The second movement is not in the relative major. The sadness has spread and for a while it is hard to discern the fury beneath it but that forces surfaces, staring at us until we too recall.
The third movement is the fastest but for all the fleet ascents and descents the witness in the solo voice clutches at each speeding heel, keeping it earthbound until each fatal signature Vivaldi closing cadence of 6th 5th 1st (Ab, G7, C minor). But if the voice had been a herald in the shadows in the first movement and a ghost rising from beneath in the second, here it is a serpent. Now fleet and troublingly sinuous and then coiling around each thing that would fly and escape. And then the sentence, final and slashing: 6th! 5th! 1st! No tierce di picardi to end on a smiling major third for this Red Priest's imagining. We grind on in the minor to the last.
When that happened I'd either leave the record on for the even angrier Geminiani concerto grosso or take it off, sit back down, look into the darkness and think about people called Hector, Herbert and Hermione. They were the characters in the novel I was trying to write called The Mouse.
Hector Mann (in his forties but the way I imagined him then puts him more in his sixties: I was twenty-two), a senior Public Servant, lives with his son, Herbert (still a child, about ten) and comes home one evening to discover that Herbert is ill. He puts the boy to bed, taking his temperature and giving him a hot lemon drink and then retires to his den where he stares at the wall with a continuing hatred. On the wall to one side of him is a poster his wife put there, a photograph of a mouse in close-up nibbling on some grains. It had been a taunt and though he can't bring himself to look at it he has never removed it.
Hermione Mann reveals herself to be the novel's narrator, a task she performs from her grave in Toowong Cemetery. She begins (at about the fifth chapter) thus:
When the moon is full above my stone I have the clearest sight. Never in my living days have I known such fineness in the detail nor colour nor perspective. And when my kin are aching, when they wince from sores or sadness I can see. I can see without the moon.
She tells the tale of Hector's continuing failure to control his son's illness which is mutating the boy into something grey and scarred. He grows increasingly terrified of the possibility of the situation worsening with the involvement of doctors. At the same time he has noticed a mouse had appeared in the home, a vile darting bringer of plague. He has found what he believes is a solution in the garden out the back which he has let wild since his wife, its curator, died, in tribute. A stray cat with a torn eyelid which makes it look like a mad professor has taken residence. By the time Hector progresses from feeding it to talking with it directly we start waiting for Hermione to do more than see clearly.
Where did this come from?
Partly from the lapse in mood in the winter following the departure of about half the household which left me both relieved and in an emotional slump, and partly from the things I saw when I listened to this concerto.
In the first months back from finishing uni and going on my second last Christmas holidays to Townsville I came back to Brisbane refreshed and ready for the second year of my band The Gatekeepers, resuming reading for pleasure, planning my entry into the world of cinema and breathing a little before admitting that it was just all going to be work instead of any of that.
One of the first things I did was head into town and stoll. It was a weekday and I had a blissful nowhere to go. Finding myself on Queen St I hung a left into the Record Market, a large shop of new and old that had a fantastic second hand section. I once found a copy of the mono mix of Sgt Pepper (a 1967 original pressing) for ninety-nine cents! The guy at the counter had to check the price but found it was legit and let me have it for that. I later gave it to Pat Ridgewell as a token of thanks for doing some audio engineering. God knows what it's worth now.
Mainly, though, the Record Market was where I dived into what had been a steadily growing craving over the past two years. The ever superbly programmed local FM 3MBS was playing a lot of the rising tide of early-music revivalism as well as new digital recordings of baroque and classical pieces. Here, on shamingly well kept second hand vinyl was a treasure house of great recordings for mostly less than four dollars. I alsmost bought them by weight.
One of them was Italian Concertos, a mix of eighteenth and nineteenth century Italian masters performed by the dependable Academy of St Martin in the Fields under the baton of Sir Neville Marriner. The cover was different to the one I had which was the World Record Club appropriation but the contents was the thing.
To revisit this music I had to listen to Ofra Harnoy's recording from the nineties. Splendid performance but clearly influenced by the trend in earlier music performance toward higher speeds. Marriner's recording is slower and statelier and, because of that, also much darker. The tense passage in the third movement where the cello is arpeggiating between G7 and C minor feels like writhing serpents.
Maestro Daniel Barenboim famously said that people should destroy classical recordings after playing them once. He wasn't being insanely consumerist but stressing the performance of music over its fetishisation. The latter happens whenever someone who comes to classical music from other bases like rock or folk and considers the recorded version of anything to be the definitive statement (unless a rare superior live version comes along).
All that should matter in classical music is that the performance is expressive of the piece. Yet many people I know who liked this or that classical music after decades immersed in rock consider any performance other than the one they first heard is wrong. Well, it has to be wrong. The reason that there are so very many recordings of pieces like The Four Seasons or Mozart's symphonies is the suggestion that the value lies in the difference. Still, while I enjoy Harnoy's playing I still pine for the Marriner version (can't even identify the soloist now) which didn't make it to cd and was probably donated along with most of my vinyl to the local op shop years ago.
Meanwhile, I wrote, page after page of the saga of the family Mann and their mouse. Watched the leaves fall from the frangiapani by my balcony, raked up the leaves of the macadamia out the back, had endless cups of sugary tea with lots of milk, read whatever books I'd bought second hand with the same fervour as I met the records, chatted to Rick about them and whatever else was born in the quiet light of the afternoon, avoided brother Stephen's thundering nonsense and began to feel old.
The band had disintegrated over the first few months of 1984 as this one fell away, that one joined a cabaret outfit that afforded her a living and the other who swore off bands after half a decade failing to become a rock star. We made some recordings over a fun Easter break and then polished them into stiff, unfeeling things petrified by the costs of an eight track studio and called it quits.
I had no Uni. There was no more mix of multisyllabic cinebabble and popcorn, the blend had gone and now that there was only the popcorn it tasted fattening. The reading was good. Everyone got into it and we talked a lot about that. The good thing there was that I just learned to relax with the chat, take a sip now and then and coast until evening.
But it was too still. The Mouse was grinding into stasis and I was listening to the concerto without a thought of Hector, his raised-eyebrow stray or his mouse of horror. I just heard the darkness around his house ripped by the whines of his increasingly doughy son. Bored I began a short story, a monologue fed on a diet of Colin Davis' batonning of Mozart's Requiem with a host of mighty soloists and the John Alldis choir and the BBC symphony orchestra, to this day my defin- oh.
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