Month: April 2025

Dazzlehands – a book that dances – from RNZ Ballet

Posted on by Jennifer Shennan

 

    Dazzlehands                                                                                                                                                                                 
    Royal New Zealand Ballet
    St.James Theatre, Wellington
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Photo credits: Stephen A’Court

It’s school holidays, so take the book Dazzlehands by local children’s writer Sacha Cotter and illustrator Josh Morgan then adapt it for performance. The protagonist is a dancing pig, so you’re halfway there already.

Choreography by RNZB company dancer, Joshua Guillemot-Rodgerson,is cheeky and his use of repeated action motifs cleverly echoes the rhythms in the text. The sassy dancers at RNZB step up to develop the characters in the farmyard and they relish the chance to play the silly card. Most of the animals conform to expectations, but Pig is the exception.

The work is set to music by local composer William Philipson, with narration stitched in. Costumes designed by Victoria Gridley are up and over the top. Fill the theatre with little ones and their older significant  others, and you can’t really go wrong.

In saying that it’s worth acknowledging how much work goes into theadaptation of any work from one genre to another, then co-ordinating all the elements of such a project in a way that still honours the original. Just because the book is for children doesn’t mean it’s childish work. The theatre can work for all ages but you have to know how to play that.

There are sold out seasons of Dazzlehands in various venues, with a te reo narration, a deaf-signed and relaxed performances included. Huia are the country’s leading publishers of bi-lingual books for children, and both editions of this work, in English, Dazzlehands and in te reo, Ringakõrero — are on sale in the foyer.

The story and moral of Dazzlehands allows a non-conformist character to play it his way. The farmer wants Pig to behave normally, like all the other animals do — Sheep goes Baa-aa, Cow goes Moo-oo, Hen goes Cluck and Flamingo makes a remarkable sound (a surprise to meet a flamingo on a farm anyway but why not?) The lady farmer grows increasingly frustrated when Pig keeps producing glitzy gloves and turning to disco dancing instead of obliging with an “Oink” as requested.

We’re reminded of the free-thinking family’s mantra – “Sit down wheneveryone else is standing up, stand up when everyone else is sitting down”.

Anthropomorphism is the spine of so many animal tales for children of all ages, from Aesop’s Fables, Three Little Pigs, Wind in the Willows, Beatrix Potter, Alison Uttley … not to mention the crazy romp of Norwegian rock group Ylvis in What Does the Fox Say? and the closer-to-home works by Margaret Mahy (The Lion in the Meadow would be a bobby-dazzler of a ballet), and Paul Jenden who choreographed Lynley Dodd’s Hairy Maclary tribe. It’s just two more bookshelves away to George Orwell’s Animal Farm and the metaphors at work when those farm animals unite to fight off oppression and find freedom. (Note itspublication date 1945).

All the Dazzlehands animals come to want a bit of the glitz so they learn the jazzy dancing — but Pig doesn’t really want to be like anyone else, so as they come across to follow his lead, Pig scores the last line in the play, just one word, and you don’t need me to tell you what that word is. Cotter and Morgan have produced a number of children’s book titles with Huia, including the award-winning The Bomb (that’s the swimming pool variety). It’s worth a few moments to listen to the online version of that being read and accompanied by Claire Cowan’s luminous composition for members of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

There’s also a fabulous lineage of children’s story ballets within the history of RNZB’s own repertoire, all of them worth re-visiting at some stage. Russell Kerr’s productions of Carnival of the Animals, Peter and the Wolf, Alice in Wonderland and his fabulous Peter Pan are all classics. But then who could forget works Kerr made from tales by New Zealand’s stellar children’s book illustrator, Gavin Bishop. Te Maia and the Sea Devil called for a wonderful underwater setting — but at the top table is the legendary Terrible Tom which thrilled so many audiences of children who lifted the roof with delight.

I recently watched a video of this winner from 1980s, with music by Philip Norman, and was thrilled to see my memory had not exaggerated the genius of Russell Kerr, choreographer. Usually it’s a book that then becomes a ballet, but in this instance it would be a ballet that became a book. Now wouldn’t that be fun?

