookstore. At the time, I hardly noticed, since I was immediately and irresistibly attracted to the author… Read More
Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse provided the latest foray into the world and mores of the late fifties. It’s yet another novel that resides firmly in northern English working class life… Read More
“Once a rebel, always a rebel. You can’t help being one. You can’t deny that. And it’s best to be a rebel so as to show ‘em it don’t pay to do you down. F… Read More
Half Blood Blues is a novel by Esi Edugyan. It deals with territory that is rarely successful for the writer, that of music and musicians. They have surely been many successful books a… Read More
Josep Vicent, artistic director, and conductor at ADDA, Alicante, decided to entitle the whole season of concerts ‘Divine Poem’. One must conclude that he really wanted to build… Read More
Billy Budd is doubly famous. He is the eponymous principal character of Herman Melville’s novella and, by adoption via E M Forster’s hand, also the eponymous hero a Benjamin Brit… Read More
I did not begin the two hundred thousand words plus of Moby Dick expecting to be surprised. Herman Melville’s book has been on my reading list shelf for years, always an intended read… Read More
Between The Acts by Virginia Woolf is the author’s last novel. It is often described as a difficult read. And indeed, difficult it is, not because it is full of shocking scenes, tough… Read More
Soft words butter no parsnips is an English saying that is, let’s admit, not overused, especially these days. It probably means get on with it and shut up. In many decades of reading… Read More
Many years ago, when I was a student, I, along with many others, bought a new stereo system and we regularly listened to chosen LPs to assess the relative merit of the purchases. One of the… Read More
Of all operas, there are a couple by Leos Janacek that I would profess to ‘know’, in that I have seen multiple productions, read and studied the libretti, listened to the music l… Read More
In another loosely themed concert, ADDA Simfonica played four works written in the forty years that spanned the dawn of the twentieth century. In different ways, these works address religiou… Read More
After hearing Mitsuko Uchida and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in Alicante’s ADDA concert hall, I was sufficiently surprised by what I had heard to be prompted to download a score as so… Read More
It is rare for a concert program to hang together as a unit both musically and intellectually. But the latest program from the ADDA orchestra in Alicante under the direction of Josep Vicent… Read More
Some artists seem to be inextricably linked to places. Henry Moore’s legacy is in Leeds, where he studied, but was not born. Barbara Hepworth’s is in Wakefield, where she was bor… Read More
“Less is more” is an expression that I have often heard when I have proffered criticisms of the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Usually these words follow a criticism of mine w… Read More
A performance of Verdi’s Requiem is more like a visit to an awe-inspiring monument than the experience of a piece of music. It’s a work that completely engages its audience from… Read More
The placing of the world premiere alongside establish repertoire is not itself unusual. What was unusual about ADDA Sinfonica’s latest concert was the fact that the contemporary piece… Read More
El balcón en invierno by Luis Landero is beautiful, if at times frustrating book. It could all be said much more simply, succinctly and perhaps with greater immediate power. But if it… Read More
Some time ago and in relation to a different book, I wrote a review that in essence began, “Occasionally, just occasionally, one comes across a book so impressive, so scholarly and so… Read More
At almost 500 pages, Elizabeth David‘s English Bread And Yeast Cookery is quite a read. It’s also quite mis-titled, but more of that later. But it is a cookbook, so why would one… Read More
Cakes And Ale by W Somerset Maugham is a profoundly surprising book. Written in 1930, the novel begins its story in the Edwardian age prior to the First World War. It comes, therefore, with… Read More
A program juxtaposing two first symphonies has to invite comparison. When those first symphonies are those of Ludwig van Beethoven and Gustav Mahler, arguably at either end of the nine… Read More
The first concert of a new season prompts an air of expectation. A cursory glance of the program suggested nothing particularly special, excepting, of course, the anticipated and alway… Read More
As a prelude to their forthcoming season of orchestral concerts, the ADDA orchestra of Alicante under their inspired and clearly inspiring conductor and artistic director, Josep Vicent, offe… Read More
I’ve just read More Fool Me by Stephen Fry. I finished the book – I don’t know why. There’s oodles of self-mockery Couched in torrents of post-hoccery, Where processi… Read More
