Chris Caldwell: Remembering Steve Martland

 Saxophonist Chris Caldwell managed and performed in The Steve Martland Band from 1996 until his untimely death in May 2013. He writes:

 I was fortunate enough to join the Steve Martland Band on Baritone Saxophone in the mid 1990’s when the opportunities for performance and the recording of new music seemed to be in its heyday. The band first recorded with Tony Wilson’s seminal ‘Factory’ label and then with the German record label BMG, but changes in the music scene were happening very quickly. Marketing and hype were the ‘buzz words’, new music for some reason couldn’t just be what it was, but had to be sweetened by what became a ‘cross-over’ revolution. This mixing of styles started to be perceived as a dumbing down, if you knock off the musical edges you end up with something edgeless, characterless and devoid of spirit..

Steve’s music avoided all of this, he hadn’t been forced into combining marimba and violin with saxophones, drum kit and electric guitars. This was his style, not a compromise, the public knew this truth and his music naturally ‘crossed- over’ so many of the stereotypes without even trying. The Steve Martland Band toured the world (Australia, America, Asia & Europe), where it was received with an enthusiasm not usually experienced in classical music festivals.

Beneath Steve’s ‘edgy’ appearances was one of the most generous and giving people I have ever had the pleasure of working with, he was a huge supporter of a British education system which gave opportunity to all, he delighted in giving hours of his time and energy (fueled by coffee!) in the support and nurturing of a new generation of composers. I personally miss hearing his loud and impassioned voice over all things creative and artistic, and how this was totally relevant to our democracy. The recent UK/Gove re-shaping of music provision in our state schools would I’m certain, have received the Alex Ferguson ‘hair dryer’ response. It is our responsibility as artists/performers and concert goers to continue to pump out, the Martland volume.

Composer of the Month: Roger Marsh

Composer of the Month: Roger Marsh

Roger Marsh studied with Bernard Rands at the University of York, UK, in the early seventies. He spent two years (1976-78) at the University of California, San Diego, on a Harkness Fellowship. From 1978 to 88 he lectured at the University of Keele, before returning to York where he is currently Professor of Music. His music has been performed and broadcast widely. Roger Marsh’s new work, Running, Jumping, Standing Still, will be premiered by the Late Music Ensemble, conductor James Whittle, at the next Late Music concert, Saturday 5^th July.

Steve Crowther: Can you describe the work to us?

Roger Marsh:  It’s a piece for instrumental ensemble in three short movements.  It’s called ‘Running Jumping and Standing Still’ – which was the title of a famous short film in the 1950s made by Peter Sellers and the other Goon crowd.  I’ve always loved the title.  The three movements are all, in their own way, concerned with physical exercise (I thought of calling the piece that). Two of the movements are a re-working of earlier material – a piano piece I wrote last year (Descending) and a solo piano section of my music theatre piece ‘Rising’ (Rising).  The third movement is all new and is the Running Jumping and Standing Still movement.

SC: Do you write at the piano, do you pre-plan? Can you describe the compositional process?

RM: Actually I used to always compose at the piano, a bit too much really; I would spend forever trying and re-trying chords and changing them, adding to them every time I sat down to carry on working.   But now I don’t use the piano so much – just to get initial ideas, and then I do almost everything at the computer with good old Sibelius playback allowing me to check things. I don’t know if it’s better, but it seems to work and I spend less time doodling.

Again, I used to re-plan, but I moved away from that quite a long time ago.  I think and imagine a lot in my head (and at the piano) before I start writing – which is a less rigorous kind of pre-planning I suppose.  I mean, I don’t start from scratch with a clean page in front of me.  By the time I’m thinking about writing something down I’ve done a lot of composing in my head already.  Usually.  There are always exceptions.  With Pierrot Lunaire I had 50 poems to set, and I gave myself the challenge of starting with the first one and never moving on until I had finished a setting.  Some of the settings went from initial idea to finished score in a matter of hours.  Some took days.  But I didn’t allow myself to think about the next one until the one in progress was done.

SC: Is it important to know the performers? Do you write with a sound in mind?

RM:   Very often that’s the case.  Not always.  Two of my recent pieces were for the Hilliard Ensemble – you can’t write for them without hearing their sound as you write.  When I wrote my Lullaby I had a particular sound in mind, but no idea who would perform the piece.  In the case of the new piece, I knew who the performers would be, and it has influenced me a bit, but not a huge amount.  Except in ‘Rising’ because there’s a little bit of theatre involved, and I thought carefully about who would be doing it.

