My first story has been published. It is a historical fantasy set in Colonial Boston during the Golden Age of Pirates. Rachel is an orphan and a thief. She’s pressed into the service by the Governor of Massachusetts to spy on the pirate Anne Bonny. There are sea songs, magic knives, and a Shanty Man.
Read it free, here: https://intrepidusink.com/the-shanty-man/
For my 61st birthday – how strange it is, to write those words – my wife took me to Iceland. There is a longer account of my trip coming, with travel advice as well as “what we did”. Our main objective was to see the northern lights, and we succeeded spectacularly. A story for another post.
By happy accident, we had to move our trip up a week from my birthday, and I discovered that a pianist I love, Víkingur Ólafsson, would be playing at Harpa during our visit. And he would be playing the Goldberg Variations, one of the summits of the piano repertoire.
Now, Harpa is a magnificent building, and in my previous two trips to Iceland, I had somehow managed not to visit it. And Víkingur Ólafsson is a world-class pianist, the Deutsche Gramaphone Artist of the Year for 2019, and he happens to be Icelandic. And I would later learn that the date of the concert, February 14th, happened to be his 40th birthday. All in all the omens were favorable. I scrambled to get tickets – the event was nearly sold out – but I succeeded in getting nosebleed seats (the second to last row of the enormous main hall).
Harpa is a magnificent building. The lobby interior is vast and surrounded by crystalline glass structures lit with a slowly rotating color, blue being the most predominant. There is a restaurant downstairs, which we did not try (favoring Fjallkonen for dinner), and as well there is a jazz club on the top floor, which, sadly, we did not have the chance to visit. One can take the elevator or climb the stairs as we did, making our way nearly to the top, slowly, taking too many pictures as we went.
As we wait, I listen to the crowd. They are mostly Icelandic, judging from the conversation and the clothing. But here and there, I hear a smattering of English and German, and some guests appeared to be from Asia. (I saw many more Asian tourists than I expected, in both our hotel and out and about). Finally, the doors open, and I hustle to my seat to get some shots of the concert hall before people crowd the hall.
It is a bit like being in the Imperial Senate in Star Wars. The room is dramatic, and very steep. A mild vertigo starts for me. I never had issues with vertigo until I went to the Guggenheim in New York City. Now I feel a faint discomfort when in steep, open balcony seating. But I master that and head up to the edge to take some photos.
The room is oddly smoky, as if a rock concert is about to break out. There are neon red striped lights surrounding the stage, and a jagged orange strip light running through the floor of the stage, surely intended to evoke a lava flow. The lights changed periodically during the show, very unusual for classical performances.
Soon it’s time, and a tall, trim, bespectacled man takes the stage. He is dapper, wearing a modern-cut, medium-blue suit. He looks like an earnest graduate student, not one of the most brilliant pianists in the world.
The Theme and Variations is one of the canonical forms of classical music. A theme is played, then developed in repeated in variations, usually alternating between fast and slow, happy and sad. The Goldberg Variations are one of the most difficult and beautiful pieces of the piano repertoire, consisting of a theme and 30 variations. Perhaps the best-known recordings are by Glenn Gould, who famously recorded the piece twice, once as a young man and once not that long before he died.
The theme opens with a crystalline singing, with simple lines and chords. Writing descriptively about a musical performance is always difficult, but let me start by simply saying that Ólafsson’s performance was astounding. His rendering of the Goldberg was over 75 minutes in duration. He of course played this without any breaks and without any score to guide him, it was all from memory. I do not believe that during that entire performance, I heard anything like a mistake. His tone was absolutely beautiful, and even during the most frenetic parts of the piece, his sound had total clarity. Every note was audible, even when buried inside a chord. Every phrase had total conviction and a deeply felt intent. Glenn Gould was famous for bringing out the “inside lines”, the melodies lurking in the lower registers and not the highest pitch. Ólafsson has a similar ability. Even my wife, who knows classical music but doesn’t listen to it much, remarked on that aspect of his playing.
