CD Giveaway No. 5

Welcome to the fifth Giornale Nuovo free CD giveaway. Peruse the CDs listed below. If you’d like one (or two) of them, check the comments to see whether your choice has already been claimed: and, if it hasn’t, then leave a comment of your own stating which of the discs it is that you want. Once you have laid claim to the CD of your choice, send me an e-mail (to mr.h@spamula.net) which contains your snail-mail address. I’ll sort through the requests to decide who gets what: in most cases, it’ll simply happen that the first person to claim a disc will be the one who receives it. I’ll mail out the CDs within a week or so (I will pay all postage costs). I’m limiting the offer to two discs per recipient.

1. The Vespers of Sergey Rachmaninov, performed in 1992 by the Saint Petersburg Capella, under the direction of choirmaster Vladislav Chernushenko. Rachmaninov’s celebrated setting, composed in 1915, of the Orthodox ‘All-Night Vigil’ is beautiful music, but I’ve not listened to it in years, and so hope to pass it along to someone who will appreciate it better than I.

2. The Stabat Mater and Requiem of Vladimir Martynov, performed by Sirin and Alkonost choirs, accompanied by the Opus Posth Ensemble led by Tatiana Grindenko. I’ve praised Martynov’s works here before, but have had less success with his compositions on sacred themes. This disc couples a kind of neo-mediæval treatment of the Stabat Mater with an unusually uplifting Requiem about which Martynov notes ‘one must remember that the primary aim of the Missæ Pro Defunctis is not to cultivate mournful feelings … but in a prayer that God would grant the deceased eternal rest and eternal light.’

3. In l’istesso tempo, which comprises three works composed by Giya Kancheli: Time… and again performed by Gidon Kremer and Oleg Maisenberg; V & V performed by the Kremerata Baltica; and a Piano Quartet performed by the Bridge Ensemble. Kancheli’s works are widely-praised, and are performed here by first-rate musicians, but I found myself unable to warm to these lugubrious compositions.

4. John Corigliano’s Phantasmagoria, etc. I bought this disc after catching, and enjoying, some extracts from Corigliano’s score to the movie The Red Violin (which I still haven’t seen). Alas, a first couple of listens never drew me back to the four exuberant pieces on this disc: Phantasmagoria, To Music, Fantasia on an Ostinato and Three Hallucinations, all performed with gusto by the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Eri Klas.

5. Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 6: Plutonian Ode, performed by the Bruckner Orchester Linz, and Lauren Flanigan, Soprano, under the baton of Dennis Russell Davis. Well, I like a nice bit of Philip Glass but there’s also a whole slew of his works I’ve disliked: I think I’ve given away more of his music than anyone else’s. For what it’s worth, I took a particulalrly sudden and violent dislike to this piece, presented here in two versions, one where a recording of Allen Ginsberg reading his Ode (which also serves as the score, sung by Ms Flanigan) is dubbed over the performance of the Symphony, and another where it is not. I could only bear to listen to either version for a few painful minutes…

6. Secret Rhythms 2 by Burnt Friedman and Jaki Liebezeit. This disc, the last one I bought at our local CD-store before it closed, is a second instalment of minimalistic instrumental grooves by ‘electronic jazzer’ Friedman and the renowned percussionist Liebezeit, formerly the drummer for Can. My first impression was that the tracks seemed a little insubstantial, but I daresay these pieces might well repay repeated listening; this just being a case where I lack the patience to persevere.

7. Much as I admire Neko Case’s plaintive voice, I could not get into her latest release Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, and thus offer it here with the hope it might find a more receptive listener.

8. I was similarly unimpressed with Ballad of the Broken Seas by Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan: I felt that while his voice suited the material admirably well, hers did not.

9. You Could Have It So Much Better by Franz Ferdinand. Indeed we could have had it better than this lukewarm follow-up to their stirring debut. Should you disagree, then by all means lay claim to this seldom-used secondhand CD.

10. I love Calexico, and would not readily be parted from Garden Ruin, Convict Pool or Feast of Wire. The 7-track EP In The Reins, however—their 2005 collaboration with Iron & Wine—I could happily live without.

11. I’ve held on to Highly Evolved by The Vines for a long time considering it’s been years since I played it, although I do recall taking quite a shine to this disc when it first came out, especially the track Outtathaway.

12. Frank Black & the Catholics’ Black Letter Days is, apparently, a ‘grower’ but one, alas, that never grew on me, with the exception, that is, of the manic version of Tom Waits et. al.’s Black Rider which kicks it off. Oddly, I remain inordinately fond of FB & the C’s Devil’s Workshop CD, which was issued simultaneously with this one.