SC: How would you describe your individual ‘sound world’?

RM:  That’s hard.  The one thing I can say that might help is that I think a lot about chords.  I almost said ‘harmony’ there, but I find that that invokes notions of a harmonic theory, and I don’t have one.  I just like to hear chords which make sense in relation to one another, and which seem to have a purpose, and which are rich and interesting.  I use the same kind of chords a lot, so I think you can listen to my music and say it has a recognizable sound world because of that.  And melody too, but more in some pieces than others: Pierrot Lunaire and the Hilliard pieces are full of it, Running and Jumping less so (but a bit).

SC: What motivates you to compose?

RM: Another huge question.  The desire to make something; to make something different; to provide something for a performer or ensemble that has asked for it.  Like all composers, I suspect, there are days when I wonder why I put myself through it (because it can be hard and frustrating), but there’s a satisfaction in having made a piece that seems to be valued.

SC: Which living composers do you identify with or simply admire?

RM:  I admire and find inspiration in so many kinds of music it’s impossible to give a list.   When I was younger I used to be a bit clearer about it: Britten, Stravinsky, Berio, Stevie Wonder, the Beatles. Those names would all still be on the list, but the list would be so long and I wouldn’t be sure that they would be at the top of it.

SC: If you could have a beer and a chat with any composer from the past, who would it be and why?

RM:  I had tea and a chat with Maderna once, and a few beers with Berio.  But I think I was so overawed to be in their presence it was less a chat and more an ‘audience’.

SC: Now for some desert island discery – please name eight pieces of music you could not be without, and then select just one.

RM:    The truth is there is no music I couldn’t live without.  But I’ll play your game:

Oedipus Rex (Stravinsky) blows me away every time.

Bach B minor mass (ditto)

Fulfillingness First Finale (Stevie Wonder).

Mahler 9, with Das Lied on the B side.

Love’s Old Sweet Song (sung by Anna Myatt – as on the Ulysses audiobooks I produced)

Kinshi Tsurata singing Dan –no –ura (Heike Biwa).  It’s used in the film Kwaidan –the last story about Hoichi the Earless.  Tsurata – blind female singer and Satsuma biwa player – was phenomenal.

Smiley Smile (Beach Boys)

Il Cor Tristo (Marsh) - it’s the piece of mine I’m most proud of and I most like listening to.

SC: …and a book?:

RM:    Ulysses

SC: …a film?

RM:  The Godfather parts 1 and 2

SC: … and a luxury item?

RM:   Binoculars

Composer of the month: Valerie Pearson

Valerie is a composer, improviser and violinist. She read music at King’s College London, studying composition with Rob Keeley and Harrison Birtwistle and came to York University to complete a Masters degree and PhD in composition with Bill Brooks and Nicloa LeFanu, funded by the AHRC. She lives in York where she teaches the violin and runs Club Integral North. Valerie Pearson’s New Work will be premiered by pianist Mark Hutchinson at the next Late Music concert, Saturday 7^th June at 7.30pm

Steve Crowther: Can you describe the work to us?

Valerie Pearson: It deals with Macbeth. In particular, the overwhelming, pervading guilt that gradually takes over his psychology, and also his position of zugzwang. 

Zugzwang has been coined as a chess term describing a situation where a player must make a move, but every option to move weakens their position. Zugzwang is, therefore, a weak position that the player is responsible for having created.

After killing King Duncan Macbeth realises that if he does nothing he may be found guilty, but each move that may prevent his denouement unravels further problems. Accompanying this worsening series of moves, which lead to the murder of beloved friends and civil war, is Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s growing psychological demise. This is fuelled by overwhelming feelings of guilt and paranoia, and starts to take the form of uncontrollable mad behaviour that may betray them.

When I was first considering these themes of Macbeth, musical ideas came to mind immediately; I knew that there had to be a particular ‘sound’ that represented Macbeth’s guilt and paranoia that could slowly infect the piece. I didn’t want to ‘prepare’ the piano so I used a technique that involves striking and immediately releasing the keys of cluster of notes and catching the resonances of the harmonics with the sustain pedal. The result is a faint ethereal glow of sound that can be used to ‘infect’ or ‘taint’ conventionally played notes. I also use the extremely high notes of the piano in a musical motive of disruption. I quickly discovered how one musical idea could be trapped and infected by another should it be ‘allowed’ in and I began to see how some elements of the zugzwang position may be realised musically.