I recently had a chance to hear Helene Grimaud in Boston. She is also a world-famous pianist and justifiably so. But I must say that Olaffson’s playing affected me more deeply and had much greater tonal clarity and precision. And I enjoyed her concert very much – I am not attempting to denigrate her playing at all, simply to give some perspective on how elevated this particular performance felt to me. Even at his fastest playing, it seemed clear that Ólafsson had another gear we did not hear.
I saw John Williams, the guitarist, some time ago in Boston. My friend Lynn remarked that during a particularly difficult passage, Williams seemed to have grown an extra finger. During one of the most frenetic variations, I thought Ólafsson had grown an extra hand. It just did not seem possible, what I was hearing.
Visually, he was intriguing to watch. He did not have as many quirky mannerisms as some pianists do, but he did perform the occasional self-conducting (ala Glenn Gould) when he was playing a single, slow-paced melody. Occasionally, during meditative sections, his head would sink, nearly touching the keyboard. Ólafsson’s technique was impeccable and visually interesting. Of particular note was his constant hand-crossing, playing blistering scales at a frenetic pace, where his left hand played rising scales while the right hand crossed over to play a melody below, both in pitch and on the keyboard.
The auditorium acoustics were wonderful. We heard complete clarity, even in the next-to-last row. With the lights down, it was almost like a meditation session, as the music surrounded us for almost 80 minutes in a long continuous stream. I confess, I almost nodded off once, but in a good way :()
Variation 29’s frenetic pace and associated technique faded to Variation 30’s stately, quiet chorale-like structure, then to the reprise of the quiet, calm opening theme. The room was silent for a good 20-30 seconds – whether in appreciation, in unsureness of whether he was done, or just a desire not to break the spell, I cannot say. The last reason for me.
Then cheers and bravos broke out. The hometown crowd brought him back for bows four times. After the last, he spoke for a few moments in Icelandic. There was frequent laughter from the crowd. Very much a hometown crowd. Then he left, and the lights came up. The show was over. The usual bring-back-the-artist-to-play encores was not to be.
I asked my concert neighbors to my left, clearly Icelandic, what he had said. For a change, one of the two, the man, seemed uncomfortable answering in English (most Icelanders I have attempted conversation with have impeccable English). The woman said, “He said something like, after this, there can be no encore.” Her translation was imprecise, but I certainly took her to mean not that he was tired, but rather that he held the piece in such high regard he did not wish to break the spell of it. We had no complaints.
If you are interested in any of this, you can listen to Ólafsson’s recording of the Goldberg Variations on Spotify.
He has also written in-depth thoughts on the piece, which you can read here: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/oct/06/vikingur-olafsson-pianist-on-bach-goldberg-variations
In case my review sounds over-enthusiastic, here are two others, including his recent Carnegie Hall performance.
Lastly, there is an excellent interview between Ólafsson and the Glenn Gould Foundation to be found here.
A happy accident indeed!
When I saw the program, I knew I had to go. Back in Boston for a spell, with access to world class musicians again! Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach. The Beethoven and Brahms pieces are pieces I know and love and listen to often. The Bach is the Chaconne in D Minor, a majestic work for violin, which I know mostly from the often-performed classical guitar arrangement. Grimaud is performing a piano arrangement by Busoni, which I did not know existed!
I was last at Jordan Hall for John Williams, I think, perhaps in the 1990s. I attended with Michelle and our good friends Thomas and Lynn. I still remember Williams’s performance of Domeniconi’s Koyunbaba, in which Lynn decided Williams had grown a sixth finger during the performance, or else he would not have been able to do what he did…
It was not that long ago, that we could not see live music performed. I am grateful that we can again do so!
Jordan Hall a beautiful and comfortable hall with excellent acoustics.
