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by Andy Patton There is a glittering gem of a sub-genre in the darkest recesses of fantasy’s vast, teeming dungeon: LitRPGs. LitRPGs, or literary role-playing games, are pretty much what they sound like. Similar to role-playing games on a computer or tabletop classics like Dungeons and Dragons , the characters in these stories find themselves thrust into a world of dangerous creatures, quests, loot, items, and, of course, leveling up. Like the dregs of any genre, many LitRPGs are bad. The books on this list are not. Some even brush against the ephemeral ceiling of greatness in moments. That being said, it does not follow that this genre is for everybody. Readers should enter these gates with caution; both treasures and dangers await. I scoured the internet, read dozens of litRPGs, and compiled this list of the actual five best examples of the genre (according to this reporter). (Just a note… these are not necessarily in order. I had a great time reading all of them.) My Top Five Best LitRPGs Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman (Support Matt on Patreon) When stepping outside to chase his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Carl watches as every building on earth is suddenly flattened. All over the planet, stairways open up to a subterranean labyrinth filled with traps, monsters, and loot—a dungeon so enormous it circles the entire globe. Carl and the cat, whose name is Donut (to be precise, Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk), find that they, and everyone else still alive, are contestants in an evil, galaxy-wide game show in which they must fight to survive, and, of course, level up and they descend deeper and deeper. Imagine Survivor with “murder dozers.” (See cover.) Point of Order: Let’s talk about that cover before going on. If you are anything like me or many other people on the internet, you might be tempted to judge the book by it. There is that giant yellow apocalypse font. A grinning goblin is wearing a pot on its head (piloting the aforementioned “murder dozer”). For some reason, a cat is running along in the bottom corner. And there is our hero, Carl, who looks like he is fresh out of a Top Gun spinoff series but, for some reason, isn’t wearing any pants. The cover sure doesn’t say, “Curl up with me next to a fire. I’m a normal book.” But if you give Carl and Donut a chance, they’ll win you over. I see that cover now and think, “Oh. There’s my buddy Carl. Ha. Still not wearing any pants. What a guy.” Dungeon Crawler Carl doesn’t take itself too seriously. How could it when one of the main characters is a sentient cat named Princess Donut who shoots magic missiles out of her eyes? At the same time, however, it has a lot of heart. The story has a moral backbone without becoming moralistic and a dark, playful streak without becoming lurid. (Okay, sometimes it is a bit lurid, but that is part of the fun. I never thought I would enjoy the recurring joke of an evil AI with a foot fetish so much. It gets me every time.) Carl is the ultimate Everyman anti-hero. He is rough, crude, smart, kind, and practical. Part of the charm of the story is that the bizarre, hostile, and horrific situations Carl is put in only serve to more deeply reveal the ironclad goodness and beauty beneath his gruff exterior. In the words of another fantasy hero worth reading , Carl is good people. If you have the chance, listen to the book on Audible. Jeff Hays, the narrator, is one of my favorites, and Sound Booth Theater makes the audio experience come alive. One word of caution, friends. To say that Dungeon Crawler Carl has some objectionable material would be putting it mildly. If you have content sensitivities, this book may not be for you. If you’d like some help thinking through what to do with objectionable content when you encounter it in otherwise worthy books, listen to the fantastic lecture “Encountering the Fall in Fiction” by Lindsey Patton. He Who Fights With Monsters by Shirtaloon (Support Shirtaloon on Patreon) It is fun to see how litRPG authors solve the problem of getting a normal person into a world that functions like a game. Is it an alien invasion ( Dungeon Crawler Carl, The Gam3 )? Is it a VR capsule that generates a lifelike video game world around them ( Life Reset, Awaken Online, Ascend Online, The Crafting of Chess, The Land )? In He Who Fights With Monsters , Jason, the main character, gets sucked into another dimension by an evil wizard’s spell gone wrong. It doesn’t turn out so great for the evil wizard, but Jason finds he quite likes his life in his new world. Jason’s new world is beset by monsters, but he discovers a knack for killing them—and getting himself embroiled in the heart of local political intrigues along the way. The story plays with a delightful irony: Jason is basically a nice, modern Aussie bloke, but the powers he keeps acquiring in his new world are the kind the bad guys usually get. For instance, his familiar is an “apocalypse beast” that takes the form of a bunch of leeches that live in his blood. Yuck. He cuts himself, and they spray out on his opponents, eating them alive. If Jason were to leave the creatures free to continue their killing rampage, the leech monster would soon become strong enough to destroy the whole world. Move along, folks, no soon-to-be-evil overlords here. In the typical, downbeat humor that fills the book, Jason named his apocalypse beast “Colin.” The good news for fans of He Who Fights With Monsters