dormouse1953

 There was a reference to Hal 9000 in yesterday's Independent crossword.  (Officer damages murderous computer (7) if you're interested.)  This got me reminiscing.  I remembered going to see 2001: A Space Odyssey in the cinema with a friend, and it must have been around May 1969.  It was half term from school which in those days would have been Whit week.  I still have my old diaries and checking I find I went to see it on 28th May 1969, fifty years ago today.  (Two days after Apollo 10 returned to Earth.  The BBC used the opening sunrise fanfare from Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra for their Apollo coverage, presumably because of its use in the film.)

Further checking with the IMDb, I see the film got its London premiere in May, 1968, a full year before I saw it.  Unlike these days of almost immediate release of films as DVDs, downloads, etc., in the sixties it was not unusual for a film to play in the West End for a long period before going on general release.  It was also before the days of multiplex cinemas.  There were two cinemas in nearby Darlington and one in Bishop Auckland, making three screens in all.  No wonder it could take a while before a film made it up there.

The film also was my first exposure to the music of György Ligeti (1923-2006) the Hungarian born composer whose music was used in the film without his knowledge.  It was some years after the film's release that he actually got any money from MGM, and then only a few thousand dollars.  But no publicity is bad publicity, and Ligeti's music did get played more, certainly in London.  It was not unusual to see him at concerts of his music in the seventies through to the nineties.

And his music is still played.  The BBC did a whole day of concerts and talks about him at the Barbican in March.  In a talk, it was mentioned that at least one film critic thought the sounds accompanying the first appearance of the monolith at the start of the film were produced electronically.  This was exactly what I thought when I first saw the film.  It was only when I bought the soundtrack album a few weeks later that I discovered this was actually part of Ligeti's setting of the Requiem Mass.  If you listen carefully, a choir is singing "kyrie".

And today on Radio 3, it was mentioned that it is Ligeti's birthday.  I now know I first saw 2001 on Ligeti's 46th birthday.

 I have a diary that at the bottom of each two-page spread gives a quotation.

Recently the quotation was "Both my marriages were failures! Number one departed, and number two stayed" which it attributes to Gustav Mahler.

Nice quotation, and I even found it on a quotation website:

https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1046757

Trouble is, as far as I can tell, Mahler only married once.  His wife was the famous Alma Shindler, immortalised in song by Tom Lehrer.

I was supposed to be going to a concert at the Barbican tonight but I received an e-mail this morning telling me the conductor has been hospitalised with pneumonia and they couldn't find a replacement at such short notice so the concert has been cancelled.

Leastwise, that's what the e-mail said when I read it in Thunderbird.  But I also download all my e-mails for long term storage using an antiquated text-only program, Ameol, supplied by Cix, my e-mail provider.  The message was in two parts, one in html and the other in plain text.  Ameol displays the text part, which is a notification that a concert has been cancelled that was due to take place on January 5th 2015.

Just bought a couple of CDs from Amazon.  Although they are both released on the same label, it seems they are being dispatched from two different sellers.  An hour or so later, I received an e-mail saying that one of them (symphonies by Havergal Brian) has been dispatched and it will be arriving on 26th October.

That's over two weeks away!  I wondered if it was being delivered from somewhere deep in Europe or the US, but the seller's address is Watford.  I don't think even a snail would take two weeks to get from Watford to Guildford.

Saw it on the Indie newsfeed at lunchtime, Peter Maxwell Davies has died.  Not unexpected, he'd been undergoing chemotherapy for leukaemia.

When I was getting into music in the late sixties, he was one of the "new" composers I head a lot of.  His opera Taverner was staged at Covent Garden in 1972 and was broadcast and in 1973 I moved to London and soon started going to concerts he gave with his group The Fires of London.