Ms. Grimaud took the stage, and took a few bars to find her footing on the Beethoven. I listen to the Gould version quite often. Grimaud’s take is clean and professional, if somewhat dry in comparison. Her tempi are slower than Gould’s, but then, most everyone’s is. Gould’s insistence that the only reason to record something is to make it new and fresh leads him to interesting, idiosyncratic interpretations (and humming, lots of humming).
Ms. Grimaud’s Beethoven was crisp and enjoyable, if missing the occasional ecstatic bursts that Gould renders so well. Hearing the music live gave the pieces a freshness I have been missing from listening to recordings. Still, her tempo variations occasionally jarred me out of my listening. I heard what I thought were a few minor mistakes or simply a muddled sound – passages that did not seem quite right for pieces I know quite well. Nevertheless, it was riveting to listen and watch – it’s been some time since I went to a live classical music performance.
The first half concluded with the Brahms Three Intermezzi, Op. 117, another set of pieces I have long admired. Her Brahms was surer than her Beethoven to my ears.
After a brief intermission – what Jordan hall, nobody selling wine during intermission? – I have been away from concerts too long, and I missed having a glass on break.
Back at it after intermission, Grimaud played like she had dinner reservations. I mean this not in a negative way particularly, but she launched into Brahms’ Seven Fantasies, Op. 116 before her welcome applause had even stopped. I love these pieces – moody, introspective, lyrical, and Grimaud’s performance did them justice. But with just a micro-second of pause, she leapt from the Brahms into an explosive rendering of the Bach Chaconne.
The Chaconne is a majestic work, in the canon of both the violin and the guitar. Segovia transcribed the piece for the guitar in the 1930s, cementing the instrument’s place as a serious classical instrument. Famously, he had this to say about it:
Segovia had a story he would tell whenever he talked about the Chaconne. According to Segovia, the famous violinist Enesco gave the following advice to a student: “You must study the Chaconne all your life, but you must not play it in public until you are 50, because it is very, very deep.”
https://www.guitarist.com/the-chaconne/
Since we are talking Brahms here, I learned after the concert that Brahms himself wrote a transcription of the Chaconne for the piano for one hand – the left.(listen here) Here is what Brahms had to say about this piece:
The Chaconne is, in my opinion, one of the most wonderful and most incomprehensible pieces of music. Using the technique adapted to a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I could picture myself writing, or even conceiving, such a piece, I am certain that the extreme excitement and emotional tension would have driven me mad. If one has no supremely great violinist at hand, the most exquisite of joys is probably simply to let the Chaconne ring in one’s mind. But the piece certainly inspires one to occupy oneself with it somehow…. There is only one way in which I can secure undiluted joy from the piece, though on a small and only approximate scale, and that is when I play it with the left hand alone…. The same difficulty, the nature of the technique, the rendering of the arpeggios, everything conspires to make me feel like a violinist!
The Busoni arrangement is, on the other hand, majestic, titanic, explosive, and wonderful to listen to, providing a fundamentally different view of this piece, which in the original violin has a more quiet majesty. This was like listening to Listz or Tchaikowsky – brilliant cadenzas, thundering chords, and a general explosion of sound.
The applause for Grimaud’s Chaconne was thunderous, and she came back for two encores, which I did not recognize. Grimaud did not speak, ever, even to introduce her encores. I’m out of date on current concert practices but I was surprised.
Then I was out into the freezing, snowy night and into a Lyft for home, which made getting out of Boston quick and painless.
The program was a bit short, I thought. 90 minutes, with an intermission. Compare that to a recent Andras Schiff performance in Boston, clocking in at 150 minutes.
But all in all, a lovely evening with wonderful performances. Occasionally erratic or not entirely convincing, but lovely nonetheless. Here is a playlist of her recordings of the pieces in her program.
Other reviews, less positive than mine, from professional reviewers, (who of course have to have something to write about) here and here. There I learn that her two encores were Rachmaninov’s Etude-Tableau In C Major Op. 33 No. 2 and Valentin Silvestrov’s Bagatelle #2.