Musical Prodigy Night for Orchestra Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents “PRODIGY”

Georges BIZET – Symphony No. 1 in C Major
Felix MENDELSSOHN – Violin Concerto in E Minor Op.64
Dmitri SHOSTAKOVICH – Symphony No. 1 in F Minor Op.10

Amalia Hall (violin)
Marc Taddei (Music Director)
Orchestra Wellington  (Peter Clark – acting Concertmaster)

Saturday 12th April, 2025
Michael Fowler Centre
Wellington

(pictured at right – Georges Bizet, Felix Mendelssohn-Barthody, Dmitri Shostakovich)

Orchestra Wellington spectacularly lived up to its long-established reputation for innovative concert programming with the first presentation in its latest series “The Dictator’s Shadow”, one doing rich justice to the youthful creative achievements of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose fiftieth anniversary is being celebrated world-wide this year. This opening concert showcases Shostakovich’s remarkable First Symphony, written during 1925 while still a teenaged student at the Leningrad Music Conservatory, and achieving a sensational success, both at home with its Leningrad premiere (May 1926)  and abroad, with the work receiving performances as far afield as Berlin and the United States the following year.

As a concert in itself, the scheme based on the idea of “Prodigy” could hardly have done better, even if any of the last three of the teenaged Mozart’s Violin Concerti could just as easily (and appositely) have been substituted for Mendelssohn’s famous E Minor Op.64 work as a vehicle for the gifted Amalia Hall to play – I must sneakily admit that I, for one, would have relished even more the opportunity to hear her play any of those last three Mozart masterpieces!). Still, the idea of using the Mendelssohn work (apart from the happy availability of such an accomplished soloist) was to bring to notice the composer’s own prodigious creativities with earlier works such as the Octet and the Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, both of which were completed during Mendelssohn’s teens.

To complete the picture there was no happier way of demonstrating a young composer’s talent, inspiration and versatile technique than presenting the youthful (1855) Symphony of Georges Bizet – and though there were only the merest touches of greatness approaching the order of “Carmen” or “Les pêcheurs de perles” in this seventeen year-old’s enthusiastic concoctions of youthful endeavour, the overall impression of the music is that of a nature by turns vivacious and dreamily melancholic, equally at home in the town or the country, as portrayed by turns, in the various movements.

Marc Taddei’s spirited direction appropriately bounced the opening along, the high-spirited trajectories providing a lovely foil for the plangent beauty of the oboe’s floating second-subject lines soaring above the strings undulating patterns, then playing with the fanfare-like figures which frame the more lyrical sections, and the horn calls that both introduce and bid farewell to the movement’s development. After this, the slow movement’s dreamy, somewhat quasi-oriental meanderings were hauntingly voiced by the oboe after the most enchanting of openings (where did the young genius conjure up this mood from?) had been brought in by the strings. Just as engrossing was the ensuing string fugato with which the oboe then adroitly wove a reprise of the opening melody – had Robert Schumann been alive to hear this sequence, he might have uttered a judgement to rival his famous appraisal of one of Chopin’s youthful words many years before –  “Hats off, gentlemen – a genius!”.

I’ve always loved the Trio section of the charmingly rustic Menuetto-Scherzo which follows, not least because of what I’ve always thought was Bizet’s “gently poking fun in a Beethoven-like way” gesture at the wind players who have the Trio’s melody and repeat it a fourth higher at Fig.8 (in my score). Oboe and clarinet on all the recordings I’ve heard except for one play a delightfully astringent-sounding B-natural in that phrase instead of a B-flat, perhaps to indicate (as Beethoven did with his village band music in the “Pastoral” Symphony), that the players might not be fully up to the music’s demands! Here, I seemed to hear (if my ears were serving me correctly), that the wind-players were playing a B-flat, which of course sounded a lot more mellifluous, but not nearly so tangy and rustic! I have, as I’ve said, recorded evidence for both versions being acceptable, but I do wonder what the composer ACTUALLY wrote!

The finale was an exhilarating, momentum-plus performance, Taddei and his players bringing out the music’s fleet-fingered energies in a toe-tapping way, but giving attention to the shapes and trajectories of the melodies as well, contrasting the “perpetuum mobile” of the opening with the grander, more ceremonial second theme, and a more sinuous refrain, a more vulnerably human, song-like tune with which to “people” the soundscape (the “melodic gift” already strongly in evidence in the young composer!)

Oddly enough Bizet seemed to never give the work another thought as an entity, confining his interest to “cherry-picking” bits of it for use in more “serious” works, such as the opera Les pêcheurs de perles and his music for the play LArlesienne. Thanks to the French musicologist Jean Chantavoine who in 1933 published an article regarding the work’s existence, the symphony came to the attention of the conductor Felix Weingartner, who gave the work its belated premiere performance in 1935, earning for it a “wunderkind” status in league with the efforts of Mozart, Mendelssohn, Rossini and Shostakovich.

