What fun if we switched things around once in a while
Toddling off to Glyndebourne last week, to drink from the well of civilisation, it became clear there was another musical entertainment taking place in a neighbouring meadow. Glynde Place was presenting A Love Supreme, a festival of jazz and other pop music.
We have John Coltrane to thank for the title. A Love Supreme was one of his “seminal” records, according to those critics who like to swim with the tide. Philip Larkin, wearing his reviewer’s hat, was warmer. A club bore who has turned into a pair of bagpipes, he called the man he liked to refer to, sarcastically, as “the master”.
But what if the audiences had got diverted? Imagine if the cool cats had gone to the opera, and the staid set had set up their picnics in the middle of a love-fest! How would the performers had coped with that role-reversal? It’s not quite like that, of course. In terms of age, and social class, there may only have been a fag paper between the groups, however much their musical interests differed. They were performing Debussy at Glyndebourne, and many of the Supreme groovers would have “got” him.
It’s a fair idea, though, switching audiences. All those coach parties coming into the West End, to catch the latest jukebox musical, could perhaps be directed instead to the Almeida or the Old Vic, to watch something earnest. Meanwhile the National Theatre crowd, eager for something meaty and metropolitan, could be despatched to Mamma Mia. In view of the stuff that has been served up at the National in recent months, they may get the better of the deal.
We could go further. Wouldn’t the World Cup be improved if Fifa imported referees from rugby to police the matches? Colombia, who behaved like infants throughout their thoroughly deserved defeat by England, would probably have ended up with three players. If they can’t behave, then off they should go, with a hey-nonny-no.
Just as they used to put a bean in the cake for the person who claimed it to exercise his right to be king for a day, maybe we should set aside a day each year to mix things up a bit, and enjoy the consequences. So long as we don’t have to listen to “Honker” Coltrane.
Presenting the news from Moscow, after England had beaten those brattish Colombians on penalties, Steve Scott, ITV’s sports reporter, referred to Kieran Trippier, England’s right back, as “Tripp-ee-ay”. But the player comes from Bury, the Lancashire town where they eat black pudding and, when nobody’s looking, tuck into tripe. Tripp-ee-ay indeed!
Mark Lawson, the Humpty Dumpty look-alike who used to be the BBC’s arts-wallah, once called Kathleen Ferrier, the great contralto, “Ferree-ay”. But she was from Blackburn, just up the road from Bury, where they still spark clogs. Lawson was plain wrong. Scott may have been trying to sound ironic, in the manner of people who pronounce “homage” in the French way.
To be on the safe side, let’s not ask either chap to say “nougat”. ”.
Attending a leavers’ concert at a well-known school, an evening that brought down the
at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion curtain on the pupils’ secondary education, it was disconcerting to hear them close the show by singing My Way. It seemed entirely inappropriate that young people, on the cusp of adulthood, should want to claim a number that celebrates the shallow and vainglorious, and pass it off as if they had all won a great victory.
My Way is a revolting song. It reveals the singer to be unutterably second-rate. To offer it to parents and well-wishers at a leavers’ concert is a mistake no director of music should make because the teenage crooners, however gifted, however willing, can only be diminished.
How about Make Our Garden Grow, from Candide?
A beautiful song, and a proper ensemble number. Old Friends, from Merrily We Roll Along, has a wistful quality. And then there is that haunting classic from Bells Are Ringing, The Party’s Over, with the line: “all dreams must end”. Better to get that learnt soonest, rather than wallow in the bogus sentiment of My Way.