is that it is really, really long. The books weigh in about 600+ pages. I found myself wishing they were longer. Orconomics by J. Zachary Pike (Support J. Zachary Pike on Patreon) This book made me laugh out loud. A lot. The jokes have a meta-level satire, playing with language and weaving game dynamics into the story in a way that adds another dimension of fun and hilarity. Gamers will experience a deeper level of humor than your average Joe. Unlike the other books on the list, Orconomics doesn’t feature a player from the “real world” coming into the fantasy world. The characters of the story are natives and their world happens to include things like levels and quests and all the bells and whistles of any self-respecting role-playing game. However, similar to the other books on this list, the story centers around the unfolding narrative arcs of a handful of compelling characters. The story features a washed-up has-been of a main character, Gorm the dwarven berserker, who has fallen from his glory days into the bottom of a keg of ale. Gorm accepts a quest to help a goblin and is dragged out of his personal abyss and into important events happening in the larger world. Along the way, he gathers a motley crew of similar misfits-with-a-heart-of-gold and the stage is set for a thrilling plot, compelling character transformations, and lots of laughs. Here is just a taste of the humor in J. Zachary Pike’s short, but loveable series: “The exact ratio of irony to matter in the universe is known as Nove’s Constant, and by definition, it’s more than you’d expect.” Son of a Liche “It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention. In the same vein, desperation is the father of compromise, panic is the sister of slapdash improvisation, and despair is the second cousin of quiet apathy. By that reckoning, dinner was a dismal family reunion.” Son of a Liche And the series is not without the occasional nugget of wisdom: “A weak mind is a malleable one. Once it is convinced it has been lied to, it begins to lie to itself. Once persuaded that it is hated, it becomes hateful. Once made to fear violence, it becomes violent.” Son of a Liche Awaken Online by Travis Bagwell (Support Travis on Patreon) The first book of the Awaken Online series had me at “high school loser gets bullied and then finds power in a game to fight back against the real-life forces arrayed against him.” The storyline is a classic because it is irresistible. Warning: The next paragraph has spoilers. Read at your own risk. If you want to skip the spoilers, jump down a paragraph. Not long after the book begins, (another) Jason finds himself (also) saddled with dark powers and is plonked down in a medieval-ish city. Jason chooses the necromancer class (because, why not?) and starts raising undead minions as any self-respecting necromancer would. The situation quickly starts to get out of hand, but Jason is apparently from the “in for a penny, in for a pound” school when it comes to necromancy. Soon a dark god gets involved, people are getting zombified left and right, Jason acquires the in-game AI as a personal pet, and he finds himself the ruler of a newly-minted undead city. And that is just the first half of the first book! OK. Spoilers over. The two things about this story that make me really love it are: 1. The AI can read the player’s memories and builds the story around them to suit the unique places they need to grow as human beings. What a setup for character development! This could have been a heavy-handed plot device, but I like what Bagwell does with it. 2. Events in the game are constantly influencing and being influenced by real-world events outside the game. As the series goes on, the stakes in both the real world and the game world get higher and higher. Life Reset By Shemer Kuznits (Support Shemer on Patreon) The book opens with Oren, the main character, sitting in the lap of luxury at the center of an in-game empire he has built. A few brutal twists of fate later, Oren has been stripped of all of his levels, his loot, and his stuff and is locked inside the body of a sniveling, level 1 goblin. He is cast out into the wild, monster-infested hinterlands where he, of course, begins to hatch his revenge schemes. Naturally, they involve building a new empire—this one entirely composed of monster allies—to take back what was once his. It is just good, clean litRPG fun. The series features an interesting (but morally confusing) relationship with one of the goblin NPCs, real-world government plots, dealings with (I’m sensing a theme) dark gods, and all the dungeon crawling you could ask for. If you liked the early Warcraft games and just wanted to be left alone so you could command your little peons to go mine more gold, you’ll like Life Reset . That is basically Oren’s life. Honorable Mentions: Game Lit If you want to be technical about it, litRPG is a sub-genre of GameLit (which is itself a sub-genre of fantasy). No list of this kind would be complete without a few honorable mentions from the parent category. Ender’s Game Skip the movie, buy the book, and stay up late reading as Ender outwits every opponent that crosses his path. Ready Player One Ditto for the movie. The book is much better. Ready Player One is the story of a nobody who rises to prominence because he solves a series of unsolvable puzzles in a high-stakes digital treasure hunt. What is his superpower? He dominates at ’80s trivia. (It does actually make sense if you read the book). Read more from Andy Patton on Substack .

