2023-12-10 12:13
Philip Spires
Author of five novels, short stories and book on rugby league
http://www.philipspires.co.uk Read More
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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.
2023-11-27 10:28
Philip Spires
Author of five novels, short stories and book on rugby league
http://www.philipspires.co.uk Read More
2023-11-25 11:14
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
2023-11-20 14:17
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
2023-11-15 12:04
Philip Spires
Author of five novels, short stories and book on rugby league
http://www.philipspires.co.uk Read More
2023-11-13 10:34
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
2023-10-29 14:19
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
2023-10-23 13:44
Philip Spires
Author of five novels, short stories and book on rugby league
http://www.philipspires.co.uk Read More
2023-10-14 12:25
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&hell…Read More
2023-10-11 14:38
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
2023-10-10 14:55
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
2023-10-10 14:50
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
2023-10-10 14:48
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
Pinchas Zuckerman With The Sinfonia Varsovia In Penderecki, Schubert And Beethoven – A Real Delicacy
2023-04-28 13:59
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
2023-04-22 15:34
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
2023-04-16 11:24
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
2023-04-04 10:08
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
2023-04-04 10:08
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
2023-04-04 10:02
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
2023-03-16 16:48
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
2023-03-10 19:51
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
2023-02-26 09:42
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
2023-02-26 09:40
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
2023-02-18 18:16
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
2023-02-17 14:06
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
2023-02-17 14:02
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
2023-02-15 09:00
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
2023-02-15 08:57
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
2023-02-03 16:15
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
2023-02-03 16:12
“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
2023-02-03 16:07
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
2023-02-03 16:03
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
2023-01-28 09:29
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
2023-01-28 09:27
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
2023-01-27 10:29
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
2023-01-27 10:26
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
2023-01-26 11:35
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
2023-01-23 14:18
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
2023-01-17 12:26
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
2023-01-11 09:30
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
2022-12-11 17:16
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
2022-11-29 10:45
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
2022-11-26 15:39
“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
2022-11-12 12:53
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
2022-10-16 13:41
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
2022-10-14 12:58
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
2022-10-12 13:24
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
2022-10-11 07:50
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
2022-10-06 13:22
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
2022-10-03 09:49
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
2022-09-24 16:03
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
2022-09-18 09:39
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
2022-07-18 08:00
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
2022-06-06 10:17
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
2022-05-22 07:52
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
2022-05-16 09:45
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
2022-05-13 09:02
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
2022-05-12 11:15
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
2022-05-04 15:22
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
2022-05-01 15:04
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
2022-04-28 10:15
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
2022-04-09 10:45
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
2022-04-05 09:06
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
2022-04-02 12:30
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
2022-03-28 09:25
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
2022-03-23 14:28
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
2022-03-22 14:02
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
2022-03-14 10:45
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
2022-03-13 13:02
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
2022-03-04 17:37
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
2022-02-27 11:38
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
2022-02-22 14:03
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
2022-02-20 15:19
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
2022-02-10 15:03
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
2022-02-09 10:58
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
2022-02-07 11:05
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
2022-01-30 10:15
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
2022-01-29 15:37
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
2022-01-25 11:58
Two concerts in five days might sound quite a lot, but we achieved that by skipping the others on offer. But could one imagine two more different musical events? How many times across two co… Read More
2022-01-25 10:43
Times change. Of that there is no doubt. Platitudes, however, remain platitudes whenever they are, like a dose of vaccine, rolled out. Their use, perhaps just once, but certainly on the seco… Read More
2022-01-24 15:40
On the surface, According To Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge might appear to be firmly rooted in the genre of historical fiction. Its cover portrays two gentlewomen, perhaps a mother and daughte… Read More
2022-01-21 17:00
In a turn of uncharacteristic succinctness, Gioachino Rossini, himself the composer of long-winded and often empty vocal gymnastics undertaken because they were possible - or not! - rather t… Read More
2021-12-16 13:41
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
2021-12-06 10:33
There is nothing standard about performance, nothing predictable about experience, unless, of course, it is drained of all communication by an imperative to supply a product. Then, perhaps o… Read More
2021-12-02 10:52
Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag was first published in 1961. It is hard in 2020, to accept that this was almost 60 years ago, especially since many of the works reviewed in this volum… Read More
2021-11-11 09:44
Zacarías González is not a name that appears in many art books or catalogues. It’s not a name that appears on the title tags in many public galleries. It does appear atta… Read More
2021-10-28 14:00
It looked like a middle-of-the-road program of Romantic staples. Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy and Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony were both written around 1880, though, as with everything… Read More
2021-10-18 12:36
ADDA Simfonica’s second concert of the season something of a rarity, in that it featured just two works, neither of which would have been familiar even to the music devotees in attenda… Read More
2021-10-07 08:01
A new season of orchestral concerts in Alicante’s ADDA opened with a blast, rather than a bang. The blast in question came at the end of the opening work, which was appropriately enoug… Read More
2021-05-18 12:49
Alfas del Pi Music Society offered three May concerts to complete the first part of its annual season. But these were three remarkably different concerts, each challenging in its own way, ea… Read More
2021-05-05 15:02
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Really surprised by the simplicity and transparency of the writing. I expected something much thicker than this, especially since it was written largely as early… Read More
2021-04-27 08:56
This particular reviewer rarely writes a negative review. If it didn’t communicate with me, there’s no need to assume that it will not communicate to you. A positive review has t… Read More
2021-04-27 08:53
Just over a year ago, it would not have been anything special to declare that it had been possible to attend four quality concerts in this area over three days. And then there was covid. Her… Read More
2021-03-15 11:14
Ann Enright’s The Green Road, eventually, is a family saga, but its characters cover a large part of the globe before joining forces in the grist of events back home. But this microcos… Read More
2021-03-11 13:11
There are not many concerts around these days. In addition, audiences are reluctant to attend and the travel and accommodation restrictions make it hard for musicians to perform. Let’s… Read More
2021-03-06 12:32
There is a genre in modern fiction called “Coming of age”, designed presumably to appeal to the “Young adult” whose type ought to feature among such a tale´s ch… Read More
2021-03-01 11:45
Tastes change. Fashions change. Presumptions, through whose refracting prisms each new age interprets its aesthetics, also change, but usually unpredictably because we absorb the restriction… Read More
2021-02-24 16:32
The Light of Evening by Edna O’Brien is a deceptively complex book. It deals with relationships between two women, Dilly and Eleanora, who live very different lives some years apart. T… Read More
2021-02-23 14:05
Music can take an audience to many different places. It all depends on where they want to go. But during a period of coronavirus restrictions, merely out of the house might just be enough. T… Read More
2021-02-19 14:02
Imagine a collage, an assemblage of the entire output of august artists, especially those of fin-de-siecle France, those one-time upstarts and latter-day establishment pillars we have since… Read More
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