This evening, in the cultural centre of Rhode-St-Genèse, I was happy to participate in the culminating event of a longstanding cooperative venture bringing together the music of composer Nigel Clarke, the conducting of Luc Vertommen, the playing of Brassband Buizingen, the ‘radio voice’ of Frank Renton, and the verses of yours truly. The occasion was a ‘champions meet’ – a try-out concert between Brassband Buizingen (the 2012 Belgian brassband champions) and Brassband Schoonhoven (from the Netherlands) – in the run-up to the 1 May 2013 European Brassbands Championship in Oslo. But it was also the occasion for the launch of a double CD, When Worlds Collide, bringing together all of the component elements listed above. Brassband Buizingen have chosen to take to Oslo as their set piece a daring new composition by their composer-in-residence, Nigel Clarke, entitled When Worlds Collide (you can hear a few clips from the work-in-progress at this link). The subtitle of Nigel’s witty piece is ‘or Little Green Men in Intergalactic Spaceships with Rayguns and Phasers‘. In the spirit of the piece, I wrote an acompanying poem composed entirely out of the titles of American 1950s science fiction B movies, and I was invited to read out the poem before the music began. (As I explained to the audience, I think the titles give an extraordinary insight into the state of mind of 1950s Cold War America.) When it was all over, Luc Vertommen had a surprise for Nigel and for me. We were each appointed honorary life members of Brassband Buizingen. I was so deeply touched by this. So talented and stylish are Brassband Buizingen that it is easy to forget that this is an amateur band (you wouldn’t think it if you heard them) and I have grown to admire them as they strive always not just for excellence but also for originality. Taking When Worlds Collide to Oslo is in my opinion a good example of that. Brassband Buizingen could have opted for a ‘safer’ piece within their comfort zone and polished it highly. Instead, they have gone for an original and provocative piece. There are six of Nigel Clarke’s compositions on the double CD, all performed by Brassband Buizingen, and all very different. Indeed, the combination of Nigel’s prolific originality, Luc’s brilliant conducting and the players’ excellence is a perfect match. I wish them every success in Oslo!

To La Monnaie this evening for another portrayal of inexorable destiny – this time Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, with a libretto drawn by Debussy himself from Maurice Materlink’s symbolist play (about doomed love) of the same name.  There was a sense of a circle in this performance, since the first foreign performance of Debussy’s revolutionary work was at La Monnaie (on 9 January 1907). There was also a sense of déjà vu inasmuch as Sandrine Piau, who was supposed to play Mélisande, had fallen on the set and injured herself, so she sang (beautifully) from the wings, whilst Monica Bacelli mutely acted her role on stage. Somehow, it worked well, with Bacelli’s portrayal conveying the mute suffering of her character. That Piau had fallen was maybe not so much of a surprise, since the action takes place around a most beautiful Anish Kapoor set design (see the picture) which, on a turntable and with varying lighting, effectively portrayed the various places (a forest, a castle, a rockpool) where the action is supposed to be occurring. Under Pierre Audi’s direction, Golaud (Mélisande’s husband) is portrayed as a psycho-sadist (convincingly acted by Dietrich Henschel). The key turning point in the drama, when Mélisande (earlier described by Arkel as having ‘the strange, bewildered look of someone constantly awaiting a calamity’) and her brother-in-law, Pelléas, finally admit their (unrequited) love for one another was brilliantly done: ‘Tout est perdu,’ Pelléas sings, ‘Tout est sauvé!‘ Exile is no longer an option. His fate is sealed. ‘If I were God,’ Arkel declares, ‘I would have pity on the hearts of men.’

To the Bozar this evening for Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex (preceded by Apollo musagète), performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and the Monteverdi Choir, with Fanny Ardant as the narrator and all under the towering baton of John Eliot Gardiner (picture). A curiosity of the piece is that it is sung in Latin. The choir were made up as assassins and Creon was also made up to brilliant effect. Here, I thought, was yet another combination of words and music (Stravinsky called it an ‘opera-oratorio) to add to the Clarke/Westlake list (see this post). Stravinsky’s music creates an authetically claustrophobic sense of inexorable destiny. We know what is going to happen to Oedipus. This is a musical description of the journey to a horrible certainty.

This evening, at the writers’ workshop, the last chapter of my magnum opus was presented and critiqued. It is such a relief to have got the whole of the thing down, albeit in raw form. Now the polishing begins in earnest. For, to be a little Churchillian, this is not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning. I began longer ago than I care to remember but I have a hard and fast deadline before me and so I’ll just have to knuckle down, especially over the summer holidays…

Tonight we watched Lindsay Anderson’s 1973 allegory on the UK’s capitalistic decline, O Lucky Man. I saw it when it first came out. Several aspects of the film made a deep impression upon me. A first was the way Malcolm McDowell‘s everyman, Mick Travis (aka Candide), keeps bobbing back up to the surface, no matter what awful things life throws at him (and it throws plenty). This, I thought, was a message of hope of some sort. But then, right at the end, McDowell is portrayed in a casting call for the same film (it’s all very self- and other-referential, as seventies films tended to be). The director, played by Lindsay Anderson himself, asks McDowell/Travis to smile, but he can’t. The director hits him across the face with his script and a forced grimace crosses Travis’s face, thus summing up what a critic has described as being ‘a hopeless sort of optimism’.  A second aspect was the way Alan price’s songs are interspliced in the film like a sort of Greek chorus. And a third was the way every cast member plays at least two and mostly three roles. The film is maybe over-long (three hours) but Anderson covers a huge canvas, taking a pop at imperialism and capitalism (and the linkage between the two, of course) and provides a sardonic portrait of British industrial, commercial and scientific decline. Travis bobs through the canvas, urged by the chorus to abandon his principles in order to succeed but also to keep his idealism high and dry and away from the evils he keeps witnessing (torture, medical experiments, napalm exports, etc). ‘If you’ve found a reason to live on and not to die, you are a lucky man,’ Alan Price sings in the title song. But does Travis find such a reason? Does the world of film provide him with such a prospect, or is the viewer just at the start of the same eternal loop? The film ends with the cast partying happily but I think Anderson knows that we know that he knows that we don’t believe this!