Well, this is a bit late. I was going to write this the week after Christmas, but events (good ones!) intervened.
Mostly for myself, I wanted to summarize my 2023 reading. As you probably know, I make a social reading app called Bookship, and I use it to track my solo reading as well as my group / book club reading.
I’m also writing a book. It’s medieval historical fiction, set during the time of Richard the Lionheart. You can follow along on my Substack, where I’m writing specifically about the history of the period:
Richard the Lionheart – A Medieval Newsletter | Mark Watkins | Substack
An exploration of Richard the Lionheart’s world and era, from his childhood in France to the Crusades in the Holy Land. Click to read Richard the Lionheart – A Medieval Newsletter, a Substack publication. Launched 2 years ago.
As you might imagine, I read a lot of medieval books this year, both history and historical fiction. A lot of those books require deep focus and aren’t necessarily ‘easy reads’. So, I also did a lot of lighter reading, as that was what I had the energy for. Surprisingly, even modern novels found a way to make pointers to what I’m working on. Here’s the fun stuff:
I finally got around to reading Dune Messiah, the sequel to Dune. It is nowhere near as long as Dune but it is a fun read. But I don’t think it has the power of Dune. (<Checks notes> Apparently I read this book in 2009 but I literally had no memory of that. Ruh-rho). I re-read Count Zero, perhaps my favorite of William Gibson’s cyberpunk/ sci fi novels. I also re-read Declare, by Tim Powers, another of one of my favorite novels, an espionage / supernatural combo. Seriously. I seem to have done a lot of re-reading last year.
In books I had NOT read before :), I read many mysteries, including Knots & Crosses by Ian Rankin, a re-read of The Blackhouse, Peter May’s unbelievably good book set on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, and his Extraordinary People. This last book, though a modern mystery, popped up some fascinating medieval details that dovetailed with my work-in-progress book. Two Nights in Lisbon by Chris Pavone was a quick read, enjoyable but leaving no lasting impression. Knots & Crosses was my first Ian Rankin book and it was good quick fun.
https://www.thehawaiiproject.com/book/The-Transmigration-of-Bodies–by–Yuri-Herrera–191405
Yuri Herrera’s The Transmigration of Bodies is a wonderful, fun, short, hallucinogenic masterpiece of a novel of a pandemic. Short, fantastic.
I also managed a re-read of The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien. This time, my reading was forensic – I was trying to understand the nature of the power of his writing. That is probably a separate post someday. In a similar vein, and for a similar reason, I re-read Patricia McKillip’s Harpist in the Wind trilogy: Harpist in the Wind, The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia A. McKillip, and Heir of Sea and Fire. These books are masterpieces. If you have not read them, they are worth your consideration.
The Whispering Muse by Sjón and The Last Song of Orpheus by Robert Silverberg are fun, myth-driven works. The Sjón book, in particular, is short and easily digested.
Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes, is a devastating novel of Vietnam. It’s also very hefty. It is a commitment, but it’s worth it if you want a real sense of what the Vietnam War was like.
I’m in a book club. :). We read many books widely praised in the press and the book universe, and frankly, many felt very average to me. I think my reading tastes have (unsurprisingly perhaps) diverged from what the New York Times, the London Review, and BookTok all think are great books. Sorry, The Candy House by Jennifer Egan, I could not even finish you. Nuclear Family by Joseph Han was a bit better, and at least it was grounded in Hawaii where I live, but I struggled with that as well. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka was uneven but very good in spots, and as I’ve been to Sri Lanka I found it a bit easier to maintain reading momentum.
The thing I love about book club, besides the people themselves, is that it gets me reading books I would not otherwise read. See No Stranger by Valarie Kaur was touching, but I had trouble sustaining attention; the message of the book was solid but it often felt repetitive. We read Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, probably the most controversial book published in many years. I have mixed feelings about it. I found it (as an adult) a touching memoir of someone with a lot of pain in their life, who struggled with being different. But I also totally get why conservative school districts did not want it in their schools (grade school libraries? really?). I’m glad I read it, at least I know what all the fuss is about.
