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Cuticle Damage at the Contemporary Music Ensemble

Tuesday 5th October, grey skies, mild, a fine drizzle. Looks like bountiful autumn has been and gone, for now. I actively like walking over the downs in wet wild October weather, but looking out of this window at the draggled colourless garden, I can only long for spring.

30th September, up to Blackheath Halls for a reprise that might well become an institution, the second Trinity Contemporary Music Ensemble Concert. Our principal motivation of course the pianists, Gabriel Jones and Lydia Aoki, but the music grows on you. Met Gabriel at the station and took him for a quick Italian at Zero Degrees, (it's on the Greenwich Meridian see, comes highly reccommended). See your child, feed your child, even if your child is forty seven and a High Court Judge, it's a law of nature. G jnr's sober dandy ensemble (Gabriel with cufflinks!) somewhat marred by a seen better days black woolly jumper with raggedy cuffs: it's a trick of the trade, saves the sides of the hands from getting bruised purple when piano abuse is called for; he proudly showed us the blackened and bloody cuticles caused by violent glissando work. What did I like? (what do i remember?). I liked husk, paul newland, with the countdown screens and all the spaces inbetween (and a slight technical hitch I'm afraid I took for part of the score, until the pianist got restive). The Hammerhawk stephen montague, that's the violent one, Blond Afrodite. . . Gregory Rose, and The Dream Cat, Deirdre Gribbin, the deceptively conventional chamber piece. The student pieces just went by too fast, but I remember Double Rainbow, because of the daft youtube video association, and Anthropogenic was clever, it's carbon emissions, see, the gases translated into chords, Contemporary Music is full of puns.

And then, the next night, a biography of Vaughan Williams turned up on the telly. What a shifty great amorous old hearth rug, what a giant human badger he was. . .and in the middle of it suddenly found myself listening to the roots of what I'd heard at Blackheath Halls in a piece of music I've known all my life, and never thought remotely weird or "challenging", how could I? It was a favourite with my parents. But it is.

I think they really know where they're coming from, those Trinity Contemporary Music people.

And then, the night after that, it was an Eighties reunion, in the upper room at what used to be The Richmond, down in Brighton by the sea, & Dinah & I were dancing, the sole representatives of the old front row, to The Jungle and This Colour. It never rains but it pours.

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wufnik on :

That was a wonderful show on Vaughan Williams--made me nostalgic for that old Ken Russell film about him that I remember seeing in the US sometime in the 1980s.

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