At the start of the piece we hear the main theme made up of clear phrases. It turns out that there are weak spots in this material where we can hear the disruptive musical elements find a way in. The piece charts the gradual infection and demise of the main theme by these other musical ideas.

SC: Do you write at the piano, do you pre-plan? Can you describe the compositional process?

VP: I can’t write at the piano in the sense that I play through my piece as I write it because I can’t play the piano. I can check sounds and chords but that’s about it in terms of being able to reproduce fixed music. I really enjoy improvising and do this a lot to generate ideas or try to realise things I have in my head. I perform as an improviser on violin and this is inextricably linked to my composition work. I improvise because I need to hear my ideas instantly in order to grow as a composer. I have learnt so much about pacing and how to develop ideas - what grabs the ears’ attention and how to keep that attention. Real time is a difficult thing to handle when you are composing.

I can’t compose a piece of music starting at the beginning and continuing chronologically. I have to have the piece planned and structured in my head before I get down to writing it out. The musical ideas have life and flexibility in my head whereas once they are written down they can get tied to that particular version of their existence. I am a cataloguer of ideas and like to play with different little combinations in my head or work out many versions of the same idea. The cataloguing of ideas is a security blanket and I wish I could grow out of it. It is safe to have those ideas there but I know, deep down, they are fetters.

In my life as a composer there is ‘general cover’ composing - coming up with ideas and playing around with things. There are three important stages to finishing a piece.  The first is to be ‘broken’. I have no clue how this eventually happens, but I only get anything done once I’m able to mentally shut out all the obligations and duties of real life. Stage two is to have a moment of crisis. Stage three incorporates stage two and is the moment when I realise that the piece doesn’t flow and it noodles all over the place. The stuff I’ve been meticulously crafting for weeks is the problem and needs to be cut and I come up with the most simple and obvious idea in about two minutes, because that’s all the time I’ve got left, and this turns out to be the most effective idea in the final piece.

SC: Is it important to know the performers? Do you write with a sound in mind?

VP: There is always a practical provision for a work’s development and this one lent itself to me presenting Mark with a fully notated score of my conception. Knowing Mark allowed me to be confident about writing certain things knowing they suited his style of playing. As I hope the piece will have a life after the premiere with other performers it is an interesting question.

SC: How would you describe your individual ‘sound world’?

VP: My individual sound world is still developing. After trying to make every piece as different as possible I have, in the last five years, been nurturing a tendency to write fast paced collage with an emphasis on fluid metres. I also explore the relationship of pitch verses sound and harmony verses timbre and strive to make notes produce interesting timbres rather than relying on extended techniques. I’d like to try to make my music sound a bit lighter in places.

SC: What motivates you to compose?

VP: When I was a child, before I had any music lessons, I wanted to know how people managed to put the notes in an order that sounded right and I wondered how many possibilities there were and whether they had already all been used. Every time I tried to make up a song it sounded like something I knew. My grandmother had a pedal bellow organ/harmonium, which I would spend hours playing, trying to make up a tune and a way to make a convincing ending. I spent hours doing this because I couldn’t ever make the music sound like it had finished.

SC: Which living composers do you identify with or simply admire?

VP: There are so many. Kurtàg has always been of great importance to me and although I knew his work before, I just couldn’t get enough of him between 2000 and 2004 when the ECM recordings came out.

SC: If you could have a beer and a chat with any composer from the past, who would it be and why?

VP: J.S. Bach, so that I could ask him what music he liked to listen to when he was alive. I’d like to fill the pub with composers, but to choose a few: Varèse, Nancarrow, Sibelius, Stockhausen, Feldman. These guys aren’t going to say they need to head off when its closing time.

SC: Now for some desert island discery – please name eight pieces of music you could not be without, and then select just one.

VP: A l'Ile de Gorée by Iannis Xenakis is my absolute favourite piece of music and is probably the only one I really couldn’t live without.

Wozzek by Alban Berg

Orchestral Set no.2 by Charles Ives

The Queen’s Suite by Duke Ellington

Piano Concerto by György Ligeti

String Quartet by Conlon Nancarrow

St Matthew Passion by J. S. Bach

To balance the epic nature of a whole opera, which I think is allowed, can I make a special mix tape of short songs as one choice?

Bundle by The Kenny Process Team, Mutual Core and Come to Me by Björk and Look Away by Deerhoof

SC: …and a book?

