So much culture — so little time

Doubt­less many of the read­ers of this blog have bet­ter things to do — but then why are they both­er­ing to blog in ? So, an account of recent cul­tural events:

Mar­tin Carthy in York. It’s a little known fact that W.H. Auden was born in York — rather bet­ter known that he edited the Oxford book of Light Verse which, instead of being pre­dom­in­antly com­ical, con­tains a large selec­tion of tra­di­tional song lyr­ics. Anxious to cel­eb­rate Auden’s 99^th birth­day in the city of his birth (albeit posthum­ously) the City of York Auden Soci­ety put on an excel­lent even­ing of folk recently, fea­tur­ing a num­ber of local sing­ers and groups, plus a won­der­ful set from Mar­tin Carthy. That man must know a mil­lion songs — and seems to have total recall of every verse of the longest ballads.

Ketil Bjorn­stad in Gateshead. And not only Bjorn­stad (piano), but Arild Ander­sen (bass), Svante Henryson(‘cello), Kristin Asb­jornsen (vocal), Alex Riel (drums) and Andy Shep­pard (sax­o­phone) — you’d have needed to add Gab­arek to the group to top that ! All bar our own Andy Shep­pard the very top Scandanavian musi­cians. A rel­at­ively peace­ful and low key start with pieces from” Before the Light” and “Float­ing” but then when Shep­pard came on stage much more upbeat — really groov­ing. Second half was a per­form­ance of “Sea­farers’ Song” — a song cycle includ­ing words by Homer and Shakespeare among oth­ers — record­ing the plight of refugees cross­ing the sea over the ages and par­tic­u­larly those who wash up on the beaches of south­ern europe, dead, after head­ing for Europe from North Africa. And so beau­ti­fully and fero­ciously played !

Ten­nessee Wil­li­ams in Isling­ton. Well, not actu­ally him, but his play “A period of Adjust­ment”. Set (and writ­ten) in the early 50s this is Amer­ican kit­chen sink drama — and what needs a period of adjust­ment is the rela­tion­ship between men and women — life being the term needed. I didn’t believe in the sug­ges­tion of a happy end­ing — can’t see those char­ac­ters ever really being cap­able of sus­tained good beha­viour. Whole thing marred a bit by pretty poor south­ern Amer­ican accents — wildly vari­able, includ­ing into Aus­tralian. Glad I saw it, though.