Romantic?
18 November

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Well, the leaves are cascading off the trees now.

It's been a hell of an autumn for arboreal colour. I'm told that it has been to do with the wet summer. We've had riches galore in the colour palette and the display has gone on since September. Now that we are into a moist, warm and drizzly November, the ground is awash with piles of fallen leaves.

We've had plenty of autumnal sunshine as Ross and I have been putting the garden to bed and putting up brave attempts to stop our two cats from crapping in the newly cleared flower beds.

Some while back, I mentioned a few lifestyle course corrections that I'd made. Well, they continue. I'm still enjoying the slightly later hour of getting up. In fact, I've pretty much shed the urge to bound out of bed at 6am whatever the day. On days off, I'm more than happy to get back into bed and snuggle up to Ross and listen to the radio as the dawn comes up.

Between the two of us we've worked on my getting used to Ross's snoring in many different guises. The latest attempt involves ear plugs. It appears to be working but it makes hearing the 6:30am alarm a thing of peril.

I'm continuing with Bowen sessions and I now have a yoga class which I attend. I don't yet feel that I have achieved a new and different rhythm to my life but we'll see how that one pans out.

And before I forget, I need to record another culinary triumph. In the run up to Christmas, I've been practising in the kitchen. This weekend's roast chicken was a thing of beauty which was a delight to the tastebuds of all concerned. Nutkin has been in paroxisms flinging himself at the fridge door in the hope of getting a pussy treat. He'll be lucky.

Last Thursday night I was off to the Phil again for an RLPO concert including Beethoven's 1st piano concerto and Bruckner's 4th Symphony subtitled Romantic

We're reaching the end of Paul Lewis's traversal of the entire Beethoven cycle of piano concertos. My absolute favourite of the five is the fourth concerto which was given a good performance back in April. The third concerto given in May was also a winning performance. I really enjoyed the second concerto in September with its wit, charm and inheritance from the eighteenth century. The first (numbered) concerto (it's actually the second to have been written) is not one that I like. I have the greatest respect for the way that Paul Lewis played the work but I'm not persuaded. It's an interesting transitional work but I don't warm to it.

And then the interval and a quick chat with Roland and a sighting of Nigel in passing and a brief but uncomfortable encounter with someone I used to work with and then back in for the Bruckner.

I've never taken the Romantic bit to mean sentimental or lovelorn. From the performances I've listened to on radio and on disc and in the flesh, I've always seen it more in terms of romantic scenery with craggy peaks and deep, mysterious forests and explosive weather systems - with all of this underpinned by a strong sense of a numinous, pantheistic deity.

Well Mr Petrenko seemed to take a different view. He seemed to hone in on the idea of the Romantic spirit - the Romantic agony as Mario Praz once had it - the idea that the artist's personality and emotions and struggles are central and paramount. What he seemed to give us was a four movement tone poem character portrait of a deeply disturbed artist. In some ways the subtitle might better have been Bi Polar.

We veered from melancholy and weltschmerz to rage and manic energy. I don't think I've ever heard so much sorrow in the score before. I don't think I've ever heard so much anger in the score before.

In general, I tend not to like Bruckner because I find his music episodic. Although it is enlivened by superb highlights, I find that it is strung together by boring bridging passages. Mr Petrenko ducked nothing of this.

Rather he said, actually this is the way it is. If you try to smooth all of this out, you make it bland and you destroy what is really there. Look, it's raw and it's disturbing; it's deeply spiritual but at the same time it's deeply troubled. Don't look for pine encrusted Alpine peeks, this is a soul strung out between the torment of doubt and the solace of belief and it's a soul which is unable to reconcile with either. You've heard what I find in Shostakovich and Mahler, well this man was there well before either of them. And, if you are looking for pretty, pretty, forget it because this music is not in the slightest bit comfortable.

I'm not sure how to rate this performance; I'm going to give it a very good three and a half stars. What I'd really like to do is listen to the whole presentation another two or three times more to see if it really does actually make sense. If I'm right and it does, then it is sensational and worth four stars or more.

Sunday saw Ross and I go to our local cinema, the Plaza, for the latest Bond film. I really enjoyed Casino Royale two years ago. So, having read that Quantum of Solace has half an hour shorter, tauter and a much better film, my expectations were raised. Unfortunately so because I was only moderately impressed. Daniel Craig is still the most highly believable Bond since Connery but there was more mordent wit in the last film and the plotting is still overly elaborate. Still, it was quite reasonable.

I've finished a couple more books. My Lucky Star by Joe Keenan is the third in a series of romps among artistic gay folk and dreadful American high society. It has wit and bitchery galore but is brittle and sterile. I cared not one jot about any of the characters all of whom were quite dreadful personalities. A few good one-liners don't make for 300 pages of enjoyable reading.

Passing On by Penelope Lively, however, was much, much better. I laughed out loud and chuckled a lot simply because of the characters. And I loved the way the idea of the mother dying (passing on) and leaving situations behind her to be resolved (passing things on) was complemented by the idea of inheritance (also passing things on) and inherited genetic dispositions (also passing things on). And yet it was all carried off with the lightest of touches. Fabulous.