VP: I really like Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy and Morton Feldman’s Give My Regards to Eight Street but if I could take the particular book that I own I think I have to choose E. E. Cummings’ Selected Poems 1923-58.

SC: …a film?

VP: The Big Lebowski by the Coen Brothers is the one I could watch over and over. La Strada by Fellini is so good as is Inland Empire by David Lynch.

SC: … and a luxury item?

VP: A cafetiere with an endless supply of coffee. Or a Korg Micro sampler – I’ve never managed to use one yet.

Remembering Bill - William Mathias by composer Michael Parkin

I have many fond memories of my old professor and composition teacher William Mathias.

I lived just down the road from him in Beaumaris on Anglesey and he often picked me up as I was hitching into lectures having missed the early bus. ‘Late again Michael, jump in’. He drove the largest Volvo I’d ever seen, in the winter wore a huge Russian black fur hat and as often as not had a fat Churchillian cigar notched in his right hand. There was always a fog of cigar smoke in the Volvo, but at least it was warm. As a nervous, overawed undergrad I rarely ventured conversation, but on the rare occasions when I did summon up the nerve, I got views and opinions on Tippett, Walton, Britten, Berkeley et al. He had met them, knew them, conducted them, and so I treasured this third-hand touch with greatness. Later on, as an over-confident and rather self-opinionated postgrad, I sometimes sought his views on my then heroes; Ligeti, Xenakis and Stockhausen. Sadly, at this later stage my professor did not share many of my enthusiasms.

I found myself at UCNW Bangor because as a pre-university student at Huddersfield School of Music I’d chanced upon two early pieces by Mathias; Celtic Dances and the Harp Concerto. After this, there was only one place for me to study, and when the professor burst into my first composition class, sat down at the piano and rattled off a Clementi sonatina at twice the metronome speed, followed by a critical demolition that took less time than he had taken him to play the exposition, I knew that the next 3 years would at least be colourful and entertaining.

Although not a tall man, everything about him was slightly larger than life, exaggerated, enlarged. Always in a hurry, he bounded along the corridors of Top College like a Welsh hill farmer in search of a flock, greeting students with a ubiquitous ‘Any problems?’ It was never a real question, just rhetorical. There was a rumour that one student had tested this by responding that his wife and child had died that week in a car accident, and he’d just returned from hospital with a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Turning around to gauge the response, he saw the professor disappearing through a door at the far end of the corridor.

Composition classes were always entertaining, often colourful, and sometimes downright surprising. After presenting him with a truly awful setting of Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, I discovered later that he had scribbled on my score above a particularly crass chord, YE TIGER!!!  His ear never failed him. And yet, one Christmas vacation I set a chunk of Ted Hughes ‘Crow’ in aleatoric and graphic notation, just to confound him. He praised it; ‘one of the most imaginative pieces you’ve written so far Michael’.

I wish I could have mastered his trick of using two (sometimes three!) separate themes and then combining them in an exuberant, dexterous coda. He showed us how, but I’ve always failed miserably to juggle even just two balls, let alone three. Advice on getting stuck; ‘keep reading up to the blank bar at twice the tempo, over and over again. Eventually it will give’. He’s right, it does!

As a composer he was a man rooted in his time, place and culture. Place was important to him. By a strange twist of fate I now live just down the road from his childhood home in Whitland (or Hendy Gwyn as he would have known it as a Welsh speaker). Carmarthenshire, rural West Wales, steeped in chapel and choral singing - as bible black as nearby Laugharne. Only lately have I begun to understand the Marquez line ‘I came to map the island, but the island mapped me’. Bill would have understood this implicitly, it was after all, in his DNA.   

       

If I were to take just one piece of his to that mythical dessert island, it would be his Violin Concerto, a late work that explores the Bardic tradition of Penillion (improvisation sparked between voice and harp). It sounds like home for me.

Sun Dance from Santa Fe Suite for Harp – William Mathias

Inspired by the composer’s trip to the New Mexican city in 1987, this three- movement suite is suffused with the culture and rhythms of Spain. The final movement, Sun Dance, depicts the American Indian ritual in sparkling Latin guitar rhythms, often reminiscent of flamenco.

The suite was commissioned and premiered by the Welsh harpist Caryl Thomas at the Wigmore Hall in 1988.

