Monet, landscape on the Île Saint Martin
ENDNOTES, April 2021
In this edition: Robin Holloway and Peter Seabourne, Piano Trios, Symphonies by Robert Simpson, reviewed by Stuart Millson
Met Stars in Concert, soprano Sonya Yoncheva, streamed from the Baroque library at the Schussenried Cloister, Ulm, Germany, 27th February 2021, reviewed by Leslie Jones
Peter Seabourne’s Piano Trio of 2018, newly recorded by the Sheva label, is an impressive, challenging, yet ultimately tonal piece of contemporary music – a work of bright, open soundscape, a piece that sits perfectly alongside the music of his teacher, Robin Holloway, whose Piano Trio (2017) also makes a thrilling addition to this new CD. The mysterious solo violin which opens the first movement (first of a series of undivided movements) grips the listener with its noble, distant beauty. The destiny of these two composers seems somehow intertwined, as if they had founded their own ‘school’.
Peter Seabourne began life as a modernist but a moment of re-evaluation and redirection led him to return from the world of the tone-shattering avant-garde to the sound-world of Britten, Tippett and Daniel Jones (the prolific mid-20th-century Welsh composer of string quartets) thence to the studio and composing-room of Robin Holloway and that region of modern music, always connected to the continuum of a recognisable Englishness. Accessible and atmospheric, Seabourne’s trio abandons complicated markings, for movements that are clearly, simply described. The third movement is just ‘Tender and poignant’, a sense of memory and of love beneath an alabaster sky, with the third movement, ‘Fast, joyous, dancing’, the composer explaining:
‘A coda sees the reappearance of the lyrical passage from the scherzo, transformed (transfigured even) into a majestic hymn. The dance resumes and everyone scampers off over the hill.’
Home is over Jordan
Colin Jordan and Françoise Dior, credit National Vanguard.org
Home is over Jordan
Failed Führers ; A History of Britain’s Extreme Right, Graham Macklin, Routledge, London & New York, 2020, reviewed by Leslie Jones
Introduction
Failed Führers presents portraits in writing of ‘six principal idealogues and leaders’ from an evolving British Fascist tradition, namely, Arnold Leese (1878-1956), Sir Oswald Mosley (1896-1980), AK Chesterton (1899-1973), Colin Jordan (1923-2009), John Tyndall (1934-2005) and Nick Griffin (1959-). Graham Macklin thereby highlights the pivotal role of key individuals who enabled the far right to adapt to changing historical circumstances. For as Professor Macklin contends, there has been ‘continuity and change within the British fascist tradition’. Both pre and post war British fascists posited the preordained role of the white race and a Jewish conspiracy to engender white racial defilement. Mass immigration from the West Indies (100,000 in 1960 alone) only increased the salience of anti-black racism in neo-fascist ideology. Then in response to mass immigration from the Indian sub-continent, the BNP under Nick Griffin grafted anti-Muslim populism onto a pre-existing racial nationalist ideology.
Compared to a more conventional chronological or thematic historical perspective, Macklin’s ‘collective biographical’ approach or ‘prosopography’ has its downside. The careers and lives of his six key figures overlapped, so there is some repetition of material. Continue reading →
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