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This mix is a bit quirky, I have to admit, but then … there’s no telling what people will like.

The first voice is that of Asha Bhosle, the voice of a thousand Bollywood movies.

(Note: The tracks will be in this order the first time you play the mix. If you listen a second time, the tracks will be in random order. Unless you delete the 8tracks cookie first. Or use a different browser.)

Then there’s Hamza el Din, accompanying himself on a ‘tar’, a type of frame drum. Just a voice and a drum. And check out this YouTube video of him singing a song from his native Nubia. He’s accompanying himself on the ud.

Then there’s Purple Rain, by Stina Nordenstam and Red Green and You Blue by Kevin Ayers and the Whole World, featuring a teenaged Mike Oldfield on bass and the amazing Lol Coxhill on soprano sax.

For a bit of early-nineties nostalgia, there’s the hyperactive Alexander Bălănescu and his string quartet commenting on the ex-Warsaw Pact nations’ new-found liking for Democracy.

There are a number of versions of Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet. This piece consists of a tape loop of a tramp singing, which Bryars has given a variety of string orchestrations. My favourite version is the one where Tom Waits sings along, but at 19′ 38″ that’s a bit long to be putting on 8tracks. The version in this mix lasts a paltry 6′ 6″. As with so much of Bryars’ music, there’s a story behind it.

Next there’s Funeral Ikos by John Tavener. Unfortunately, in this recording the low basses at the bottom of the chords which end each ‘Alleluia’ are either inaudible or missing, which in the context of an audio CD could be said to be a distinction without a difference. The text is pretty wonderful, too. Here’s one of the verses:

Youth and the beauty of the body
fade at the hour of death,
and the tongue then burneth fiercely,
and the parched throat is inflamed.
The beauty of the eyes is quenched then,
the comeliness of the face all altered,
the shapeliness of the neck destroyed;
and the other parts have become numb,
nor often say:
Alleluia.

Lastly a reworking / recomposition by John Woolrich of a Monteverdi madrigal. The piece is called Ulysses Awakes and is for solo viola and strings.

I’ve been reading Kate Atkinson’s collection of short stories called ‘Not the End of the World’. And enjoying it a lot. I was compelled to read too much Guy de Maupassant as a teenager / university student and as a consequence I’ve avoided short stories ever since. Over-reaction or what?

Atkinson is particularly good at beginnings. Here’s the beginning of ‘Tunnel of Fish‘:

If Eddie could have chosen, he would have been a fish. A large fish without enemies, free to spend all day swimming lazily amongst the reeds and rushes in clear, blood-cold water. His mother, June, said not to worry, he was halfway there already, with his mouth hanging open all the time like a particularly dull-witted amphibian, not to mention the thick lenses of his spectacles that made his eyes bulge like a haddock’s.
Afterwards, of course, June had regretted saying that, but sometimes Eddie was so infuriatingly gormless that she couldn’t help herself. June had hoped that the removal of his adenoids when he was eight would make Eddie look more intelligent. It hadn’t. She had had the same expectations at nine for his spectacles. Most people she knew looked brainier with glasses, yet somehow Eddie contrived to look even more dopey. June thought that the grommets in his ears at ten would raise him from the undersea world of the deaf, and theoretically they had done, according to his ENT consultant, yet Eddie still behaved as if he couldn’t hear a word June said. Which was just as well, June thought, seeing as half the time the things she said to him were not very nice.

Despite the very down-to-earth style, the genre is definitely magic realism. What Gabriel Garcia Márquez might have come up with if he’d been born into the English middle classes, been educated at a good grammar school and gone on to get a first from a red-brick university. A big if, I suppose.

To mark its 120th anniversary, the Concertgebouw Orchestra has made a number of its recordings available to download as MP3′s.

One of the recordings is of a performance the orchestra gave in 2005 of Bruckner’s 8th symphony, under Bernard Haitink. This clip is the last 3 and a half minutes or so of the 3rd movement. It’s a heavenly peroration for 4 Wagner tubas. There are not many opportunities to hear this beautiful instrument, unless you’re willing to sit through the ear-treacle which is Wagner opera, which is a crying shame.

To make this clip, I used the open-source freeware program ‘Audacity’ (downloaded from Sourceforge). To be able to save your selections as MP3′s, you will also need the LAME MP3 encoder, which you’ll find under ‘Optional downloads’ on the same download page as Audacity.

The first track in this mix is a piece written by Gavin Bryars for David James of the Hilliard Ensemble. It’s called Incipit Vita Nova and was written to celebrate the birth of a child called … Vita. There’s a connection with the piece Diptych by Silvestrov, which was on my previous mix. Diptych appeared on one of Gavin Bryars’ albums, On Photography. He explains why:

I sat in a pew [at a rehearsal by the Latvian Radio Choir] and [they] started to sing the piece they were rehearsing before mine. It was something I did not know but I thought it was the most beautiful music I had ever heard in my life. I sat still, completely overwhelmed by the richness of its harmonies, by its serenity and by the way in which it evolved – slowly but inevitably …. I resolved at that moment to include this music on the recording and enable it to be heard more widely.

Then there’s classical Iranian music from the singer Mohammed Reza Shajarian, with Kayhan Kalhor on kamancheh / spike fiddle. The piece is called Avaz va Saz; the words are a poem by Sa’adi: ‘Those who give themselves to the madness of your love, free themselves from the burden of life’s worries.’

Guitar music follows, from John Fahey, Jack Rose and Carlos Paredes.

Like the first track, the last two tracks feature a male alto / countertenor: Andreas Scholl in O Jesu, nomen dulce by Heinrich Schütz and Carlos Mena in Sances’s Stabat Mater.

I recently bought the CDs of Vivaldi’s ‘pastiche opera’ Bajazet, also known as Il Tamerlano. It’s loosely based on the story of the life of the 14th century warrior Timur the Lame and the emperor Bajazeth, as was Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine the Great. I saw the National Theatre’s production of Tamburlaine the Great in 76/77 (Albert Finney was Tamburlaine) and it was grim indeed – Vivaldi’s version is a sunlit picnic by comparison.

I wanted to listen to Bajazet because of the singing of Marijana Mijanovič, my favourite Serbian. I saw her singing Bradamante in Handel’s Alcina in Amsterdam a couple of years ago and was bowled over – I do love a woman in a trouser role. In Bajazet she sings the part of Asteria:

Other highlights of these CDs are Patrizia Ciofi singing ‘Nasce rosa lusinghiera’ (one of the tracks in this mix) and this aria, ‘Qual guerriero in campo armato’, from Vivica Genaux:

Vivica Genaux is a mezzo more famous for singing Bellini etc. apparently. I’d never heard of her, let alone heard her singing – I’m a real ignoramus when it comes to grand opera. This aria was written for the castrato Farinelli by his brother, Riccardo Broschi, who was probably the one who arranged for Farinelli to be castrated at the age of 12 or so. So I guess he owed Farinelli a hit aria.

If you’re wondering how it is that an aria by Riccardo Broschi appears in a Vivaldi opera, Wikipedia’s on hand:

Bajazet is a pasticcio. It was a common practice during Vivaldi’s time for composers to borrow and adapt arias from other composers with their own works for an opera. Vivaldi himself composed the arias for the good characters (Bajazet, Asteria and Idaspe) and mostly used existing arias from other composers for the villains (Tamerlano, Irene, Andronico) in this opera. Some of the arias are reused from previous Vivaldi operas.

Fascinating!