13. I must class the music of the Animal Collective together with the prose of Vladimir Nabokov, and the taste of gorgonzola cheese, among those things that I really ought to like but somehow cannot enjoy. Regarding their Sung Tongs disc: I can recognise some of its appeal without actually experiencing it…

14. Satori by the Flower Travellin’ Band was one of several albums recommended to me earlier this year during a haphazard exploration of Japanese music I’d embarked upon after discovering the magnificent Boredoms and OOIOO. This is a classic and influential slice of early-’70s acid-rock, succinctly characterised by one amazon reviewer as ‘It’s like Black Sabbath does Dark Side of the Moon.’ The thing is, I don’t really like Black Sabbath, or this either.

15. Just Another Band from the Cosmic Inferno, by Acid Mothers Temple & The Cosmic Inferno, is a contemporary chunk of Japanese psychedelia, another recommendation, like the one above, that didn’t quite do it for me. This CD features just two lengthy (and loud) jams: Trigger In Trigger Out and They’re Coming From the Cosmic Inferno.

Engraved and Etched English Title-Pages (ii)

By way of belated continuation to my previous entry, here are some more images from A Catalogue of Engraved and Etched English Title Pages down to the death of William Faithorne, 1691. The first pair of details below are taken from title-pages designed by John Droeshout (1596-ca.1652). The first adorned a 1645 work by one A. de Sousa de Macedo, entitled Lusitania Liberata; the second prefaced an anonymous tract published in 1651 by the name of Truth Brought to Light and Discovered by Time, or, a Discourse and Historicall Narration of the First XIIII yeares of King James Reigne. Droeshout’s brother Martin was also an engraver, best known as the author of the vignette portrait of Shakespeare on the title page of the ‘first folio.’ The brothers came from a Flemish family of painters and engravers. Of John we read that ‘no particulars of his life are recorded’ excepting a perfunctory record of his will.

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As John Byrne mentioned in a comment on my last entry, perhaps the single most iconic image from any engraved or etched English title-page is that of the monarch composed of his subjects (highlighted in the detail below), which dominates the frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), and which, moreover, neatly encapsulates its theme. This title-page was made by the Paris-based printmaker Abraham Bosse, in collaboration with the author. Curiously, in his Catalogue, Alfred Forbes Johnson gives this print as the work of an unknown artist—presumably the attribution to Bosse was not accepted in England at the time of its compilation (in 1933).

The detail below shows part of the title-page of an edition of Aesop’s Fables self-published by the painter, etcher and illustrator Francis Barlow in 1665. Given that Barlow specialized in depictions of ‘animals, birds and country life,’ he made full use of the Fables’ pictorial potential, providing more than a hundred interpretive illustrations, all of which can be seen on-line here courtesy of the Fine Arts Musuems of San Francisco ‘Image Base.’ Several of his drawings, and a few paintings, may meanwhile be perused here, at the Tate Collection’s site.

In contrast with most of the artists discussed here, the facts of Wenceslas Hollar’s life are quite well known: he was born in Bohemia in 1607, where his family came to be ruined in the capture of Prague during the Thirty Years’ war. After leaving Prague he spent time in Frankfurt (where he worked for a time under Matthæus Merian), Strasbourg, and Cologne; at length arriving in London ca. 1637. His support for the royalists obliged him to leave England for Antwerp in 1643, but he was able to return to London in 1652. Hollar was a highly accomplished and prolific artist: in excess of 2,700 of his prints have survived, and these include city-views, portraits, ships, religious designs, heraldic subjects, landscapes, still lives, architectural drawings, reproductions of other artists’ paintings and drawings, and, of course, title-pages.

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The title-pages in the pair of details above, are, respectively, from The Sphere of M. Manilius: an edition of a classical astrological text; and, from J. Nieuhof’s An Embassy Sent by the East India Company to China. Both of these works were published in 1673, although Hollar’s plate for the latter had been executed five years earlier. According to John Aubrey, in his Brief Lives, Hollar ‘was very shortsighted, and did work so curiously [in so much detail] that the curiosity of his work is not to be judged without a magnifying glass.’ Aubrey goes on to mention that ‘he was a very friendly good natured man as could be, but shiftless as to the world, and died not rich.’

While the majority of title-pages bore a signature of some sort, many were unsigned, and many of these are necessarily of uncertain or unknown authorship: one hundred and seventy-nine of the title-pages catalogued by Forbes Johnson are classed as ‘Anonymous.’ One such whose design caught my eye (part of which is shown in the detail above) was the 1674 frontispiece to The History of Lapland by J. Schefferus. This work was apparently the first ‘realistic and descriptive account of the Laplander’s manners and customs’ and had been compiled ‘to dispel untruthful rumours, circulating in Europe at the time, spread by less serious and scientific publications, concerning magic and witchcraft among the Lapps.’