But next was Mendelssohn – and if the work chosen this evening was definitely not a “wunderkind” work in terms of years, it still evoked memories of hearing for oneself at another time those two outrageously precocious pieces which have for all time identified their then teenaged composer as one of nature’s creative marvels, the Octet for Strings and the Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. This was the E Minor Violin Concerto, for many listeners the work that epitomises the romantic instrumental concerto with its manifest qualities, and one for which tonight’s soloist. Amalia Hall (the orchestra’s regular Concertmaster), seemed a near-ideal choice as its performer.

I’ve certainly not heard a more silvery-toned performance, one whose gossamer finish seemed in places almost unearthly, especially so in the rapid figurations when the notes seemed to “spill out” from the instrument like stardust from a comet arching across a firmament, with the couple of minor intonation stresses deserving the description (coined by a similarly entranced commentator in another, different context) “spots on the sun”. One might also occasionally have wanted a shade more tonal projection in places from the soloist; but to look for something different would be to besmirch the magic we were fortunate to find ourselves caught up in on this occasion  – and so we contented ourselves with the integral state of things as part of the excitement and wonder from both soloist and orchestra.

The music itself is too well-known to annotate at length – enough to say that the musicians here aptly probed the “character” of each of the work’s movements,  filling the ambient spaces with appropriately vibrant tones and gesturings across the instrumental spectrum, More of a dialogue than a contest throughout, the interaction between Hall and her conductor and players transmuted the first movement’s questings, proposings and              bargainings into concordance with the enticing sweetness of the slow movement’s exchanges before giving the exuberance of the finale its head,  violinist, conductor and orchestra revelling in the freely-shared elation of the work’s full expression.

Our readily-wrought appreciation of Amelia Hall’s playing was further enhanced by an encore item she performed with Peter Clark, her stand-in this evening as Concertmaster. This was a duo written by the Polish composer-virtuoso Henryk Wieniawski, his Etude-Caprice Op.18 No,4, in which the playing of both musicians was as remarkable for its delicacy and finesse as for its brilliance – a true sweetmeat of a bonus!

Casting about for ways to characterise the very “two different worlds”  kind of ambience which grew straightaway from the sounds of Dmitri Shostakovich’s singularly remarkable First Symphony, one has to find words for a “new era” of expression – and in this case, one with something of an almost hallucinatory quality in its music’s rapid-fire contrasts of atmosphere, outlook and motivation. One learns with no surprise that the composer spent much of this time earning a living as a cinema pianist, developing in the process a kind of penchant in his music for rapid movement and change, the introduction of disparate elements, and an almost expressionist delight in their surprising interactions.

These thoughts summed up something of the story of the Symphony’s first movement, presented here by Marc Taddei and his players with, in the wake of the concert’s first-half respectabilities, almost mind-boggling aplomb. It’s all superbly etched in, with the changes of pace and mood here nonchalantly and there explosively registered (though clearly articulated, whatever the voice), and the overall energies of the transitions driving one’s sensibilities on until reaching the droll  “did we dream you or you us?” fragments of out-and-out wonderment at the end that had previously tumbled past us all through the plethora of incident carried by the music.

By contrast, the second movement was here kept constantly and brilliantly on the move, either in a helter-skelter or a trance-like, sleepwalking kind of trajectory, each of which abruptly changed as if Shostakovich was  following a private movie-showing (here, Rachel Thomson relishing her occasional “cinema-pianist” role with gusto!). Or, perhaps, we were being asked to reimagine something grimmer – sequences of flight and agitation followed by funereal processions over desolate battlefields still resonating with crushing piano-chord hammerblows……

The music’s Lento mood darkened and deepened, with Taddei drawing from his players a remarkable soundscape of sorrow, with beautiful oboe and ‘cello-playing, taken up by the horns and strings, the repeated portentous brass call heightening the mood of tragedy – the performance brought out the music’s potent “funeral oration” character, moments of harshly unfettered despairing alternated with bleak, desolate voices, anticipating the Shostakovich of the great and harrowing symphonic adagios to come!

And so to the fourth movement, begun with a snare-drum crescendo which seemed at first an isolated, even fatuous gesture of promise, but which planted a rebellious seed in the Lento that returned, bearing its brass, wind and cello musings – suddenly, trumpets and lower strings were igniting the clarinets and upper strings, and whirling us away on a kaleidoscopic journey of contrasts too numerous and varied to fully describe,  but remarkable to experience in a single span of time! There seemed nothing which daunted these players and their valorous maestro – we were transported from the music’s deep recesses of gloom to its near-frenetic expression of exhilaration as the composer’s “end-game” imaginings were given their head in this engrossingly unpredictable but ultimately edifying ride!

