Stumbling on melons

There’s been  good news and bad news.  The good news is that  sport has almost disappeared from the evening news. The bad news is that the C-V has taken its place.

A secondary aspect of the good news is that the Morrisonesque commemoration of the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook’s arrival at Botany Bay has pretty well sunk like a stone.

I was ten at the time of the bicentenary and it was a big deal.  We had a special public holiday and watched fireworks from some incline above the harbour.  I also had to do an incredibly laborious school “project” on all three of the great Captain’s voyages of discovery. He may have been killed on the third but the second, Antarctic, one struck me as the grimmest.

In Victoria, Dr Annaliese van Diemen, deputy chief medical officer, tweeted from her “private” account (is there such a thing?):

Sudden arrival of an invader from another land, decimating populations, creating terror. Forces the population to make enormous sacrifices & completely change how they live in order to survive. COVID19 or Cook 1770?

Victorian (opposition) Liberal MP Tim Smith tweeted in response:

What’s with the culture wars crap from a state health bureaucrat at a time like this?

Comparing the extraordinary first voyage of Captain Cook where he charted the East Coast of for the first time to a deadly virus is disgraceful.

You’ve lost the plot.

Funny how, like class wars, it is  the Right which calls out “culture war!” these days. I can see from Google (that’s enough: I am never going to give Murdoch money) that The Australian took up his cause.  Of course, The Australian never starts a culture war, ever.

Dr van Diemen’s history may be a bit approximate, but given that James Cook’s visit in 1770 led not so indirectly to the terrible smallpox outbreak that is estimated to have wiped out about 70% of the indigenous population of the Sydney basin in 1789, I don’t think she’s lost the plot.

And smallpox was just the start.

On 19 January this year my friend ST sent me an SMS.  It began:

What was your tastiest fish takeaway?

I was flummoxed for a moment, then I realised that he was referring to the closing-down sale the previous December of Fish Fine Music, described in Limelight  as the “last remaining classical music specialist shop in the country.”

I hadn’t been helping to keep Fish in business.  Fish had been at its present address since 2006 and I had never darkened its doors there until the final days.

That’s not so much because I’d made any switch to streaming or YouTube (other than occasionally, to look something up) but because I’d basically stopped acquiring recorded music at all.  I’ve lived off my memory, the radio, the Con library, the relatively few CDs I already had and, most of all, live music.

I ditched my sizeable and space-consuming vinyl collection (much acquired in a burst of acquisitiveness from the now defunct second-hand store, Ashwoods, in my early twenties) a bit under 10 years ago.  I do regret that but they took up an enormous amount of space and I was hardly ever playing them.

All the same, no one can resist a bargain and this was probably my last chance to buy a CD in a proper music shop ever.  So I went.  In the end, twice.

It seemed that all the usual suspects had come out of the woodwork, some actually known to me and others known by sight or brief conversation from concert proximity.

The above photo features a well-known Sydney piano identity (to coin a phrase: “well-known Sydney racing identify” was once the standard descriptor in the SMH for George Freeman. I don’t suggest anything similar about the WKSPI.)  She left with a large bag well filled – you can see it in the picture on the counter just past her handbag.  Good on her!  The staff offered to help her carry it away but she managed on her own.

Before I went, ST, who is an inveterate list-maker, pressed me for a list of representative choral/orchestral works which he could look for to establish this part of his notional/aspirational “collection.”

In the end ST paid no heed to the list he’d asked me for.  In truth there must be a reason why didn’t have such recordings already and his taste was not about to change to fill the “gap.”

Even though choral/orchestral music is not really so much my thing these days, it is I who, as a by-product of making a search on ST’s behalf, ended up with 6 CDs extracted at a bargain price from a dismantled Erato Box Set of sacred music: Vivaldi, The First Homicide (that’s Cain and Abel); Bach, Christmas Oratorio; and Mendelssohn Paulus.

