Ruth Gipps in Cheltenham

There is more good news regarding Ruth Gipps, the hitherto unjustly-neglected British composer.  Her Second Symphony will be performed as part of the Cheltenham Festival on Saturday 6th July, 2019, at 7 p.m.  It will be conducted in the Town Hall there by Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and played by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra — a later incarnation of the same orchestra in which Ruth Gipps played the oboe early in her career.  More details here: https://www.cheltenhamfestivals.com/music/whats-on/2019/cbso-and-alison-balsom/

It is wonderful that Ruth Gipps is now receiving the attention she deserves, and that her decision to stick to a traditional musical idiom, which cost her so much in her own lifetime, has now been vindicated, as a new generation of listeners discovers and delights in her music.  I am almost confident enough to start a wish list — a recording of the third and fifth symphonies, the première of her oboe and viola concertos, or a major London performance, such as her piano concerto at the Proms…

Here is the second symphony’s grand finale, from this year’s new recording of the symphony by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Rumon Gamba:

Update: Unfortunately Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla had to withdraw from the concert due to illness: Edward Gardner deputised, and Ruth Gipps’ symphony was replaced with Walton’s suite from ‘Troilus and Cressida’.  Never mind — another time!  Wishing Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla a swift recovery.

Update no. 2: Ruth Gipps’ second symphony is now due to be performed in  Birmingham’s Symphony Hall at 7.30 p.m. on Wednesday 2nd October (https://cbso.co.uk/event/alison-balsom-plays-musgrave).

Joaquín Sorolla: Spanish Sunlight in London

The Return from Fishing (from the Wikimedia Commons)

For the past few months there has been more sunlight in one room at the National Gallery than in the whole of the rest of London.  It is light that has to be squinted into: dazzling Mediterranean sunshine, undiminished for being more than a hundred years old.  It drenched the coast of Valencia at the turn of the last century, yet its intensity was captured again and again by the Spanish artist Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923).  This year, the National Gallery has housed the first major exhibition of his works in London for over a century: ‘Sorolla: Master of Light’.

Clotilde and Elena on the Rocks (from <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bastida_clotilde-elena.jpg>)

I cannot remember when I was last so astonished by the works of a single painter.   I am only a layman, but it seems to me that Sorolla was extraordinarily gifted, and that he achieved the Impressionists’ ambition: to capture light and motion, at least as well as any other artist of that movement.  It is from Monet’s own estimation of Sorolla, as the ‘Master of Light’, that the exhibition’s title comes.  Indeed, he seemed to be able to depict everything that light does: ‘Never has a brush contained so much sun,’ declared the critic Henri Rochefort.  In a single picture he could record its punishingly blinding intensity on red cliffs, and then the gentler glare of its second- and third-hand reflections, which softly and bluishly appear in his wife’s and daughter’s white clothes in a shady foreground.  He could recreate its bold invasion of a raisin-packing warehouse with a slab of exactly the right shade of yellow-white; he could depict its delicate illumination of a woman’s eye-lashes; he could paint its pearly coolness in church.  In vain does the viewer try to see how it all works by getting right up close to the picture: everywhere there are dashes and patches of colour which seem audacious or even rash, but which turn out to be exactly right, unerringly true.  The brush-strokes are deft and instinctive and simply beyond technique or instruction. They are strokes of genius.

‘Sewing the Sail’ (from <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cosiendo_la_vela.jpg>)

Yet, to my shame, Sorolla was completely unknown to me before I heard (via Westminster Cathedral’s magazine ‘Oremus’) about this exhibition.  He is well-known in Spain, but I cannot understand why he is not better known in Britain.  His paintings ache with reality.  As the curators put it, ‘his pictures radiate the dazzle of sunlight on water, the heat of a sultry afternoon and the force of a stiff sea breeze.’  Amid the glittering sunlight, you can almost hear the paintings: the violent smack and slap of a billowing sail, the shrieks of children playing, the slosh and roar of the sea.  In one of the most stunning tableaux, ‘Sewing the Sail’, depicting a family mending the sail by which they earn their livelihood, the stunningly realistic rendering of so mundane an object as a terracotta vase actually made me feel slightly dizzy, to say nothing of the effortlessly lush and generous tumble of the sail’s canvas.  His eye was almost journalistic — indeed, one of the pictures shows his wife holding a camera — and many of the pictures depict a split-second, an instant, the twinkling of an eye, as if they were photographs.  They are often in the gerund, with their titles like ‘Sewing the Sail’ and ‘Packing Raisins’.  And he painted in the field, even building wooden platforms out into the sea to stand on with his easel.  Some of the details that he chooses to pick out are almost heart-stopping.  In ‘Packing Raisins’ the ear-ring of a young woman in the foreground can just be glimpsed: on closer inspection it turns out to be a tiny but unmistakeable point of brilliant yellow.  Somehow he could see the tiny particulars that go to make a place, a person or even a single moment — an impression — distinctive.