Michael Parkin

Composer of the Month: Timothy Raymond

Composer of the Month: Timothy Raymond

Timothy Raymond is the former Head of Composition and Contemporary Music at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama where he taught for 15 years. He has worked subsequently at the University of Aberdeen and at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. His music has been performed both in the UK and overseas and broadcast by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. He is Director of Music – and Composer-in-Association - at the Priory Church of Bolton Abbey

Timothy Raymond’s Memorare will receive its first performance by La Mer Trio at the next Late Music concert on Saturday 3^rd May.

Steve Crowther: Can you describe the work to us?

Timothy Raymond: It takes its cue from a prayer addressed to ‘Our Lady of Consolation’, which – like a number of Marian prayers – evokes ideas connected with escape and protection. The music is dominated by rapid changes of mood from ‘agitated’ to ‘suddenly calm’. Sequences which appear to be moving forward are suddenly arrested and replaced by music of stillness and delicacy, underpinned by atmospheric harp writing. The second ‘half’ of the piece includes the development of several tonal/modal elements which emerge only sporadically in the first, and is characterized by a recurring dance-like passage (viola), briefly suggesting a mediaeval connection. Other passages include an intense, sustained and still chorale followed by a complex canon in which the three instruments attain complete musical equality. The music sort of evaporates at the end as the closing bars reflect the upward flight of the opening, but purged of its anxiety. The flute is associated – though not solely, by any means – with this latter element.

SC: Do you write at the piano, do you pre-plan? Can you describe the compositional process?

TR: I don’t use the piano at all during the initial notating of musical ideas and I only use it as a check to the ear at an advanced level of the composing process. I’m a relatively fluent pianist and can improvise – both skills that I’m keen to dissociate completely from my composing, where musical thought, its structuring and symbolic representation is, for me, the key to a degree of control and precision which would otherwise be unavailable. The traditional nomenclature and identification in harmony and counterpoint of ‘voices’ with ‘lines’ remains supremely relevant and continues to be a creative spur. It colours my approach to writing for instruments.

The ‘process’ might best be described as ‘empirical’ rather than ‘methodical’. It is methodical in certain respects but it is deliberately ramshackle. It’s also seamless and osmotic and has become increasingly sculptural (with sound as the matter to be shaped) and only partially follows notions of beginning, middle and end. Those notions do emerge (from the block, as it were). I have become committed to creating closed forms characterized by organic connections between the parts.

An initial stage of research involved ideas suggested by the prayer, continuing with an investigation of related symbolism and plainchant. That was completed by an amassing of musical ideas and material and a full consideration of instrumental resources and the musical figuration appropriate to them, including selective study of repertoire (the Debussy Sonata is inescapable). A partial mapping of a musical world is followed by the planning of a journey through it, the end result of that process being the closed form to which I referred. Only at that point do the concepts of beginning, middle and end become palpable (I recall that the beginning changed several times and was only finalized towards the end of my work on the piece). Matters of musical taste are, needless to say, a constant factor. One question I ask has become something of an obsession for me after I proposed it to composition students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland this year: What is the difference between a musical convention and a cliché? Or perhaps: When – or under what circumstances – does a convention become a cliché? I don’t claim to have answered that but it does make me think.

SC: Is it important to know the performers? Do you write with a sound in mind?

TR: Very important for me. Composition tends to be an appropriately isolated activity. It benefits immensely from the empirical and practical input of performers at any and at all stages. If, as is the case here, you don’t know them personally, then your knowledge of the instruments, their capabilities and limitations, is all that you can go on. I always invite performers to respond to a score and to make any suggestions which they feel would aid the performance and improve the score’s effectiveness. I’m always keen to acknowledge any such collaboration.

Whilst I acknowledge that musical composition can be linked or even equated with research, adventure and discovery (whatever we individually understand by those words), throughout all the stages of sketching leading to the production of the score, I can only ‘put pen to paper’ (so to speak) when I have as clear an idea of the sound in my inner ear as I can imagine, including as precise a sense of pitch (harmony) and rhythm as I can muster.

SC: How would you describe your individual ‘sound world’?