by John Micheal Heard “Holy, holy, holy!” With these words, the four living creatures gathered around the throne of God cry out at the sight of the slain lamb in Revelation. Not just “Holy!” But “Holy, holy, holy!” As if speaking it once could not capture the scope of what they were trying to communicate. “Repetition is holy,” my poetry teacher used to say. She taught me to treat repetition like one might handle a sword: it is sharp; it will cut. Use it with discretion and never with haste. Repeat yourself and those words will burn into the minds of your readers. Repeat only those words which you love most. The danger of repetition used without discretion is that it will dull the sword. “Holy” has unfortunately become one of those terms that has lost its luster in many Christian circles. It’s a word we casually use to connote God’s magnificence without doing the work to demonstrate it in detail or mean it with depth. It is easy to sing “holy” in our worship songs, to say he is “holy” from the pulpit. But how is he holy? Is he holy in our hearts? Holy in our minds? Holy in our relationships? The word “holy” means set apart, otherworldly, sacred. Jesus teaches us to pray, “Hallowed by thy name.” That is, “Let your name, O God, be unlike any other name.” Holiness is a central characteristic of God. There is no one like him. Nothing can match his beauty, goodness, and love. The word “holy” becoming trite is tragic because it is antithetical to the meaning of the word and thereby contradicts the intention of Jesus’ prayer — that God’s name should forever be exalted. The danger of repetition used without discretion is that it will dull the sword. “Holy” has unfortunately become one of those terms that has lost its luster in many Christian circles. John Michael Heard Good writers are characterized by their precision and intentionality with language. They say what they mean and mean what they say. Even the nuances of their sentences are carefully placed, leaving room for their readers to roam. A bad writer can write a book and say nothing; a good writer can fit entire worlds into a single word. God is no exception. “In the beginning was the Word,” the Gospel of John begins. When God speaks, all creation listens because his words are significant. The same should also be true of his people. I think this is what Jesus is getting at when he discusses the problem with oaths in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus urges his disciples to be men and women of their word. “Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’” he says, “and your ‘No,’ ‘No;’ anything beyond this comes from the evil one.” Herein lies a crucial characteristic of our enemy: the devil does not merely want to deceive us into sin; he wants to make our words mean nothing. If he manages this, then our worship becomes hollow and, eventually, our lives as well. Writers are wordsmiths. We can dissect words or fill them. We can parade them around or ignore them. We can even make them up if we like! As such, writers often carry a special awareness of the state of our vocabularies. The meanings of our words change all the time, for better or for worse. The task of the writer, then, is to fill our words with purpose so that they can stand firm in the ever-shifting tides of meaning. And, in some cases, this means bringing back to life those sacred words that may have been buried with time. Do you think those gathered around the throne of God were merely reciting, “Holy,” as though reading it from a book? Certainly not. They were trying to give expression to what they could hardly fathom. Was “holy” sufficient? No. But it was the best that they could muster. When confronted by the glory of God, our words will always and inevitably fall short—if they could do him justice, then our God would be too small. Even so, we still speak because his creative and divine brilliance compels us to offer up the best of what we have to offer: words. Writers, when you look at God, what do you see? Are there words enough to capture it? No? Then for now let one word suffice: “Holy, holy, holy!” John Michael Heard grew up in Almaty, Kazakhstan. He recently completed his film degree at Asbury University and is now studying Spiritual Formation at Asbury Theological Seminary. His passion is storytelling through screenwriting, poetry, and fiction. His most recent short story “Faster” was published in Issue 16 of Cagibi literary journal.