A piano concerto played in a transcription for marimba is not a common event. It is even rarer when it is the Concierto Heroico of Joaquin Rodrigo, which, unlike his moderately popular harp… Read More
There are times when words fail, and this is one of those occasions. Feel free to read no further, because what follows cannot be described better than simply “perfect”. The orch… Read More
Basically, in normal circumstances I would not regard a concert offering two Brahms symphonies as resembling a cup of tea. If that’s not mixing too many metaphors… But an advant… Read More
When we consider Nixon, Kissinger and the Destruction of Cambodia, Sideshow by William Shawcross is probably the main event, if not the last word. On completing the book, it’s hard to… Read More
Dvorak’s Carnival Overture provides a stunning opening to any concert. It’s exuberant, tuneful, spectacular and exciting. It’s all these things if it is played by its perfo… Read More
Dmytro Choni is a pianist from Ukraine who has won the Santander competition and finished fourth in Leeds. Such results are irrelevant once a musician presents him or herself as a performer:… Read More
Personally I quite like being proved wrong, especially when the result is beneficial. When that is accompanied by a realisation that assumed values always need to be questioned, the result c… Read More
Consider these elements. A young, rich and gifted man is obsessed with revolutionary idealism. He attends prestigious schools and the most prestigious university but is expelled from the lat… Read More
I have seldom had the privilege of participating in a concert audience that showed their appreciation with such heartfelt enthusiasm. At the end of this performance of Mahler’s First S… Read More
John Galt published his Life of Lord Byron in 1830, just six years after the poet's death in Missolonghi, in what is now modern Greece and then was part of the Ottoman Empire. Byron had been… Read More
This was a more than merely memorable concert, ending with the Valse Triste of Sibelius as an appropriate encore. “Appropriate” is an important term, since Mahler’s great s… Read More
GK meets GF sounds like the title of one of those mid-twentieth century albums when a producer with an eye for a buck teamed up some ancient crooner with an equally aged instrumentalist to p… Read More
All we have is the present. Our future, if it might exist, is a mere proposition of whose eventual reality none of us can be sure, may only be imagined, until it arrives, when it becomes the… Read More
It’s hard to describe what a complete success this concert was. For the first time I have heard Marin Alsop conduct a live concert. I expected superlatives. I got much better than that… Read More
Gabriel Garcia Marquez may have invented magical realism, a writing style that stresses realism in language to the extent that images become amplified, perhaps stretched, or recoloured. The… Read More
Gala Lirica, Opera Gala or merely Song Medley often labels an admixture of showcase snippets, offered, it seems, primarily to advertise a voice or commemorate a venue. Too often these evenin… Read More
Reaching the end of The Fugitive, volume six of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche de temps perdu, I begin to realise – not quite at last – how modern an experience he relates… Read More
There are insufficient superlatives to describe the experience. L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Alicante under Jonathan Nott played Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and Ibert’s… Read More
I doubt that F. Scott Fitzgerald intended that The Crack-Up with Other Pieces and Stories should ever be published, let alone read as a single volume. This is a mix of autobiographical piece… Read More
The fifth Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich was reportedly “a Soviet artist's creative response to justified criticism”. That past criticism came as a result of official displeasur… Read More
The musings of an adolescent male, perhaps not a completely formed adult human being, if such a state is ever achieved by anyone privileged to participate in the experience of this process w… Read More
Two concerts on consecutive days might be considered by some as a live event to far, especially when the concerts feature big, autobiographical works, one of which at least is widely regarde… Read More
Veronica Decides To Die is a novel by Paulo Coelho. I write the review in English, though I read the book in Spanish, so it may be that many aspects of the book’s language may ha… Read More
It's a comment both on current availability and prevailing mentality that I choose to write a piece about a television experience, albeit via the internet. There are not many concerts around… Read More
Ostensibly, The Daydreamer by Ian McEwan is a book for children. It’s not really a novel, because the author himself conceived these pieces as separate stories to be told to his own ch… Read More
