Nimble Tread

Notes

It's been a hectic few weeks for me, and I'm looking forward to a few days of R&R before I head off to Switzerland for a spell.  Before I go, though, I figured I should do some housekeeping at NT.  For starters, I'd like to disagree with Hilary Finch of the Times for what must be the thousandth time.  Her review of Juan Diego Flórez's recent concert at the Barbican was ominously venomous, and I suspect she might be harboring a JDF bias of her own, albeit one in opposition to the prism of adoration employed by his fans.  Many of us enjoy supporting an underdog, but every once in a while that impulse gets corrupted into a compulsion to topple giants.  The concert was hardly Flórez's greatest effort, owing largely to a frog in the singer's throat, but that's how it goes with live music, and a fair assessment of the performance needs to consider obvious physical factors.  For instance, the 9 high Cs in Donizetti's Amici miei -- a tune that Jessica Duchen and I both think sounds better in French -- are less affected by phlegm than the subtle piano lines in Rossini's Pace non trovo, which require unencumbered vocal suppleness.  Accordingly, saying that "Flórez uses one single gear, one expressive mode, one universally applied vocal colour," and basing the statement on a handicapped performance is patently dismissive.  Finch gave the concert three stars out of five; I agree with the score, but not with the reasoning.  Flórez  will be back in London this fall to sing Matilde di Shabran at Covent Garden, and I'd encourage the lady from the Times to reserve a seat and her judgment.
On another note, I've spent the last hour listening to Boston Secession's latest cd, Surprised by Beauty: Minimalism in Choral Music, and find myself impressed by the effort.  It doesn't take much to get me to admit that I'm not Minimalism's greatest fan, particularly in its serial or formulaic guises, but then again most of my experiences with the genre have been instrumental.  What sounds to me cold and mechanical coming from instruments can sound more fallible and inspiring when issuing from a person, or people.  While some of the album's thirteen songs may be broadly considered "difficult music," most of the tunes are pretty user friendly.  Take for instance Gavin Bryar's And so ended Kant's travelling in this world, which is a beautiful piece that kept making me think of the lush harmonies in Fauré's Requiem.  And then there's Arvo Pärt's The Beatitudes, which is a long-standing favourite of mine, and I was happy to hear it done justice.  One of my surprise favourites was William Duckworth's Hebrew Children, a song that embodies the vocal factor mentioned above and feels like a combination of ecumenical liturgies.  I found it to be utterly hypnotic.  Less so for Ruth Lomon's Transport and Duckworth's War Department, but hey, you can't win 'em all, and there's no accounting for some people's tastes. 

Sun Over Hosers

Being a Canadian expat of typical patriotic zeal, I'd completely forgotten that July 1st -- Canada Day -- was a date of singular significance to the national spirit.  And I remained in cheerful oblivion too until I passed within peeping distance of Trafalgar Square and shrewdly detected a forest of red-and-white maple leaf top hats and figured something was up. 
My suspicions now afire, I sauntered into the square to have a look round.  The first thing I noticed was a floor hockey rink lurking at the base of Nelson's Column.  It was a striking feature on the landscape, and I was surprised I hadn't noticed it before, but I supposed the daily swarm of tourists is such that even the most charismatic hockey rink would melt into the mass of visiting humanity.  Still, it seemed at any rate to be a good thing to have on hand, and several teams of mildly inebriated hockey players put it to immediate and effective purpose.  I stuck around for the first game -- or match, as the announcer called it.  He sounded Canadian, but also referred to the rink as a pitch, so I suspect he might have been pandering to the local idiom -- and had the pleasure of watching the Cambridge Eskimos (self-named) run roughshod over the Canadian High Commission's squad, the alliterative Red Room Rockets (also self-named, but not in as enigmatic a fashion as it may seem: the Red Room is a pub in the High Commission's basement where many London-based Canadians, myself included, have contemplated the virtues of Moosehead beer).  The game itself was more chaos than sport in so far as the rink, which was probably designed as a forum for four people, was woefully overtaxed by the actual headcount, which hovered around eight depending on the players' and referees' concentration.  As far as I could tell, the strategy, such that it existed, was to get your stick somewhere in the vicinity of the ball and then immediately fire it (the ball, usually) somewhere in the vicinity of the net.  No time for aiming, and certainly none for passing, which in a rink of such modest proportions would have been the very height of wanton showboating. 
The result of all this wishful shooting was a handful of balls launched on target and a far greater number of them ricocheting off spectators' heads or skipping across the water in the Square's fountains.  I found all of these outcomes perfectly satisfactory, but took particular pleasure in the last since it inspired acute excitement in every child on hand and led these faux-altruists, normally banned from dipping so much as their tootsies in Nelson's baths, to immediately volunteer themselves for retrieval duty, risk to their scheming little persons be damned.
Once a few balls had sizzled past my head, I'd had enough and decided to see what else was on offer.  I undertook a brief tour of the grounds, and the first thing that caught my eye was a Quebec tent that upon closer inspection turned out to contain little more than tourism brochures and promises of a stand-up comedian.  Having been raised in the Quebec, and knowing it to offer more than what was warehoused in its representative tent, I set out to see whether the country's other provinces had fared any better.
It turns out they hadn't.  For starters, most of them were left out of the thing altogether.  There wasn't so much as a souvenir necktie to be had from British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Prince Edward Island, Manitoba, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia.  The Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and the Yukon, being so distant from tourists' consideration, never stood a chance.  Ontario had a few representatives on hand, but it wasn't represented nearly as well as Alberta, which put its people to good use by making them give massages to the tent's visitors.  This was a clever move, and as is often the case with cunning PR strategies it was a touch disingenuous in so far as it doubtless gave many people the idea that Alberta is the seat of Canadian sensuality, which I can assure you it isn't.  The seat of cattle, sure; the seat of natural splendour, absolutely; but the seat of erotica, I think not.
I felt let down by the sights, so I decided to graze a bit on bison burgers and beer.  These proved to make a formidable combination that when pickled by the blazing sun and the tingly odour of the fountains' chlorine handed me about all I could stand, and I decided to continue my Canada Day celebration in spirit and in solitude.  I walked to the edge of Trafalgar Square and looked back at the scene for a moment.  I watched people mill about in red and white, followed red hockey balls as they soared into the crowd, and listened to an announcer finish his sentence with "go to Canada Hoose, eh."  I stood there overlooking a pleasant celebration that was free from protest, free of controversy, free of threat, and suddenly remembered why I'm glad to be Canadian.