I haven’t yet really got into the Vivaldi – it feels a bit generic. I have really enjoyed the Bach but that was no surprise.  It was the Mendelssohn which was the ear-opener.

Paulus is the story of St Paul, starting with the stoning of St Stephen, traversing his conversion on the road to Damascus (of course!), and taking the story up to his embarkation at Ephesus, with a brief anticipation of his ultimate martyrdom to round the story out (Libretto here).

I read somewhere that Paulus was based on Mendelssohn’s study of Handel and Bach. To me Bach looms much larger, probably because chorales are interpolated, including Wachet auf! which also receives a quite beautiful treatment in the overture.  Apparently the chorale-ish stuff was the bit that didn’t go down so well when Mendelssohn later took St Paul  to England – they didn’t yet have any background in this.  Hence Elijah, which has since eclipsed Paulus, especially in the Anglophone world.  Paulus only started to have a revival internationally from the 1980s.

I’ve really enjoyed listening to Paulus and right now I’d say I prefer it to Elijah.  It has the virtue of being shorter.  My preference may abate once the novelty wears off.

The late Charles Rosen famously dubbed Mendelssohn the inventor of [musical] religious kitsch.  Rosen’s chapter on Mendelssohn in his book The Romantic Generation (not quite so influential as its predecessor, The Classical Style) opens with a reference to Schumann’s paired review in 1837 of Paulus and Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, described by Schumann as the “two most important compositions of the day.”  Rosen writes: “the comparison of the two composers was developed in the most vivid terms, and created a scandal.”

What scandal, exactly?  Rosen tactfuly passes over this.  I plan to make this question the subject of a further post.

This comes from the news of Prince Charles opening the new emergency hospital in London remotely from his Highlands residence at Birkhall.

No-one would accuse HRH of ever actually using the kerchief he customarily sports in his suit jacket pocket.

Nor does it seem likely that the piano behind him in this photograph is played very often.

A colleague has taken to referring to the C-v crisis as “the Thing.”

It’s hard to concentrate on anything else.

D, who has followed from afar his family locking down in Shanghai, favours a ‘go hard and early’ response because of China’s going hard – he is such a Chinese nationalist that he refuses to countenance any criticisms about not going early enough.

But everyone faces a moment where observing isolation seems too hard.  After a week of home-alone and actually putting them off on earlier occasions, D allowed two friends to visit on 22/3.  I criticized him for that – why sacrifice the hard yards you have already put in?  That evening D retrieved our rather ineffectual steam cleaner from its obscure place of storage and set it to work in the kitchen and bathroom.  Not entirely rational given that the visitors had only passed fleetingly through the house (they talked on our back verandah at my insistence – I hope an appropriate distance apart), but psychologically understandable.

Then I made an exception for the piano tuner, who came on 25/3.  He was very careful, as was I.  He even wiped down my money.  Maybe some time between now and 8/4 I’ll regret that, though even then I’ll never know.  Meanwhile, my faith in Mozart’s piano sonatas – even if they are the poorer and simpler sibling of his other works – has been restored, and also my faith in or at least enjoyment of my humble (bot not yet, I have decided, hopeless) piano.

There have been lots of different views about what should be done, or what should have been done, when and by whom.  The government has obviously been unhappy about the part played by the ABC’s Norman Swan in some of this.

I too have been guilty of a little expertizing – volunteering “information” in a reply to a comment on this blog about possibly using slightly diluted methylated spirits as a surface disinfectant.

This (the meths, not the opining though, on reflection, that too) can have its perils.  I had a small quantity mixed with water in a coffee cup, then used the cup for a coffee without paying much attention.  Had I swallowed any?  Probably not – I think I tipped out whatever remained though maybe did not rinse out – it was the reek of the meths in the kitchen sink that I was probably noticing.

Internet searches about the toxicity of methanol (blindness quite soon after as little as 5ml) gave me a little bit of a scare until I looked further and discovered that in Australia “methylated spirits” is nowadays more than 95% ethanol.  You can learn something every day!