‘Mother’: Sorolla’s wife Clotilde and youngest daughter Elena.
(from <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Museo_Sorolla_-_00324_-_Madre.jpg>)

His paintings ache with a reality other than the visual, too.  Beauty runs through his paintings: human beauty, and human dignity.  All through his paintings Sorolla affirms the nobility of his subjects.  There is his affection for his family: he plainly loved his wife Clotilde deeply, and his portraits of her depict a woman of shocking beauty.  In ‘Mother’, showing his wife and his newborn daughter Elena swathed in soft bed-linen, he created a picture ‘overflowing with tenderness’.  He also loved the landscape and traditional costumes of his country: the Hispanic Society in America commissioned some enormous murals depicting Spanish culture, the ‘Vision of Spain’, and he spent many years travelling around and working on this project.  And some of his other subjects, too, have a journalistic element (perhaps, if he had been born in our age, he would have been a photojournalist).  His portraits of ordinary life and ordinary working folk, and even social commentary, such as a monumental depiction of a dying fisherman, as if he were Christ being taken down from the Cross,  entitled, searingly, ‘And they still say fish is expensive’.  Then there is ‘Sad Inheritance’, an enormous picture of crippled boys being taken by a monk to bathe in the sea.   The dignity of his subjects, even amid suffering, poverty and evildoing, runs through all his work.

It seems to me that he had all the gifts of the true artist: the eye that sees, the heart that senses, and the hand that creates.  This is what the art of the twentieth-century could have given itself to.  Observation, feeling, technique, in the service of truth and beauty.  I have needed two visits of over two hours each to feel I have done Sorolla’s works any kind of justice.  I know this is perhaps rather short notice, but if any readers are able to get there to see the exhibition before it closes on the 7th July, I would heartily recommend it.

‘Strolling along the Seashore’ (from <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joaquín_Sorolla_y_Bastida_-_Strolling_along_the_Seashore_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg>)

Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha 2019: a week today

‘Jezu miłości Twej, ukryty w Hostii tej’ (‘Jesus, your love, hidden in this host…’) — Rzeszów, 2018.

Last year I wrote an article about the open air hymn concerts held every year at the feast of Corpus Christi in the city of Rzeszów in south-eastern Poland.  The ‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’ gatherings (the name means ‘One Heart, One Spirit’) draw tens of thousands of people from all over Poland and beyond.  There is a large choir, soloists and full orchestra, the fruit of a rich and energetic musical culture, and they sing richly-arranged versions of traditional hymns as well as newer music.  There seems to be a heightened, clear-sighted, prayerful atmosphere, along with a real sense of togetherness and harmony.  Last year’s concert had more music of a charismatic and evangelical flavour than has been usual, but there really does seem to be something for everyone.

I think it is a very good thing that these events take place.

This year’s concert will take place as usual on the feast of Corpus Christi: a week today, Thursday 20th June, at 1900 local time (1800 British Summer Time), and I imagine it will be streamed over the Internet, most likely via the website, jednegoserca.pl, or its official YouTube channel.