by Bailey McGee Leslie Bustard is one of those people who is just easy to love. That much became evident when the idea for this video project was suggested as a way to encourage Leslie during her ongoing battle with cancer. People rallied together to create the video you are about to see, and even in writing this introduction, it was hard to decide what to leave out from the tributes written for our dear friend. But here are a few thoughts from those involved: Karen Smith writes: “If you know Leslie then you have undoubtedly been blessed by the warm smile and peaceful aura that seem to follow her everywhere she goes. Infused by the Spirit, she brings an instant calm that makes you want to take a deep breath, pour a cup of tea, and listen to her words of encouragement and wisdom. Through the years we have messaged, hugged at Hutchmoot, and shared prayers and mutual concerns over abnormal test results. When mine came back benign, hers did not. Cancer is a thief.” Elizabeth Harwell says: “In Leslie’s poem, ‘Thursday,’ she describes the day she was told about more tumors in her body. In response to the news, she says with beautiful honesty: ‘I thought of other people praying.’ I loved that line from the moment I read it. I understood what it meant to collapse upon the thought of other people doing the work of prayer for you. It’s courageous to trust others to bear what you cannot. It’s vulnerable to climb onto a mat and be lowered down through a roof. Do your friends have the resilience to not let up? Do they have enough faith to walk through dark valleys?” Leslie’s poetry, like just about everything about her, is vibrant even in the shadow of darkness. By acknowledging what is true for all, and in considering her death and what it must mean, she is giving us the gift of truly appreciating life. So when the idea was suggested of giving back to Leslie by reading her poems aloud, it seemed fitting. She has given so much to us, how wonderful to embody the words she has written. This project, then, is a labor of love for someone who has inspired us all in many ways. I hope that as you see and hear Leslie’s poetry come to life, you get a sense of her heart, a sense of wonder at the goodness around us, beautiful in its frailty. I hope you feel invited into this community that loves each other and lifts one another up, even if just for long enough to enjoy a poem of Leslie’s. For this hour, and hopefully many afterward, may you know the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Featured artwork by Bruce Herman.

by Matt Conner Much has been said about the stages of Holy Week, reflecting upon the final days of Jesus’s ministry and life, but few writers have handled the subject so beautifully as Frederick Buechner. There are reasons we turn to Buechner’s thoughtful work again and again, and it felt right to allow his words to reflect on the very real goodness of Good Friday. From his book The Faces of Jesus: A Life Story , Buechner describes why the word “good” was used to “describe the day of his death”: “God so loved the world” John writes, “that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” That is to say that God so loved the world that he gave his only son even to this obscene horror; so loved the world that in some ultimately indescribable way and at some ultimately immeasurable cost he gave the world himself. Out of this terrible death, John says, came eternal life not just in the sense of resurrection to life after death but in the sense of life so precious even this side of death that to live it is to stand with one foot already in eternity. To participate in the sacrificial life and death of Jesus Christ is to live already in his kingdom. This is the essence of the Christian message, the heart of the Good News, and it is why the cross has become the chief Christian symbol. A cross of all things—a guillotine, a gallows—but the cross at the same time as the crossroads of eternity and time, as the place where such a mighty heart was broken that the healing power of God himself could flow through it into a sick and broken world. It was for this reason that of all the possible words they could have used to describe the day of his death, the word they settled on was “good.”  Good  Friday. The Faces of Jesus: A Life Story, 1974. Matt Conner is a former pastor and church planter turned writer and editor. He’s the founder of Analogue Media and lives in Indianapolis.