Two standouts for me from book club were Hawaiki Rising by Sam Low, which covered the Hawaiian Renaissance and the history of the Hōkūleʻa, and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which I had not read since high school.
As I’m writing a book and have never done it before, I’ve also been reading books about writing, mostly by authors I admire. On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner, The Art of Fiction by James Salter ( a writer I especially admire), Writing Tough Writing Tender by my friend Kelly Simmons, and Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin all gave me interesting perspectives of one sort or another.
Works in progress: I’m currently in various stages of reading The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, Ironfire by David Ball, and a WWII book, The Thin Read Line by James Jones.
The bulk of my reading time this year has been medieval. Essex Dogs, by the well-known popular historian Dan Jones, is an earthy, grim take on the Hundred Years War. Company of Liars by Karen Maitland is a riff on the Canterbury Tales, with a cast of interesting characters and a lot of medieval backdrop. 1356 by Bernard Cornwell covers the Battle of Poitiers, also during the Hundred Years War.
In the general medieval history category, A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester is very famous. Tom Hanks says it is his favorite book. It made me crazy, it is so wrong about the medieval era. More on that here. Try Mortimer’s A Time Traveler’s Guide to the Medieval Era instead.
I read a number of contemporary histories of the Third Crusade, written during or shortly after the Crusade, many of the books I read not for the first time:
My constant companion this year was The History of the Holy War by Ambroise, translated by Maryanne Ailes. It was written by a French cleric/jongleur/minstrel, Ambroise, who was on campaign with Richard. Great fun. Well, not fun really, it’s pretty grim, but it is an amazing first-hand history of the Third Crusade. Also: The Itinerarium of Richard de Templo and The Annals of Roger de Hoveden, also both first-hand accounts of the Third Crusade (I produced eBook editions of these last two works that are available on Amazon, details here). And The Life of Saladin, by Baha al-Din, a compatriot of Saladin who was with him for much of his life.
The History of William Marshal by Nigel Bryant is a wonderful contemporary history of “England’s Greatest Knight”, William Marshal. It was written just after the Marshal died, and its discovery in 1861 (not that long ago) is something of a historical miracle.
In modern works of history, about Richard, I read:
Richard I by John Gillingham, The Troubadour’s Song by David Boyle, Richard The Lionheart by David Miller, and Richard the Lionheart by W. B. Bartlett. About Saladin: The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin by Jonathan Phillips and Saladin, by Geoffrey Hindley.
General histories of the Crusades I found particularly interesting: How to Plan a Crusade by Christopher Tyerman, a study of the logistics of getting tens of thousands of men across the ocean and supplied for war for many years. The Crusades Through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf provides a welcome balance to the Christian-centric histories we often read of the Crusades, and The Siege of Acre by John D. Hosler is an in-depth study of one of the most famous battles of the war.
I also found time to make an edition of the Arthurian Lays of Marie de France for Standard eBooks. The stories are good fun, particularly if you’re interested in Arthurian things. And they’re FREE!
Lastly, I read bits and pieces of Nicholson’s Women and the Crusades, King John by W. L. Warren, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs by Adrienne Mayor, The Once and Future Sex by Janega, Crusaders by Dan Jones, and probably a dozen other books about various aspects of the Crusades.
Standouts: Brave New World. Hawaiki Rising. The History of the Holy War. Count Zero. The Transmigration of Bodies. Gender Queer. The Harpist trilogy. Declare. Matterhorn. All well worth your time if your tastes run that way.
In desperate attempt to get Google to index some of my favorite pages about Richard the Lionheart from my Substack, I am including many of the links here.
Let us pray.
(Did you know we’ve made digital editions of some of the contemporary histories of Richard available at a nominal cost? You can find a listing here. A tale about pickpockets!
And more!