Sometimes the ‘F’ word has the sweetest ring to it.
It expresses in one simple syllable pleasure, satisfaction and stimulation. It is exactly what one wants to hear. Especially at this time of the year.
I refer, of course, to Film. The word that means that one doesn’t have to plough through some abstruse piece of archaic grammar that only people learning our language have to grasp. No, it means being in a darkened room with professional audio delivery which can effectively silence (or mask) even the most intractable chatter of a group of young Spaniards in close proximity.
Film! The magic ticket to mindlessness. Film! The wilful abnegation of any sense of responsibility to the darkness. Film! Somebody else’s work. Film! Even with the worst audience still easier than taking the kids themselves! Film!
The head of department has booked the auditorium for the last day of term and all is set for the flickering images to take our children away on the wings of fantasy! Or something. Or anything.
And that is only for those lessons which I have to take after a swathe of my teaching will be lost in the sanguinary exploration which is going to take place tomorrow morning. What a way to end a term: with a lunchtime duty and semi-hysterical students last period in a darkened room!
‘The Chichester Psalms’ by Bernstein are beginning to make an impression on my memory. I have been studiously listening to the new recording that I have had as the latest disk from the BBC Music Magazine. As I drive to school each morning I dutifully listen to the sequence yet again and today, for the first time, I have been humming sections from the piece and therefore realize that it is beginning to take its place in the memory banks.
The performance on the CD from the BBC Music Magazine is by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra with the National Youth Choirs of Scotland and Great Britain and the Rodolfus Choir.
My reactions to the piece are frankly mixed and the discovery that the score comprises salvaged music from deleted material that was originally in ‘West Side Story’ and a theme from an uncompleted Bernstein musical ‘The Skin of Our Teeth’ perhaps explains part of my sense of discontinuity in the flow of the music.
Some parts sound disconcertingly like some modern ‘happy-clappy’ passages of liturgical music with the slurred chromatic meanderings that make some modern peoples’ music so difficult to sing.
The overall effect is impressive with the poignant figure of David singing the twenty-third psalm in the second movement particularly satisfying.
The orchestral prelude for the third movement sounds to me as though it is from an altogether different piece with lush strings and swooping melody strangely at odds with what we have been listening to.
It took me a while to get to know it and it might take a longer while for me to get to like it. Perhaps, as it was intended to be, I should try and get to a performance in an institution with the atmospheric resonance of a great Cathedral.
Meanwhile in Barcelona I have yet to hear any concert in the Santa Maria del Mar which to me appears to be an ideal concert space, but which someone else has told me is an acoustic nightmare.
I would like to find out for myself.
It expresses in one simple syllable pleasure, satisfaction and stimulation. It is exactly what one wants to hear. Especially at this time of the year.
I refer, of course, to Film. The word that means that one doesn’t have to plough through some abstruse piece of archaic grammar that only people learning our language have to grasp. No, it means being in a darkened room with professional audio delivery which can effectively silence (or mask) even the most intractable chatter of a group of young Spaniards in close proximity.
Film! The magic ticket to mindlessness. Film! The wilful abnegation of any sense of responsibility to the darkness. Film! Somebody else’s work. Film! Even with the worst audience still easier than taking the kids themselves! Film!
The head of department has booked the auditorium for the last day of term and all is set for the flickering images to take our children away on the wings of fantasy! Or something. Or anything.
And that is only for those lessons which I have to take after a swathe of my teaching will be lost in the sanguinary exploration which is going to take place tomorrow morning. What a way to end a term: with a lunchtime duty and semi-hysterical students last period in a darkened room!
‘The Chichester Psalms’ by Bernstein are beginning to make an impression on my memory. I have been studiously listening to the new recording that I have had as the latest disk from the BBC Music Magazine. As I drive to school each morning I dutifully listen to the sequence yet again and today, for the first time, I have been humming sections from the piece and therefore realize that it is beginning to take its place in the memory banks.
The performance on the CD from the BBC Music Magazine is by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra with the National Youth Choirs of Scotland and Great Britain and the Rodolfus Choir.
My reactions to the piece are frankly mixed and the discovery that the score comprises salvaged music from deleted material that was originally in ‘West Side Story’ and a theme from an uncompleted Bernstein musical ‘The Skin of Our Teeth’ perhaps explains part of my sense of discontinuity in the flow of the music.
Some parts sound disconcertingly like some modern ‘happy-clappy’ passages of liturgical music with the slurred chromatic meanderings that make some modern peoples’ music so difficult to sing.
The overall effect is impressive with the poignant figure of David singing the twenty-third psalm in the second movement particularly satisfying.
The orchestral prelude for the third movement sounds to me as though it is from an altogether different piece with lush strings and swooping melody strangely at odds with what we have been listening to.
It took me a while to get to know it and it might take a longer while for me to get to like it. Perhaps, as it was intended to be, I should try and get to a performance in an institution with the atmospheric resonance of a great Cathedral.
Meanwhile in Barcelona I have yet to hear any concert in the Santa Maria del Mar which to me appears to be an ideal concert space, but which someone else has told me is an acoustic nightmare.
I would like to find out for myself.
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