Very much a seminal composition of his at this time was the music theatre piece Eight Songs for a Mad King.  The Fires of London had a staging of this that they performed frequently.  It's about George III who, in his periods of madness tried to teach his mechanical birds to sing.  There are four giant bird cages on the stage and an instrumentalist sitting in each.  After the music starts, the singer playing the king enters, often in a straitjacket.  The vocal techniques employed are extreme, growling, groaning, shrieking.  The music quotes parts of Handel and there are some foxtrots.  Finally, the singer addresses the audience in more or less a normal speaking voice to announce the king is dead.  The monologue ends, "Poor fellow, he will die howling" at which point he starts to howl.  Meanwhile, the percussionist has strapped a bass drum to his chest, marching band style, and starts beating it with a bullwhip and chases the singer of stage.  A truly harrowing piece.

About this time Max, as he was always known, moved to Orkney and his music was performed often.  He did the music for the two Ken Russell films The Devils and The Boyfriend.  More foxtrots in both of those.  Max loved foxtrots.  When he got round to writing a symphony in the mid-seventies, the premiere got reported on the BBC news.  I was there.  A second symphony was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.  In all, he wrote 10.

Some said his music started to get boring and I was certainly less interested in some of his later works.  But he did write Orkney Wedding and Sunrise, which ends with a Highland piper marching on stage, pipes blaring.  And there was another "lighter" piece that had an interesting back story.

Max was doing a tour of the US with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and did a concert in Las Vegas.  The music critic of The Independent wanted to do an interview with him and contacted the Hilton where he was staying.  The hotel claimed not to have heard of him.  They looked in their booking computer under Davies, Maxwell, Peter and even Sir, but they couldn't find him.  The critic checked the other Hilton hotel in the area and they didn't have him, either.  Finally, he did turn up at the first hotel.  They had him registered under the name "Mavis".  So Max wrote a piece called Mavis in Las Vegas, full of parodies of the sort of tunes you might expect to hear there.

The summer of 1975 I was living in London but working in Guildford, having been seconded to the Guildford office by the CEGB.  I was living in Bowden Court, a hostel in Notting Hill run by the London Hostel Association originally designed to house civil servants newly moved to London.  (It's still there, but by their website, it seems they cater now more for foreign language students.)

This was a handy location for the Proms and that summer I had a season ticket.  A gallery season ticket, and not arena, which I preferred.  I guess they'd run out of arena tickets by the time I booked.

August 29th was a Friday, and according to my diary I had to go back to Notting Hill to pay my rent.  Most nights, I used to go directly to the Albert Hall from Waterloo station.  This meant I got to the hall later than usual, but the gallery never completely fills up.

The concert was given by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under its newly appointed chief conductor Rudolf Kempe.  This was his last ever Prom concert and possibly one his last with the orchestra as he died the following May.  (He was due to conduct the 1976 opening night of the Proms.)

The concert ended with Dvorak's New World symphony and afterwards I came down from the gallery and walked home.  My standard route was to walk west along Kensington Road to Kensington High Street and there to turn north up Kensington Church Street to Notting Hill.  Kensington Church Steet kinks about 150 metres north of Kensington High Street, suddenly turning west and then curving round to its original direction.  I was walking round this curve when I suddenly heard a loud bang.  I'd been living in London long enough to know what that meant.

As I came out of the bend I could see a lot of activity at the north end of the street and when I got there, the whole north end had been cordoned off.  I later discovered that a bomb had been left in the doorway of a shoe shop near the northern end of the street, and a bomb expert examing it had been blown up and killed.  This was one of a whole series of bombs that had been left near stations on the Central Line.

The police were not letting people through the cordon, not surprisingly.  However, they were sending people down a side street going west - Kensington Place, according to Google maps.  What I don't think they realised was that if you then took the next turning north, which I did, following the people in front of me, you go up a back alley behind the shops.  That area was covered in broken glass.  Presumably when the bomb exploded, it blew out all the windows at the back of the shop.  What's more, that alley came out on to the main road inside the police cordon on Notting Hill Gate.  The police at that end of the cordon were none too pleased to find a stream of people inside their cordon, but we weren't detained and I made my way home.

The next night, I was walking the same route back from the Proms - now no longer cordoned.  There were police stopping people all along the street asking them if they'd seen anything the previous night.

I always find this song chilling.