This morning I drove three young adventurers down to the deepest Ardennes, where they had to (hopefully) navigate their way across some interesting terrain as part of their Duke of Edinburgh award scheme. On the way there and back I ‘read’ an audio book that a friend had long ago given me. Last Man Standing, by David Baldacci, should really have been entitled Last Chapters Written Very Quickly, as I got the distinct sense that the author had a publisher’s deadline to meet. It was nevertheless an amusing and intriguing romp in which one member of a super elite Hostage Rescue Team, Web London, inexplicably survives an ambush in a raid on a drugs operation gone horribly wrong. His survival raises suspicions, but it also frustrates those who wanted everyone dead, and so London ends up being pursued by just about everybody. At the same time, he is determined to get to the bottom of matters, including through psychological analysis. The characters tend to be one-dimensional and workmanlike, doing their bit in the plot and then rapidly disappearing, but the underlying motives of his protagonists are well wrought. Paranoia is, in the hands of crime novelists, a wonderful tool when handled well. In the end, you don’t know who or what to believe. Friends might be enemies, enemies might be friends. You just don’t know. And where do conspiracies stop and madness begin? Oh dear oh dear. This book was perfect for a long drive and the latest news is that the adventurers are still standing.

Tonight we watched Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 ‘neo noir arthouse action crile thriller film’ (as the Wiki entry puts it),  Drive. The basic story, adopted from a James Sallis 2005 novel of the same name, is about a Hollywood stunt performer who moonlights as a getaway driver. Ryan Gosling plays the driver, who is both romantic knight and psychotic obsessive, and Carey Mulligan (we’ll definitely be seeing more of this lady on our screens) plays his next door neighbour (the love interest). The basic storyline, a heist gone wrong, is essentially a reworking of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, with its moral that radix malorem cupiditas est. Stylish, taut, extremely violent, claustrophobic, fatalistic, and yet open-ended, Drive is excellent entertainment and deserved the accolades it received.

This evening I hosted a farewell dinner for the outgoing President, Staffan Nilsson, and all of his private office together with my secretariat and the management board of the Committee. It is our traditional way of saying thank you. In less than a week’s time Staffan’s Presidency will be over and a new one will have begun. That is the way of the Committee. In the two-and-a-half years of his presidency Staffan has been indefatigable in his efforts to cultivate a stronger European civil society. He has displayed remarkable physical stamina, travelling across Europe (and sometimes the world) non-stop, but also frequently travelling back to his Swedish dairy farm to tend his herd. He has displayed fortitude and moral force and, together with his team, has commendably stuck to a vision and seen it through (the three pillars of his presidency programme were dialogue and participation, sustainability and growth, and solidarity and development). He has made a lot of friends for the Committee in the other institutions and elsewhere and, I think he would agree with me, we have also had a lot of fun. As I told him in my little speech, personally I shall miss him a lot. I shall miss our chats on planes, at hotel breakfasts and our very early Monday morning meetings. I shall miss his constant good humour and rigorous punctuality, the paperclip sculptures he ceaselessly makes in meetings, and his practical jokes (though I think my habit of checking my chair to see whether he has let it down before my arrival is now so deeply ingrained that it will outlive his presidency!). As Staffan frequently jokes to his guests at the end of meetings, ‘thank you for leaving!’

This morning I helped get underway a meeting hosted by the Committee’s President, Staffan Nilsson, with the title ‘Brussels; City of Bees.’ The meeting hosted a discussion chaired by Dilyana Slavova, the EESC’s incoming President of its ‘NAT’ Section, with the following participants: Staffan Nilsson, Frederic Chemay (from the Belgian Federal Government’s Environment Ministry), Catherine Rousseau (from the Private Office of the Minister of the Environment) and Marc Wollast (representing Apis Bruoc Sella, the charitable organisation which is working to encourage the placing of more bee hives in urban areas). The Committee hosted this meeting because it is both concerned about the decline in bee populations and determined to encourage more urban hives. Faithful readers of this blog will know that the Committee has two hives on the roof of its flagship headquarters building, and the ‘guests’ included a few newly awoken bees, including the very big fellow in the picture!

The time for thank yous and farewells is, too soon, upon us! Today, I was sadly privileged to be able to say thank you, on behalf of all of the EESC’s staff but particularly its communication department, to our outgoing Vice-President with responsibility for communication, Anna Maria Darmanin (Malta/Various Interests Group). Highly active on Twitter and Facebook, Anna Maria has been a tireless champion of the modern media, and has made particularly effective use of video clips and short interviews in order to put the Committee, its members and their activities ‘out there’. Anna Maria’s infectious enthusiasm has inspired us all for the past two-and-a-half years. Nobody has better embodied E.M. Forster’s dictum, ‘only connect’!