There's always a first time!

I feel confident in asserting that no one else since the dawn of time has listened to Virgil Thomson’s “Four Saints in Three Acts” on the beach at Castelldefels until I did so today.

Liking that piece of music, and publicly admitting it is like boasting about having a sexually transmitted disease. Not that I’ve got one, you understand, it’s just that I imagine that the odium that you get if you . . . this metaphor is already out of hand. My point is that “Four Saints in Three Acts” is an acquired taste that not very many people have bothered to acquire once they have heard it.

I picked up an old RCA recording in my first year of teaching in Kettering on the strength of the fascinating photograph on the front cover and the libretto having been written by that great American pseud Gertrude Stein. The music was extraordinary and the libretto was shameless gibberish containing, I found to my absolute delight, the original use of the line, “pigeons on the grass, alas!” which I recognised from a sarcastic Thurber short story. Who, in all fairness, could ask for more?

If nothing else, the preceding paragraph will give you a graphic illustration of what sort of guy I was in my first year of teaching!

I had my comeuppance when I went to a rare performance of this seminal American masterpiece in a performance by ENO in London. I loved it, even though I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew the music more thoroughly than most of the singers. At the end of the performance, with tears of pure joy in my eyes, I turned to the lady of my left and said, “Wasn’t that great!” To which she simply replied, “No.”

Ah well, you can/t win them all. I really do recommend at least a cursory glimpse of the ‘libretto’. Any musician who sets, “Having happily had it with a spoon” to music has my vote – in the same way that Benjamin Britten deserves immortality for setting, “And a box of Swan Vestas” in one of his operas. And before you say anything, yes, I do know which one, but I do not want to appear too full of it. So there.

Talking of culture, I was forcibly reminded of Gericault’s ‘The raft of the Medusa’ while taking my customary swim at the end of the day today.

A group of kids had taken out one of those pedalos and were swarming over it and, for a split second, it was a perfect picture; even down to the raised arm waving to form the apex to the compositional pyramid. I have to admit it was a little unsettling; one felt that one ought to do something when confronted by a living representation of one of the great social canvases of the last few hundred years – but it soon passed and I returned to bobbing gently in the sea!

Tomorrow is the fiesta Del mar with pirates and fuegos artificiales.

It just goes on getting better!