Whitsuntide and Sanity

Happy Whitsun!  This is the feast of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit burst into the Upper Room, ambushing the disciples cowering there with tongues of fire and a rushing wind — and set the Church off on its great adventure.  We in Britain celebrate it rather feebly these days.  Eleanor Parker, author of one of the best blogs on the Internet, ‘A Clerk of Oxford’, has an article on the ‘lost holiday’ of Whitsuntide.  It was, as she puts it, ‘the time for fairs, Morris dancing, games, ale-drinking, school and church processions, weddings, wandering into the countryside, and generally having a good time’.  It is only very recently that this has faded away.  The Clerk gives a link to a newsreel film of Manchester’s grand Whit Monday procession in 1927.  It is almost unbearably evocative of that vanished solemn world of cast-iron, and trams, and Corporations.  The white clothes of thousands of children are startling amid the huge soot-blackened hulks of mighty civic buildings — a sight that is now impossible and even unthinkable, though, thankfully, the Mancunian Whit Walks continue to this day.   Even in the early 1950s, Philip Larkin could still observe, in one of his finest and best-known poems, the tradition of Whitsun weddings.  Did he guess how completely the sight he was recording was about to fade away?  Was it he, as much as anyone, who was ‘out on the end of an event / Waving goodbye / To something that survived it?’  For look at what has happened to Whitsun since then.  The holiday has had all its character and flavour rationalised and secularised out of it.  Where once, seven weeks after the moveable feast of Easter, we had Whitsuntide, with its fire and wind and its brass bands and ale, we now have merely a bureaucratically static day off, the ‘Late May Bank Holiday’ — yawn.  It is better than no holiday at all, I hasten to stress — but it seems so dull and flat, and it has lost us our bearings, the flavour of our season and our bond with the past.

It has occurred to me recently that the Thing, whatever it is we should call it — hardly a Spirit — the materialistic, individualistic, over-liberal, progressive secularism of our day, will founder in the end mainly because of its own sheer dullness.  We have done a pretty good job of disenchanting life.  What now?  The exhilaration of life lived only for the moment and for the self, day after day, with only earth-bound hopes and the vaguest beacons of transcendent meaning, can only last so long.  We cannot distract ourselves for ever from the question that never goes away: what will fill the chasm of longing within us?  We know that the world of the performance appraisal, and the retail park, and the ready meal, is ultimately an insult to the dignity and depth of the human being, a dignity and a depth which cannot be ignored or privatised without consequence.  We have lost the words and the gestures by which we once articulated the magnitude of birth or marriage or death, and compassed moments of particular joy or suffering.  Where are our feasts and seasons to illuminate the year, the occasions for majesty or solemnity, our resonant poetry and song, or a deep spirit of togetherness that does not rely on an opponent or scapegoat for its strength?  Where is our hope for eternal life?  We will soon recognise, with alarm, how truncated is our sense of history, how disenchanted our sense of place, how stifled our hunger after wonder, and how hollow the inheritance bequeathed to us by the spirit of secularism: boring art, boring ideas, bored lives.  Secularism will fail because it is boring.

And secularism will run out of steam, too, because of its fundamental pessimism about the human person.  This may seem a strange thing to say about a tide of thought with so much to say about self-esteem and self-fulfilment.  But I am sure it is true.  For instance, the idea that our lives can mean whatever we decide, though it sounds good at first, conceals a cold indifference, for it leaves us perfectly free to decide that it means little or nothing at all, and, since many of us sometimes need encouragement to find and pursue real meaning, it leaves huge numbers of people open to the clutches of nihilism.  And, more broadly, many currents of thought that have become prominent in Britain, especially since the 1960s, have relied on pessimistic, often cynical arguments.  We all know how they run: the answer to difficulties in marriage is divorce; the answer to crisis pregnancies is abortion; the answer to terminal illness is euthanasia.  The idea of quality of life is turned to ill-use, to the evaluation that some lives are not worth living.  St. John Paul II’s phrase ‘culture of death’ was not too strong an expression.  It can’t last for ever, and indeed it isn’t lasting.

