ThePlagueYears: Stratford calling

I haven't blathered about music or books or TV lately, so today I will. First...

A music recommendation I recently discovered, on Apple Music, an orchestra, a chamber orchestra, I'd never heard of: The Orchestra of the Swan. Intriguing name. I thought at first it was some kind of renegade classical cross-over group. The Apple Music classical curators seem fond of that kind of stuff.

But the OOTS, as it's sometimes called, turns out to have solid classical credentials. And it's not as new as I'd thought. It was formed in 1995. It's based in Stratford-upon-Avon and it's the "resident orchestra" - whatever that means - at a few different Midlands institutions. It tours and plays conventional concerts but also has a history of commissioning work from contemporary composers and of "original" or "innovative" concert programming.

The reason I thought it was some kind of cross-over group is that the OOTS' last two albums, both released this year, definitely fit that category.

Timelapse includes distinctly modern re-arrangements of classical chestnuts, including two reworkings of Vivaldi slow movements. One features music director and first violin David Le Page playing blues riffs - among other departures. Strange, but interesting.

The album also includes straight-up renditions of other classical pieces and, most audaciously perhaps for a classical ensemble, arrangements of two songs from the pop canon: David Bowie's and Brian Eno's "We Could Be Heroes," which I'd vaguely heard of, and "There is a Light That Never Goes Out" by Johnny Marr of the Smiths, which I hadn't. (They're a 1980s British rock band, which explains why I had no knowledge of them.)

The other album, Vivaldi Sleep, is full of the first category of pieces on Timelapse: hypnotic improvisations played over a background of Vivaldi harmonies. If you ignore the solo instruments and listen to the strings in the background, it's all Vivaldi. But the overall effect is strange and mysterious, and definitely modern.

All the pieces - with titles such as "Sleep Walk," "Morpheus," "REM," etc. - conjure some feeling of the mystery, and restfulness, of sleep. (It eventually put me to sleep, in fact. This is not a criticism; I was listening late at night.)

A book recommendation I mentioned some time ago that I was reading Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet (retitled Hamnet and Judith on this side of the Atlantic). I've been reading it for what seems like weeks - well, actually it is weeks, now that I think of it. It's long-ish at just under 400 pages, but I've also been reading at a snail's pace, a few pages a night before sleep.

Hamnet is the story of Shakespeare's life - or the life of his family - in Stratford. It's main focus is the death from bubonic plague of the Bard's 11-year-old son, Hamnet, in 1596. (Hamnet had a twin sister, Judith - hence the North American title. She was spared.)

It's beautifully written. The character of Shakespeare's wife, Agnes, is fascinating - she's some kind of healer and seer. The depiction of the Shakespeare family dynamic is also interesting. Before Will goes off to London to make his fortune as a playwright, the couple and their children live in a tiny flat next to the Shakespeare family's glove-making workshop and home. Will's relationship with his bullying father is fraught.

The core of the book is the recounting of Hamnet's death and its aftermath. It's wrenching stuff, especially to be reading it now when our own child is ill a long way away from us. The pain of grief and helplessness in the face of the disease is...difficult.

I'd still recommend it. It won the Women's Prize for Fiction and Waterstone's Book of the Year in Britain in 2020. It's a good read.

It's the second of O'Farrell's I've read. The other, This Must Be The Place, is a strange family saga about a fictional European cinema superstar who runs away from her husband and the film industry and lives anonymously in a remote farmhouse in Ireland. With Hamnet, O'Farrell has upped her game I would say.

I stayed in this morning - it was snowing heavily -and rode the bike while watching more of Genius of the Ancient World, the end of the first episode about the Buddha and the beginning of the second about Socrates.

In the afternoon, the sun shone and I got out for a brief walk. It felt colder than the +1C reported by The Weather Channel. There was a biting wind from the west.

Photography not flowing. It was a day for historic buildings: Eldon House and the old courthouse, both dating from the 1830s, less than ten years after London's founding.