If Orchestra Wellington continues to delight us with anything like the same adventurous spirit, emotional engagement and instrumental brilliance as we heard in this first “The Dictator’s Shadow” concert, the remainder of the series will, for me, be well-nigh unmissable! Full marks to all involved for such intelligent and innovative programming and for the sheer elan of execution (oops! – that word just slipped out, Comrade! – sorry!) of some glorious music!!

 

Josef Haydn’s meditation on empathy, forgiveness and love from Camerata at St.Peter’s-on-Willis-St., Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

FRANZ JOSEF HAYDN – The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross (1786-7)  Image: Bernd Ritschel

Camerata
Anne Loeser – Music Director and Concertmaster

St Peter’s on Willis St. Church
Te Aro, Wellington

Saturday, 5th April, 2025

Co-founder Director of Wellington’s Camerata chamber orchestra, Liz Pritchett, eloquently marked the occasion of the group’s tenth anniversary when welcoming the audience at St.Peter’s-on-Willis- St. Church. to its first concert for 2025, paying tribute to the various efforts of people over the years of the ensemble’s activities in maintaining the ongoing success of the venture. She then introduced Concertmaster Anne Loeser to the platform to begin the evening’s programme, one heralding the liturgical year’s oncoming Easter celebrations by featuring a single work, Franz Joseph Haydn’s “Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross”, while also continuing the ensemble’s ground-breaking  survey of the composer’s orchestral works.

Haydn wrote this work in 1786 responding to a commission from the Bishop of Cádiz for a work to solemnise the Good Friday service the following year at the Oratorio de la Santa Cueva (an underground church in the Spanish city). The work rapidly became popular, being performed on its publication in its original orchestral guise almost simultaneously in Vienna and Bonn – and later in Rome, Berlin and Paris – in fact, so much so that the composer not only adapted the work for string quartet, but also approved a version for solo keyboard which had “turned up” (Haydn apparently edited the proofs of what was probably the work of an enterprising music publisher!). A decade later, inspired by hearing a further adaptation of the work for choir and orchestra by the Passau choirmaster Joseph Freiberth, Haydn decided to go one better and produce his own choral version, which was completed in 1796.

The work, with its self-explanatory title, consists of seven slow movements, one for each of Christ’s seven utterances while on the Cross. They’re often called “sonatas” or “meditations” with the seven individual pieces framed by a slow orchestral introduction and a concluding “Presto con tutta la forza” which depicts the earthquake described by Matthew’s Gospel at the moment of Christ’s death. Here, Camerata used, of course, the original orchestra version, one which forged something of a link with that first performance in Cadiz by having a speaker (Gregory Hill) intone beforehand each of the seven statements by Christ quoted in the various Gospels. Haydn described in a preface to the work something of the structure of the original service, consisting of each of Christ’s utterances, a discourse on its significance, and then the corresponding piece of music – fortunately we were spared the longeurs of such an arrangement on this occasion!

The work’s dark, D Minor introduction, Maestoso ed Adagio, straightaway engaged our attention, with the players’ fully-voiced and deep-throated sounds generating a real sense of impending tragedy and sorrow, and throwing into relief the more consoling F-major sequences before the opening’s inevitable, inescapable return. The mood actually lightened with the first of Christ’s utterances to be reflected in the music’s phrasings – “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”, the tones  conciliatory and stressing the idea of mercy and forgiveness even in the face of betrayal, mockery and abandonment merely hinted at here by the occasional intimation of darkness.

Similar sentiments coloured the exchange between Christ and the repentant thief via the words  “Today, you will be with me in Paradise”. Major and minor key sequences readily brought to us the drama of the encounter, with forceful attack by the strings on the high exposed notes, followed by the reprise of the opening reaffirming Christ’s positive recognition of the sinner’s repentance.  In a different context was the great and touching tenderness which came over the music for the following “Woman, behold thy son”, where Jesus enjoins his mother to regard her vigil’s companion John the Apostle as her son in his place,  the “held” chords at the phrase-beginnings and the two-note answerings especially affecting, as were the even more plaintive  interactions between strings and winds in the music’s development.

