Just heard that Meredith Monk will be the Composer of the Week on BBC Radio 3 next week, starting Monday.

Yes!

Gosh ... 130,000 page views!

It seems a lot but ... over ten years?

& how many visits are by search robots or myself checking a post has been printed accurately?

Then again, who cares?

& today ... a quick visit to the sumptuous Full Abstraction exhibition ...

As most of the works are behind glass there's no point trying to take pictures of the whole work. Far better to hone in on details - which, in any case, are what fascinate.

Here are a series of beautiful passages of paint & mark making (Robert Motherwell, Cy Twombly & de Kooning).

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This was a more satisfying visit - last Sunday afternoon with the younger sprout.

An upstairs 'loft' space lit with spot lights and a series of watercolours by Anne Herbauts (confirming my suspicions that she works more or less on an A4 scale & then enlarges or reduces depending). What really makes the show, though, is the Broodthaers-style mock museum cases containing a range of found items. The premise of the exhibition is the forest being overtaken by the sea. Thus, in the morning, we each become unwitting Crusoes beach combing the streets for what the waves have left behind. It is a beautiful conceit & a fantastic engine for generating a series of wry surrealist re-imaginings. The same intelligence & poetic eye that informs AH's book works is here for all to see. Such a modest space & scale but what ripples it sends out into the day. Fresh eyes. Marvellous.

(Only open Wednesday & Sunday afternoons).

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Here goes with a series of posts bringing you up to date with exhibitions going on in Brussels. For some reason October is especially rich.

First ... the Japanese Modern Art selection at the Bozar. Frankly, it's a major disappointment. I went hungry for works by the great Yu-ichi Inoue & found only the one - and annoyingly shielded behind highly reflective glass. It was virtually impossible to appreciate the brush marks given the superimposition of either yourself or other works on the other walls.

Nevertheless, my first direct encounter with his work. (There's a show in Frankfurt but four hours driving there & back is just a bit too much).

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& more ear food ...

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(note: this is the trumpeter not the bassist of the same name)

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(I was looking for the Belcea Quartet but this is meant to be good, too)

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(overplayed, perhaps, but the Midnight Cowboy theme gets under the skin)

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The current ear food ...

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Something to do with the arrival of Autumn ... an appetite for string quartets & solo piano ... 

Puzzling ... how can the first Brahms String Quartet have such an immediate effect & the 4th Symphony (yes, the ever so famous Fourth, conducted no less by my hero Carlos Kleiber, a performance that everyone agrees is unsurpassed) leave me so utterly ... cold ... indifferent ... bored even?

Hackneyed melodies ... bombast ... staggering rhythms.

(& yes, I know this must sound as utter philistinism).

My rule of thumb on Brahms: the fewer instruments the better.

Renault Clio IV wind noise update.

Boring as it may be for some readers, I feel a responsibility to follow an earlier post about wind noise.

Due to a recent visit to the garage to have two dents repaired (the first was my fault trying to avoid a wooden pillar while parking; the second was the fault of a waste disposal van driver early one Sunday morning on Folkestone harbour front reversing without looking) I was given a replacement car for the week. A silver grey Clio IV diesel & within seconds of accelerating on the Ring that tell-tale noise began. Yep. Each model suffers from the turbulence caused by the wing mirror design.

Consider this before buying ...

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So I take myself off to the local museum & mooch around the Oriental collection (other than a family of three, I was the only person there at 10 o'clock). 

Not much calligraphy on display but there is this scroll beneath a glass case. There wasn't any explanatory text in evidence & - needless to say - I can't decipher it. But I am utterly entranced by the brushwork. With my index finger I trace the strokes in mid-air, trying to recapture the descent of the brush, the moment of contact, the movement, the 'taction' with paper, the lift. Then the return to the ink pot before taking the plunge again. 

In the lower example, look at the character fifth column, eighth down. Or sixth column first row. Breath taking. 

&, by way of contrast, the restrained elegance of the top example - which was written to the right hand side of the sheet. 

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only the main computer seems to be able to load the pictures

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One of the ongoing problems with this Blog has been the refusal of various apps to upload posts containing images.

Here's a new attempt.

These are collaged fragments from the Turin workshop - a series of preliminary strokes made on the wrapping of the sumptuous Arches paper we were working upon.

So here goes ...

... & lo & behold it fails. Again.

If anyone knows what the problem is then please let me know.

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Thunder & lightning (7:50 pm). The first movement of Tristan & Isolde playing on BBC Radio 3.

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I listened to the first Brahms String Quartet earlier this afternoon & fell under the spell. Am I right in hearing a motif from the Clarinet Quintet in the second movement?

Question: why don't I respond to the Symphonies in the same way?

Whose recording might work the magic? (I have the budget Karajan).

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New month & a new look.

& this to listen to ...

 

o