The last of the details here shows part of the title page by William Faithorne (1616-91) for the 1676 English translation of Paul Scarron’s Roman Comique. While Forbes Johnson cautions that Faithorne’s title-pages are not his finest work, some, like the one above, and the frontispiece to Glanvill’s Saducismus Triumphatus (previously mentioned here) are not without interest. Faithorne’s royalist allegiance, like Hollar’s, obliged him to spend some years in exile, from which he returned in 1650. Faithorne’s fame rests primarily on his work as a portrait engraver, in which capacity his subjects included Oliver Cromwell, John Milton, Queen Catherine, Prince Rupert, Cardinal Richelieu, Thomas Hobbes, and Charles I. According to Forbes Johnson, ‘by the time of Faithorne’s death in 1691 the popularity of the engraved title-page was declining’ He counts Faithorne as ‘the last English engraver of any distinction’ to produce this kind of work.

Engraved and Etched English Title-Pages (i)

A couple of months ago I acquired a book with the descriptive title of A Catalogue of Engraved and Etched English Title Pages down to the death of William Faithorne, 1691. In this entry, and, I hope, in the one following, I will present a selection from the hundred or so title-pages reproduced therein. In his introduction, the book’s editor Alfred Forbes Johnson writes that ‘Engraved title-pages may be said to date from the middle of the sixteenth century, a surprisingly late development in book-decoration, since the art of engraving had then been practised for at least a hundred years.’ According to Forbes Johnson, the earliest such title-page seen in England, on which the title formed part of the engraved design, was the one made for Thomas Geminus’s Compendiosa totius Anatomie delineatio in 1545. It wasn’t until the seventeenth-century, however, that pictorial title-pages became commonplace.

The detail above shows part of the comely Britannia at the centre of William Hole’s title-page for Michael Drayton’s topographical epic Poly-Olbion, the first edition of which was published in 1612. Hole (fl. 1607-24) also engraved the county maps which illustrated the book. The engraver’s other main claim to fame was as the designer and publisher of Parthenia, or the Maydenhead (1613) one of the earliest publications of English keyboard-music ‘the first attempt in England to print music from copper plates, and the first carefully arranged miscellaneous anthology of keyboard music anywhere.’ There seems to have been a general skill-shortage in the graphic arts in Jacobean England: for every title-page or frontispiece by a homegrown artist like Hole, there were several others by transplanted Frenchmen, Flemings or Dutchmen. Most of the best ‘English’ prints of the period were executed by foreigners.

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The brothers Simon (1595-1647) and Willem (1598-1636) van de Passe were two of the best esteemed of the expatriate engravers in London. Both had studied printmaking under their father Crispin’s direction. Simon moved to London in 1613 ‘and worked for the publishers of that city for a period of around ten years’ where he was ‘also employed by the famous miniature painter, Nicholas Hilliard, to create engravings after his paintings of the English Royal Family.’ William came to London in 1621, and remained there until his death. The ship in the first of the details above forms the centrepiece for Simon’s fittingly bold design for the title-page of the first volume of Bacon’s Instauratio Magna (1620); while the face in the second detail is William’s depiction of Homer, on the 1624 title page of George Chapman’s translation of the Batrachomyomachia: the comic epic long misattributed to ‘the blind bard.’

In keeping with the prevalence of emblematic and allegorical imagery, many title-pages and frontispieces were charged with more-or-less complex symbolism. Some authors of works thus illustrated took it upon themselves to expound on their meaning with explanatory verses. An excellent example is the ‘Argument of the Frontispiece:’ a poem included by Robert Burton among the introductory texts for the third (1628) edition of his Anatomy of Melancholy, this being the first edition of the work to carry the famous title-page, which was engraved by Christophe (or Christoffel) Le Blon (or Leblon) ‘of Mons and Amsterdam’ (ca. 1560-1650). This ‘Argument’ begins Ten distinct Squares here seen apart, / Are joined in one by Cutter’s art. The panel shown in the detail above is that where Old Democritus under a tree, / Sits on a stone with book on knee…

Other title-pages were much more simply illustrative. The ornamented yet uncomplicated design behind the detail above is for an edition of All the works by the ‘water-poet’ John Taylor issued in 1630. It was the work of one Thomas Cockson (or Coxon, fl. 1591-1636). Other designs used the multi-panel format to illustrate various aspects of an author’s work. The detail below highlights one of the vignettes in a title-page by Thomas Cecill (fl. 1626-40) for a 1634 English translation of the Works of the 16th-Century French physician Ambrose Paré, a compendium which apparently included ‘general discussions of living creatures, of human anatomy, and of surgery, as well as more particular considerations of the brain, muscles, tumors, wounds of various sorts, and other human maladies, along with “the arts to repaire those things which are defective, either by nature or accident.”’