by RR Staff Our friend W. David O. Taylor should be no stranger to anyone here. He’s served as the keynote speaker at Hutchmoot, written for the blog, and appeared on podcasts, and we’ve always appreciated his sharp mind, his strong faith, and his generous spirit. David’s latest book, A Body of Praise: Understanding the Role of Our Physical Bodies in Worship , released earlier this year, is an insightful work on the human body and the importance of embodiment. In order to whet your appetite for the book, we have an exclusive excerpt to share with Rabbit Room readers! The Spirit Who Plays Jazz A final aspect of a theology of spontaneity is captured in the language of the Spirit as jazz player. While this particular metaphor is widely used in theological writings about the Holy Spirit, it remains useful for our purposes here too. Jeremy Begbie helpfully unpacks the meaning of the metaphor as it relates to the context of corporate worship. Over against the presumption that only order and disorder might characterize our experience of worship, Begbie proposes a third mode, non-order, and uses laughter as an example. “It is not order (predictably patterned),” he writes, “but nor is it disorder (destructive).” It is instead what might be called non-order or the jazz-factor. Begbie explains at length: Note: You can order A Body of Praise from the Rabbit Room Store here . W. David O. Taylor (ThD, Duke Divinity School) is associate professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary. An Anglican priest, he has lectured widely on the arts, from Thailand to South Africa. Taylor has written for the Washington Post, Image Journal, and Religion News Service, among others. He is the author of several books, including Glimpses of the New Creation: Worship and the Formative Power of the Arts and Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life. In 2016, he produced a short film on the psalms with Bono and Eugene Peterson. He lives in Austin, Texas.

by Justin McRoberts Have you ever dealt with a bad case of jet lag? Yeah, same. It can be really disorienting and even a bit frustrating; getting where you’ve worked to get and then feeling so unwell that you barely feel there at all. A few years ago, I hatched what I thought was a brilliant plan to deal with jet lag on an upcoming international flight. I would stay up all night before my flight, sleep the entire 11 hours from SFO to Frankfurt and when I arrived, I’d feel refreshed and focused. It almost worked, this “brilliant” plan. I did, in fact, sleep the entire flight and wake up when the plane touched down. I also felt refreshed, mentally, having slept. But I’d spent that sleep balled up and crooked in my window seat, so when I stood up and grabbed my bag, I threw my back out and spent the next three days in pain, struggling to get out of chairs much less get out of bed. My host (who was an Army chaplain) was patient and kind with my slowness as well as all the noises I was making. Eventually, he said “We need to get you checked out. I’ll call the chiropractor.” Thing is, the chiropractor he referred me to was working on the army base in Heidelberg and seeing an army doctor wasn’t the most comforting thought. I was imagining myself doing jumping jacks while being barked at by Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket : “You want me to adjust that back, son? Adjust that attitude first! It wasn’t that way at all. The chiropractor was a soft-spoken Canadian named Sara who got me straightened out over an hour-long session, during which she said “Wow, you really slept wrong.” I found that such a strange sentence and idea. That I could “sleep wrong.” Turns out, there are quite a few ways I have tried to rest that are actually harmful. We rest so we can get back to work. We rest as a reward for work We rest infrequently That’s naming just a few. I’ve certainly found other ways to rest poorly. The heart of the matter in all of it is that I’ve too often treated rest like a simple tool to fix my tired, distracted soul. But true rest is a practice. In fact, rest is a life-long practice in and through which I learn myself, over and over, so that I can be more whole (not only more rested). Rest is a loving and curious conversation between my conscious mind, my soul, and The One Who Holds My Life together. On my way to Germany, I had “rested” in a way that, quite literally, distorted me. I think that happens more often than we figure. The best example I can recall is the way I might become “vacation dependent.” I’m not anti-vacation, but I do think vacations or leisure trips can be more restorative (and more enjoyable) in the context of a life in which rest is a regular practice. Consider how many people you know come back from a long-awaited vacation and immediately wish they had a few days of vacation to recover from their vacation! Too many of us return from an escapist vacation adventure to our regular patterns of work and home with a deeper resentment for daily life. Justin McRoberts More problematic than that, a reliance on vacations can distort my relationship with my everyday life. Maybe you’ve heard people talk about how badly they wished they lived in Hawaii or Tahiti or Tahoe or wherever it is they “get away.” As much as I understand that sentiment, it’s also a dismissal of the goodness available right where we