In all the kinds of music I enjoy it often happens that I’ll grow to appreciate second-tier productions as much as (if not more than) those generally agreed to be ground-breaking masterpieces. There’s so much to love in what is ‘merely’ excellent music that comes to us less unencumbered with expectation & significance than the canonical Great Works. My latest classical acquisitions have both been in that vein: an album of The Complete Piano Trios of the Czech-born and later French-resident composer Anton Reicha, and a first volume of the Complete String Quartets of Alexander Glazunov which features the Russian's 3rd & 5th quartets.
I wrote a little about Reicha on one of my previous blogs. His output is sometimes simplistically divided between a more eccentric and experimental phase earlier in his career when he worked in Germany and Austria; and a more soberly decorous one after he settled in France. His set of six op. 101 piano trios (1824) belong to the latter, and, indeed they are graceful and mellifluous pieces relatively light on drama & intensity. The fourth trio does perhaps have a little more in the way of Teutonic sturm und drang than the others. Another one that stands out is the second – the only one in a minor key – and also the only one of the set I’d heard before. Very few people had ever heard all of them before as this is the first ever recording of numbers four to six. It's the kind of music that can serve as an agreeable sonic backdrop while reading a book, for example, with moments now and again that will undemonstratively demand (and reward) more engaged attention. The performances, by the Trio Bohémo, and the recording, are beautifully done.
I’d heard very little of Glazunov's music until recently, when I followed up an on-line recommendation to listen to his 3rd string quartet (1886-88). A while elapsed before I obtained it on CD – with performances by the Utrecht Quartet. It's a very appealing piece with strong melodies, especially in the Alla Mazurka part of its third movement. The fifth quartet (1898) is also very good, if less emotive. Again I can't fault the playing or the recorded sound.
In books it was another poetry-heavy week. I finished a volume of The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo and another of the Selected Poems of Attila József. Both were poets who had to struggle against poverty, health problems, & adversity in general. József's life of tragic hardship came to an end under the wheels of a train in December '37. He was 32. In April of the following year Vallejo, in exile from his native Peru, succumbed to a mystery illness in a Paris hospital. He was 46.
Clayton Eshleman's translations in the Vallejo volume are the fruits of a lifelong vocation, and have been done full justice by the University of California Press. They impress even where the poems are obscure to the point of incomprehensibility. Enough meaning does shine through, overall, to make the effort of reading them seem a worthwhile endeavour. Peter Hargitai's translations of József, on the other hand, have had to make do with much less lavish treatment in a print-on-demand volume that could have used a little more editorial attention than it received. The translations are still strong, however. Both Eshleman and Hargitai understandably (being Americans) use American colloquialisms in their translations. I'm not sure why those sometimes felt jarring to me in the context of József's poems where they didn't in Vallejo's – some prejudice stemming from my Britishness perhaps.
Stationery news: I treated myself to a Kaweco AL Sport fountain pen on Saturday, specifically one with the ‘Anthracite’ finish and a medium steel nib. Several times I’ve been tempted by the pens on display at The Art Shop in Abergavenny, and this time I finally succumbed. I could have acquired the same item more cheaply on-line, but the Art Shop is a local business I’m happy to support.
Another enervating heatwave is in effect, due to peak over the coming two days, with temperatures forecast to reach 37C on Thursday.