Monday 13 December 2004

Having the loan of an editing suite makes for a very civilised way of working. It's set up at my desk, so that rather than having to go out to a studio, I can use a spare half hour to do a rough cut of a piece and come back to it later. So I've made a lot of headway just in spare bits of time here and there. Working for short periods keeps your ears fresh too.

Also keeping my ears fresh is the Café Zimmerman Bach concertos CD which came in the post the other day. It's the first classical CD I've heard in a very long time which I wanted to listen to all the way through. Playing Bach's music involves a difficult balancing act of investing the music with enough personality and style to bring it alive, without overpowering it. I think it's fair to work on the assumption that Bach was a far greater musician than any of us, so the listener should be able to hear his work at least as well as ours. On this record, the musicians only get in the way very occasionally - I once tried to listen to the recording of Richard Egarr playing Bach concertos with the AAM, and it's the only record that's ever made me want to throw up: obstructions are constantly put in the way of the music. I would imagine it's a bit like trying to watch John Sessions reading tragic poetry.

I took the afternoon off to be a tourist with Betsy MacMillan who's visiting from Montréal, and in the Gallery of Modern Art I was struck by a small painting by someone I'd never come across before: 'Unidentified Aircraft', painted in Montrose in 1942 by Edward Baird (1904-49). A bit of web searching turned up that there was an exhibition of his work earlier this year in London to mark the centenary of his birth. Did anybody see it?