With the dramatic “My God, my God, whv has thou forsaken me?” the level of angst and anguish was suddenly heightened, though with the music’s exhortations reiterated in a major key, having the effect of “humanising” the suffering, the solo violin passages concentrating one’s concept of a single person’s ordeal with its exposed quality, extended by the cello’s and others’ solo lines. And how piteously Haydn then honed in on this suffering in the following “I thirst”,  firstly by the poignant use of pizzicato notes as a background to the words, then forthright repeated-note patterns suggesting the suffering Christ’s extreme duress, as the heart-rending call is echoed by the various winds – also, how affecting is the recapitulation of these various piteous elements of the scene, as the drama draws closer to its end! One must pay special tribute to the brasses in these darker, more dramatic sequences, their colourings adding weight and gravitas to the depictions for our increased absorption!

The drama then enacted, it seemed, a number of “conclusions” of a kind, the first being the finality of the words “It is finished” – a bald unison statement, then a harmonised repetition through the orchestra, the composer alternating the “bare” melody with the harmonised version, as if indicating an eventual cessation of suffering, and an attaining of a “better place”, which indicates why the music didn’t return to the minor key-opening. Then came the final grand statement “Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit”, the last of the utterances and a total acceptance, indicated by a warmly sonorous E-flat major – in fact, the music here almost becomes balletic in places, with a triple-time decorative figure appearing for a number of bars – an undeniable sense of occasion, coupled with a certain expectation – but of what?

The answer, of course, came with the final, unnerving “Il terremoto” (The Earthquake), voiced in a frenzied C Minor, which the rushing strings , the thundering timpani and the baleful winds and brasses made splendid use of with suitably telling characterful and concerted seismic gesturings – as if the composer was here adding his voice to all those who have since proclaimed that “this, truly, was the Son of God”. It brought a precipitate finish to what had been a largely contemplative occasion, one whose reflective meditation on aspects of the human condition with its capacities for empathy, forgiveness and love made for a moving and worthwhile experience.

 

 

Come to the Cabaret! – with Stephanie Acraman and Liam Wooding

Posted on by Peter Mechen

THE COMPLETE CABARET SONGS OF WILLIAM BOLCOM

 

Stephanie Acraman (voice)
Liam Wooding (piano)

RATTLE RAT D140-2023

Producer: Kenneth Young
Recorded by John Kim and Steve Garden
at the Gallagher Theatre, Waikato University

I imagined I could at first almost hear the beguiling tones of Joan Morris floating around the edges of Stephanie Acraman’s voice as the latter made her svelt, seductive way through the opening song “Over the Piano” of this well-nigh irresistible collection of American composer William Bolcom’s Cabaret Songs, which Steve Garden’s enterprising Rattle Records has captured and released for our delight!

I couldn’t help myself, really – because Joan Morris is the wife of the composer, William Bolcom, of these songs, and the singer for whom they were originally written – and over thirty years ago I remember sitting spellbound in London’s Wigmore Hall listening to Morris and Bolcom weave their magic through an evening of American Song, one featuring names and tunes of composers and music I both knew and didn’t know, but didn’t at all care, the discoveries throughout the evening being as delightful as the familiar songs were enfolding, wrap-around-pleasures!

Not that Stephanie Acraman doesn’t quickly make these songs very much her own –  by the time she and her pianist Liam Wooding had teased my sensibilities with that first number, I found myself falling hook, line and sinker for more!  And I straightaway loved the Ira Gershwin-like word-pairings in the second song “Fur (Murray the Furrier)”, with the matching “worrier” and “hurrier” creating consonances that seemed to spontaneously sprout from the very ground along which the song ambled,  Bolcom’s musical fancies  so readily and adroitly  tickled by his songwriter Arnold Weinstein’s impish wit and word-verve.

Some history – alongside his studies with both Darius Milhaud at Mills College, California, and Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire, the young William Bolcom was balancing an interest in the works of Boulez, Stockhausen and Berio with a desire to develop his own stylistic links to popular music. This brought him into contact with Arnold Weinstein who was the librettist of a 1964 anti-war satire Dynamite Tonite for which Bolcom had been asked to write the music. Their resulting collaboration went on to produce operas, song-cycles and books of madrigals, besides a number of “single” works over the years, and of course, these “Cabaret Songs”, which appeared in separate “books”, the first completed in 1977 and with Book Four finally appearing in 1996.  These songs embody the concept of “cabaret” as a “theatre of life”, presenting vignettes illustrating all kinds of people in different life-situations, their range and variety here done captivating justice in this particular recording by these two performers.