TR: I approach the composition of a new piece as an imaginative/musical adventure as far as possible peculiar to that piece alone. I don’t regard stylistic consistency from piece to piece as an ideal but, that said, it’s obvious (to me, at least) that certain characteristics have remained constant in my work: a concern with harmonic consistency together with full integration and inter-reliance of all the compositional parameters both in controlled flow and direct contrast of ideas. This is informed by the conviction that systems don’t guarantee any interest whatsoever and that on no account should they be allowed to inhibit fantasy and imagination. I have an abiding interest in the necessity of anarchy in all walks of life (if you can negotiate the fundamental paradox). I don’t believe that music has to be anything at all. The moment someone pontificates that music has to contain this, that or the other in order to be significant, it’s in my nature to try very hard to exclude that ‘this’, ‘that’ or ‘other’ from my next piece! However, I have to say that for certain types of musical expression and certain types of musical discourse to become viable, hierarchies of values need to be established amongst the elements of the composer’s musical meta-language.

In most of the music I’ve written lately, there’s a sense of a musical spectrum or a network of relationships which incorporate a significant spread of tonal resources (including the post-tonal. Our vocabulary fails us here – we don’t yet have the words (the most useless is ‘atonal’, which is misleading and almost always untrue)). I also recognise a similar range of rhythmic resources, from free to strict, from additive to metrical or whatever. As I get older, I’m more and more convinced that it’s important to try to do something different. Not to rewrite the same piece.

SC: What motivates you to compose?

TR: I’m absolutely fascinated and enthralled by composing. It’s the only thing I think I can do which I believe defines me as a worker. I like solitude. Composing’s an act, like playing an instrument, a performance which you need to develop skills – technique – to bring off. It isn’t (for me, at least) a branch of academe or a set of tricks or dodges but a very satisfying form of thought in action – one which doesn’t mean anything in a strictly linguistic sense but one which I think we’d be poorer without. It’s capable of many types of power and expression ‘[w]hereof one cannot speak…’. Again, I can only say that, for me, there’s been no better adventure.

SC: Which living composers do you identify with or simply admire?

TR: I find it hard to identify with anybody now – least of all my self. I just want to do something ‘different’ now. Most composers I could identify as influences are dead – some of them have died recently. And I now tend to look further back for reading/listening, though I’ll also listen with interest and enthusiasm to things that seem to be at an extreme edge. That’s a trait I acquired from my teacher – composer, John Lambert (1926-1995)). I like Edwin Roxburgh and Hans Abrahamsen. I’m interested in Julian Anderson and Paul Archbold and in the work of some of the post-spectralists such as the Belgian composer, Luc Brawaeys. I’ve heard one or two impressive recent pieces by German composers, Enno Poppe and Georg Friedrich Haas. I’m sure I’ve missed some or other key figure (so important to me that I’ve forgotten them altogether). One or two of the real Oldies are still alive: Boulez and Nørgård (to name two people as alike as chalk and cheese). I’ve mentioned Reich in the past as the only one of the minimalist and post-minimalist generation whose music held any interest for me, but nothing much later than the mid-1980s - in fact, nothing since his baseball cap became inseparable from his head.

SC: If you could have a beer and a chat with any composer from the past, who would it be and why?

TR: Charles Ives, simply because you probably could have had a beer and a chat with him. And you could probably avoid talking about music with him too, if you wanted. He remains one of my very favourite composers.

SC: Now for some desert island discery – please name eight pieces of music you could not be without, and then select just one.

TR: This is hard (because I can’t get many composers mentioned above or Sibelius 5, Bartok’s 4^th Quartet, Varèse (anything) or Berg Wozzeck or really anything much in there). (See what I did?) But I love being pretentious as you can tell, so here goes:

1) something from the Netherlands polyphonists: let’s say Obrecht, Missa Maria Zart, primarily because it’s beautiful and then, because its structural complexities are so fascinating and absorbing; 2) J.S. Bach – almost anything, but the B Minor Mass will certainly do; 3) Wagner, Götterdämmerung; 4) Brahms, 4^th Symphony; 5) Fauré, 2^nd Piano Quintet in C minor; 6) Dutilleux, Métaboles; 7) Ohana, 2^nd String Quartet; 8) Carter, Duo (for violin and piano).

First choice (er…….): Fauré, 2^nd Piano Quintet in C minor because of its profound beauty; the first movement’s journey into blinding light; its modernity, subtlety and poignant expressivity.

SC: …and a book?

TR: Robert Frost,The Poetry of Robert Frost, perhaps.

SC: …a film?

TR: A Sunday in the Country (Un dimanche à la campagne, Bertrand Tavernier, 1984)

SC: … and a luxury item?

TR: : A massive, well-stocked wine cellar containing good French reds for the most part (though I wouldn’t say no to a few hundred assorted Belgian beers too) and a bottle-opener.