Even in the last century, C.S. Lewis observed the difficulty that our culture has in aspiring to high ideals.  He lamented that people seem unable to recognise that ‘when B is better than C, A may be even better than B’, or that people prefer ‘thinking in terms of good and bad, not of good, better and best, or bad, worse and worst’ (‘Mere Christianity’, Collins, 2012, p.108).  So many people think that the Church, if it speaks against B, is condemning people to C, whereas it is really hoping for A for us all.  It is an irony that, even as it aspires to utopia, and even as it criticises the Christian doctrine of original sin, the secular world nevertheless seems to have resigned itself to the inevitability of certain evils.  The recent introduction of so-called ‘no-fault divorce’ into law has given us yet another chance to see this habit of thought at work.  The advocates of that idea argue that what they called ‘amicable divorce’ is preferable to an ‘acrimonious divorce’, as if anybody would suggest that conflict should be aggravated where it could be lessened.  But they take it entirely for granted that divorce is simply a fact of life, like illness or bad weather.  But what if — one might ask — what if we tried to avoid divorce as much as possible; indeed, altogether?  We have free will, and we can use it to keep promises just as much as to break them.  What if we encouraged husbands and wives to stick together in moments of difficulty?  Is this not why they once made their vows?  Should we not help them towards heroic reconciliation, with the help of family, friends or counsellors, anything that it takes?  Those in favour of the new law might scoff that this assertion is simply childish naïvety.  But is it rather childlike innocence, which is something quite different — and, what is more, since it is children who tend to suffer most from divorce, is it so misplaced?  Contrary to the egregious posters that appeared all over railway stations a few months ago, advertising a divorce app — with a phonily jolly message from a fictional Mr. and Mrs. Foster who have decided that ‘things really haven’t worked out and we’re calling it quits’ — ‘amicable divorce’ is a contradiction in terms.  The sundering of vows causes great suffering to all concerned; nobody arrives at that point unscathed by grief, and divorce carries no promise that things will not worsen (it is divorce, not marriage, that weaponises children).  By asserting that such things are commonplace, and should be the foundation of rights and laws, secularism belies its fundamental pessimism and hopelessness.  Meanwhile, though, the Church asks, quietly, and with that ingenuousness that will save the world: what if a vow actually means a vow?  What if chaos need not necessarily have the final word?

I say all this not to pass judgement on those who go through divorce, especially in today’s climate, but to give an example of the ways in which secularism abandons people in difficulty.  The Thing seems very adept at working out the lesser of evils, but pretty hopeless at aspiring to the greatest good.  It has worsened that startling lack of moral verticality that C. S. Lewis observed; a kind of Brutalist shoulder-shrugging style of ethics which lowers the ceiling of human love and self-giving, and which often assumes that heroism is unrealistic, that sainthood is fantastical, and that we can afford simply to give up too easily.  The result of all this is that we all settle for too little from ourselves and from each other.  So, one implication is that men don’t hold themselves to high enough standards of manners and speech; women therefore don’t believe men are capable of high standards and so don’t dare to expect them; and so both settle for less and less, and end up demoralised.  (Meanwhile, in the spheres of education or career, people often expect far too much of themselves, making all kinds of sacrifices for things which do not, in the end, determine their dignity).  And is there another reason why we settle for too little: that we do not believe in mercy?  Do we fear that to aspire to high standards in our lives is to set ourselves up for a fall from which we will never recover? How swiftly this idea leads to cynicism and nihilism — and again it is because there are questions which secularism doesn’t know how to begin to answer.

The Thing seems all-powerful just at the moment.  It has claimed the media, the mainstream and the momentum.  Worse, it holds considerable sway over the language, manners and customs of ordinary people.  But it will have to last another nineteen centuries if it is to outlast the Church and since, in the end, it is reductive, and boring, and it sells us short, and tells us that we are less than we are, that we are merely granules of egos, zooming about directionlessly until we are extinguished, I would not bet on its staying the course.  It is too cynical to understand heroism; too superficial to comprehend beauty; to shallow to nourish friendship.  Birth is beyond its understanding; death defeats it.  Our dignity cannot stand this for ever.  Ultimately, too, the culture of death must die.   

Secularism may not necessarily fail violently or dramatically, but when it does fail, as fail it will, the Church will still be there, with hope and pageantry intact, along with the year’s colourful wheel of feasts and seasons, the tongues of fire and the rushing wind.  We know that life matters beyond what we see, however hard we try to deny it; we know it has a meaning too deep for words and thought, and we sense the immortality of our souls.  Religion, properly practised, lends life the dignity that befits it, and the paradox is that this makes us joyful and light-hearted in spite of our suffering.  We will keep the feast of Whitsun as of old, and sanity will prevail.