As the songs pass through one’s consciousness one gasps in places at the abyss-like gulf between portrayals of different human sensibilities, as, for instance, when one breaks off from the antics of the well-practised philanderer of the fourth song, “He tipped the waiter”, in Book One, and straightaway enters the endless but patiently-endured world of longing  of the singer in “Waitin’”, a touching, almost hymn-like paean to hope, voiced by a disarmingly unpretentious soul. Then, there’s the life-enhancing, wing-spreading optimism and oxygenating energies of the free-spirited vocalist (with a suitably jaunty piano accompaniment!) in “Places to Live” (the word “live” perhaps Freudianly misprinted as “love” in a couple of places), and which then somewhat mordantly curdles into the fraught domesticities of “Toothbrush Time”

Besides these (and other) ill-fated couplings airing their dreams and disappointments practically in tandem with one another,  there are the ones that “stand-alone”, the songs which live amidst either a bubbling effervescence of both words and music, or are woven all about the voice’s suggestive curve of tremulous warmth with the piano’s like connivance,  echoing in the memory as worlds of their own long after the sounds have outwardly ceased. These can tell their own story, as with the “Song of Black Max (as told by the de Kooning Boys” – Weinstein’s deliciously macabre ode to a legendary fate-like figure of the Dutch underworld) – or paint a no-holds-barred character picture, like that of “Radical Sally”, a bluesy ballade of a nemesis-like female omnipresence who, in the poet’s words “still looks at you like a long-lost cause” – singer and pianist totally inhabiting both persona and ambient world.

Acraman and Wooding throughout the disc make every sliver of Bolcom’s and Weinstein’s characterisation and flavour count, even the pithy “Thius, King of Orf”, whose elliptic utterance and sudden discharge couldn’t help but remind me of the “la-la-land” life-slices of American cartoonist B.Kliban (“Cynthia is mistakenly crowned King of Norway”, for instance)……as recounted above they do it breathtakingly so, and draw a masterly contrast that follows with the gentle, Blake-like world of “sweet and small” satisfaction of the eponymously-titled portrait of a bee who “sits a second on a rose, sips a bit and goes….”

Turn to anything in these “books”, in fact, and listeners may well find themselves variously amused or disconcerted, charmed or concerned, grounded or transported  – Acraman and Wooding  present without apology a collected means of awakening a whole gamut of responses to these portrayals of the human condition, and which I, for one, couldn’t resist playing right through again, just to revisit what I considered the fun of it! And a second hearing uncovered still more in the “stand-alone” areas that Bolcom and Weinstein give voice and tones to that I caught on my first, fine, careless traversal…..

I found myself going back to the resonances that clung to my memory of Volume One’s “Waitin”, with its “hope-against-hope” loneliness, to Volume Two’s “The Actor” who repeatedly “dies for a living”, along with “George” whose “difference” to others cost him his life (as it did a Puccini heroine in a different context, but hinted at by the same music), to Volume Three’s “Miracle Song” (which pays tribute to Jerry Lieber’s and Mike Stoller’s  “Is that all there is?” but with rather more grotesque imagery (ev’ry third friend you meet – “Hello, so what else is dead?”),  a song leaving us like possuums trapped in car headlights!…and then the final Volume’s vulnerabilities of love, firstly teased in “Can’t Sleep” and then trashed in the following “At the Last Lousy Moments of Love”.  How tellingly Acraman and Wooding give and take with each other throughout these vignettes of human feeling,  with many a vocal impulse proposed, shared and countered by a pianistic rejoiner, and vice versa.

A third  “listen”? – it won’t be the last time, I’m certain, but this traversal had me looking for the ones I might have not given enough time to, and allowed to pass me by in a generalised kind of mind-set – but as with all great music parts of it are loaded to register at later and still more later hearings! So I’m now writing this with the initially-thought trite but charming “Love in the Thirties” from Volume Three suddenly having properly “sprung” its spell (with my own parenthood times poignantly played like a private movie in my head throughout the song!), and finally (appropriately?) the last song “Blue”, tantalisingly ambivalent in its intent for me (a song for someone else or for the self? – I vary, depending on my mood (need?) when listening) …….but those words which I’ve finally paid proper attention to are Wordsworthian in their impact, like distant daffodils! – “behind the eyes, behind the mind you’ll find the sweetest brilliance and a stillness of such blue…..” I’m finding they now leave me weak with their realisation……

I’m left saying that I can’t recommend this recording  enthusiastically enough! – whatever genre of music is one’s “thing”, this for me has transcended such considerations! I wish for it every success – it does proud  everybody involved in its becoming and actual being.