Getting out more...

It's easy to be dismissive of the cultural agenda of a home counties town from which one can be in London inside an hour by train.  But over the past year or two we've come to appreciate what good old Disgustedville has to offer.  Our local symphony orchestra is now altogether pretty good.  I should say that the standard of the orchestra's playing has come on by leaps and bounds since the (frankly) embarrassing showing they gave accompanying the Operatunity women some years ago.  Their last concert included a couple of pieces by Britten and the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, which is one of my Desert Island Discs.  I was unfamiliar with the Britten pieces, but loved the violin concerto, which sounded really difficult, requiring the soloist (Callum Smart) at one point to play pizzicato while holding a long note (da boy dun great).  Not knowing the score, it was hard to assess the quality of the orchestral playing, but it seemed convincing, and must have been a brute to rehearse.  As for the Berlioz, it's easy to cavil, since it was the first piece of serious music I listened to, and I've heard countless recorded and broadcast renderings of it in the intervening 45 years.  I think this was the first live performance I've been to, and was impressed by the huge rôle old Hector gave to the double basses and timpani.  I didn't like the conductor's very pedestrian tempo, which left gaps in the slow sections that exposed the patchy attack of the strings.  They didn't either, since they frequently galloped ahead of him.  No complaints about the outstanding woodwind solos and string accompaniment in the Scène aux champs.  Elsewhere, under-rehearsed, I suspect, which is understandable given the demands of the Britten, and indeed the ambitious programme they have set themselves for the season.  But all good fun, culminating in that glorious, blazing and almost comically prolonged coda, which brought the house down.  Incidentally, a whole bunch of Berlioz are buried in our local bone orchard in the Languedoc, but not Hector, whose remains ought to be immured in the Panthéon, but are still in Montmartre - together with those of his two wives.

Last night's concert by Fascinating Aïda was in parts highly touching, and in many more parts good for a mighty belly laugh - even embarrassed giggling in some of the filthier songs!  I think I first heard them performing as a half-time interlude in Robert Robinson's Saturday evening  Stop the Week Radio 4 programme.  The good people of Disgustedville turned out by and large to be the kind of audience that can stand a bit of clever bawdy humour (I think the fellow near us who walked out was answering a call of nature...).  I wonder how many of them had actually heard of 'dogging', the subject of one of their more, um, robust songs (one of us had not...).  One of their more recent songs is A Teacher's Lot is Not a Happy One, obviously to the familiar Sullivan music, highlighting the superficiality and general incompetence of OFSTED.  Look for it on their web site if you're ready for the occasional rude word (which some nicely brought-up teachers will have learnt from their pupils, of course).  Their Cheap Flights song is, of course, a classic.  Or as Dillie Keane put it, 'Thirty years and one f*%@&€g hit!'. 

So the Booker jury liked The Luminaries.  I did not, and have given up on it at the 22% point.  I found its pseudo-Victorian style contrived and wordy - so far as I got - and a bit like some later Trollope stuff that went to the charity shop part-read. 

I'm covering a lot of miles at the moment for the hobby, and to meet people who want to join the club.  Fair enough: there's not a lot I can do in the garden at the moment while it's so wet, but whenever the terrace is dry enough I get out and catch up on the dead-heading.  The roses and penstemons are battling on, and the cosmos are also hanging in there.  This year's rudbeckias have been pretty pathetic - a mix of late sowing, poor compost and horticultural incompetence, I fear.  Once next door's overbearing trees have come down we'll get a  bit more autumn sun on the garden.  That is supposed to happen early next week. 

Also due this week was the next stage of the work on Château Smith.  My spies report no signs of scaffolding so far.  Oh, well.