The process of commissioning an engraved title-page did not always run smoothly. The wildly elaborate design by the prolific William Marshall (fl. 1617-1649) for George Wither’s 1635 collection of Emblemes, for example, left the author vexed and out-of-pocket, as is evident from his Preposition to this Frontispiece:

This BOOKE contayning EMBLEMS, ’twas thought fit,
A Title-page should stand to usher it,
That’s emblematicall: And, for that end,
Our AUTHOR, to the Graver did commend
A plaine Invention; that it might be wrought,
According to his Fancie had forethought.
Insteed thereof, the Workeman brought to light,
What, here, you see; therein, mistaking quite
The true Designe: And, so (with paines, and cost)
The first intended FRONTISPIECE, is lost.

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Forbes Johnson catalogues 114 title-pages as Marshall’s handiwork. He admits that this engraver’s work was ‘very unequal’ and quotes an earlier authority, Sir Siney Colvin, of having said that Marshall’s efforts, at their worst, were ‘crude and bungling.’ Certainly his design for Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici is none too sophisticated. The last of the details above comprises four of the small panels from Marshall’s 1641 title-page for R. Braithwait’s The English Gentleman and English Gentlewoman.

Peake

The images that follow are details from a set of sketches and completed drawings done by Mervyn Peake for a projected illustrated edition of Dickens’s Bleak House, which, however, never came to fruition. These drawings were, for me, one of the highlights of a new book, Mervyn Peake: The Man and his Art; a volume which offers the fullest selection of Peake’s artwork yet published. I’ve been a Peake fan for many years, after first discovering of the Titus novels ca. 1987…

While best-known as a novelist, Peake also excelled as an illustrator, and was a fine poet and painter too. Besides the abortive commission for Bleak House, Peake also produced notable illustrations for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, The Hunting of the Snark and Treasure Island. As an illustrator, he considered his influences to be ‘Rowlandson, Cruikshank, Bewick, Palmer, Leach, Hogarth, Blake, Doré, Grandville, Dürer and Goya.’

It’s been many years since I dipped into the pages of Titus Groan or Gormenghast, but I did recently revisit the novella Boy in Darkness wherein the titular Boy (evidently Titus Groan, though not named as such) ‘yearning for freedom from his ceaseless duties as 77th Earl of Gormenghast, escapes the ancient castle and encounters the nightmare world outside the keep.’ The Boy gets lost, and is kidnapped by a pair of humanoid chimæras: Goat and Hyena, who, at length, present him to their master, the Lamb:

White. White as the foam when the moon is full on the sea; white as the white of a child’s eye; or the brow of a dead man; white as a sheeted ghost: oh, white as wool. Bright wool…wool…in a million curls…seraphic in its purity and softness…the raiment of the Lamb.

But the colours seeemed to have no effect upon the Lamb, whose wool reflected nothing but itself, and in one other particular, and that was in the matter of the eyes. The pupils were veiled with a dull, blue membrane. This blue, dim as it was, had nevertheless a disproportionate effect, for the surrounding features were so angelically white. Set in this exquisite head, the eyes were like two coins of bruise-blue smoke.

The breast of the Lamb was like a little sea—a little sea of curls—of clustering curls or like the soft white crests of moonlight verdure; verdure white as death, frozen to the eye, but voluptuously soft to the touch—and lethal also, for to plunge the hand into that breast would be to find there was no substance there, but only the curls of the Lamb—no ribs, no organs; only the yielding, horrible mollience of endless wool.

The nightmarish quality of Boy in Darkness is intensified by what is, for the most part, its patiently avuncular narrative tone: like that of a father carefully explaining something disturbingly scary to his child.

Peake’s poetry has its memorable moments too, as in the verses of A Reverie of Bone or in some arresting epigrams & short lyrics:

The vastest things are those we may not learn.
We are not taught to die, nor to be born,
Nor how to burn
With love.
How pitiful is our enforced return
To those small things we are the masters of.

And I thought you beside me
How rare and how desperate
And your eyes were wet
And your face as still
As the body of a leveret
On a tranced hill
But my thought belied me
And you were not there
But only the trees that shook,
Only a storm that broke
Through the dark air.

Click on the images to see them enlarged, and in full; they are Copyright © the Mervyn Peake Estate, and are reproduced here without permission, only for as long as no-one objects to their presence on this site.

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