It's a busy week for me for musical excursions to London.  Six events in eight days.  Last weekend saw a mini-festival of the music of Sir Harrison Birtwistle (80 this year) at the South Bank - three concerts in three days.  Tonight I am going to see Sondheim's Assassins, one of my favourite Sondheim musicals.  Friday night the BBC are putting on a performance of Busoni's monumental piano concerto, a piece I heard on the radio when I was at university in 1972 and have only been to one other concert performance ever, at the Proms back  in 1988.  (I have been to two separate productions of Assassins in that time.  Indeed, the show hadn't been written back in 1988.)

Last night it was Handel's Messiah, a piece performed a bit more often than the Busoni, but not something I often go to.  I prefer Handel's more florid Italian operas and Messiah has gathered 250 years of performance traditions.  Still, it was a period instruments band performing it, not a modern symphony orchestra - valveless trumpets, etc.

When the famous Hallelujah chorus started, at the end of part 2, I noticed people starting  to stand. I had almost entirely forgotten about this tradition.  I remember my music teacher telling us about this at school.  When the king attended the first London performance he was so moved by this that he stood, and when the king stood, everyone else had to stand.

It's a nice story.  But I see there is some debate as to why he stood.  Was it political - the earthly monarch standing before the heavenly one?  Did he mistake it for the National Anthem?  Did he think it was the interval and was dying for the loo?

And it appears there is little evidence George II ever attended a performance of Messiah.  The first performance was in Dublin in 1742 and the London premier was the following year.  But the first time the story about the king standing appears was in 1756.

As to me, I wasn't intending to stand, but soon I was surrounded by standing people and I had to stand just to be able to see.

I was going to a concert up in London this evening.  Before setting off for the station I checked the National Rail website to see the trains were on time - they were.  After I got to the station just after six o'clock, I looked at the screens and I'm sure the train I was going for, the 18:17, was still marked "On Time".  But when I got down to the platform, it was marked as "Delayed".  The reason, it turned out, was a tree down in the Liss area.  After a while, the station announced apologised that it appeared to be a very big tree and it was going to take time to move it.  Both the up and down lines were blocked and trains were being cancelled in both directions.  I was wondering about taking a slow train that started at Guildford, knowing that that would get me to London after the concert started.  But then they announced that the 18:34 was being started at Haslemere, beyond the blockage.  Just to confuse matters, the platform indicators were showing this train, the still delayed 18:17, and the train that was originally supposed to be the 18:34, stuck somewhere in Hampshire and now cancelled.

The train when it did arrive was 12 minutes late and arrived into Waterloo just one minute before the concert was due to start.  There was no way I was going to make it for the first item, Tout Un Monde Lointain by Henri Duttileux, a French composer who died this year in his nineties.  His music doesn't make it to concert halls that often, so I was rather annoyed about that.  (So, I'm listening to a recording of it right now.)  But I did get to hear the second half of the concert, the 13th Symphony of Shostakovitch, a bitingly satirical piece written during the Khrushchev thaw in the Soviet Union in the early sixties.  Great performance.

The concert finished about half past nine and when I sauntered up to the station they were still announcing that services were subject to delays, but the train I caught was on time.

I said the weather had improved yesterday, and I realised how much when I got ready for bed last night.  My nose and forehead were sore and noticeably pink.  And I forgot to bring any sunblock with me.

The weather has been much the same today.  As you can see mountains all around, I thought I would try and walk in the direction of one of the gentler looking slopes and see how far I could get.  I got far enough to realise I shouldn't be doing that wearing trainers and without a map and on my own.  I had contemplated packing walking boots for the trip but never did in the end.  (If I had, of course, the weather would be terrible this week.)

After a meal this evening, I was walking back to my hotel through the Mirabellgarten when I heard the sounds of music.  I was expecting the Austrian equivalent of a German oom-pah band but it turned out to be an English brass band, the University of Warwick Brass society.  The locals seemed to be enjoying it, including a version of the Helston Floral Dance.  (Altogether now - fiddle, cello, big bass drum, Bassoon, flute and euphonium.)  They were enthusiastic, although not always in tune.