live. “Home” becomes a “boring” place where things get done, while “fun,” “happiness,” and “the good life” are on a beach a thousand miles away. That’s a terrible way to live. A dependency on vacation can also mal-form my relationship with work. I can end up thinking of “work” as a thing I have to do but something I am happier getting away from. Work becomes a necessary evil, while “vacation” becomes the antidote. Too many of us return from an escapist vacation adventure to our regular patterns of work and home with a deeper resentment for daily life. All of that is to the detriment of the loved ones and projects and organizations we’d joyfully given ourselves to at some earlier point. I’d hope a departure from our normal patterns can lead to a renewed love and joy for the life we get to live. Too often, in the absence of a regular pattern of rest, “vacations” steal that everyday joy. So here’s what I’ve learned: A regular Sabbath practice gives me the opportunity to stop in the middle of the good life I’m already living and appreciate it so that I am not resting from the life I’m living; I’m resting in it. The proximity of a Sabbath practice (in that it happens in regular, direct relationship to my every day relationships and circumstances) helps to clear my vision to see what I have more completely and lovingly. A regular Sabbath practice isn’t just about “recovering from work” or even “getting rest.” In a regular Sabbath practice… I learn what “rest” looks like for me in this season of life. I have room to pay attention to my own soul so I can re-learn what rest looks like when the season of my life changes (because it will). I have room to stop and see (and remember) I have a good life, given to me by the same Good God who is also inviting me to rest. I re-remember the goodness of my life when I forget. As it turns out, one of the reasons jet lag knocks people out so hard is that our bodies and minds are already so tired that we don’t have the ability to recover quickly from the disorientation. Which is to say, part of what I learned in Germany was that it probably didn’t matter how I went about addressing my need and desire to show up “rested” for that trip. I needed to learn what my soul even meant by “rest.” That knowledge has only come by way of practicing. You can read more of Justin’s work on Sabbath in his latest book Sacred Strides: The Journey to Belovedness in Work and Rest available on May 30 from Thomas Nelson Publishers. Justin McRoberts lives in Martinez, California, with his wife and their kids, Asa and Katelyn. He coaches artists, ministers, and entrepreneurs. He also travels regularly to lead retreats, teach, and perform. Justin really likes peanut butter (both chunky and smooth) and loves wrestling with his two kiddos. He lets them win. He is the author of six books including Sacred Strides: The Journey To Belovedness In Work and Rest.

by Timothy Willard C.S. Lewis was a Christian mystic but not in the pagan sense, in the Tozer sense: he experienced his faith deep in his sentient being, always aware of God’s presence in his own nature and the world around him. Lewis’s friend George Sayer said Lewis’s life experiences were not literary but “mystical experiences of the presence of God.” As a young boy, Lewis’s aesthetic experiences were mediated through nature. This affinity for the beauty of nature persisted in his life. Before breakfast, recalls Sayer, Lewis would walk the garden to drink in “the beauty of the morning, thanking God for the weather, the roses, the song of the birds, and anything else he could find to enjoy.” When Lewis and his brother Warren reminisced about their childhood, Jack “lamented the lost simplicity of country pleasures: the empty sky, the unspoilt hills, the white silent roads on which you could hear the rattle of a farm cart half a mile away.” In Lewis’s final work of fiction, Till We Have Faces , when Psyche admits to Orual that the sweetest thing in all her life is to go to the mountain to find where all the beauty came from, we hear Jack’s voice pining for the One Thing behind the thing. In Lewis’s mysticism, we find hidden instructions for chasing beauty in our everyday callings and in our art. Lewis would have us be reachers and builders . Consider the painting of a child. We’ll call her Phoebe. Phoebe’s mother invites her to paint the sunset. So, Phoebe sits with her paper, looks at the melting colors in the sky, and smears wonder marks, filling her makeshift canvas. Think about Phoebe’s act. She sees. She listens. She thinks. She paints. With her senses afire, she rebuilds the awe-full sky before her. She uses the materials given to her to paint what she sees. What does her painting show us? Is it mere mimesis? Or is it something more profound? Phoebe reaches for the awe trapped in the colors that dazzle her sense of sight. Her innocence gives her purity of voice. She paints unaffected by forces telling her how to represent what she sees. In her act of sky-building, she paints from her truest self.  Lewis, however, points to the fact that only God truly creates; he alone brings something from nothing, and he alone brings forth existence itself. Timothy Willard The vision of the sunset elevates her mind. Though her strokes to an adult appear raw, a rhythm of joy flows across the page—felt more than seen. The great translator of Homer, W.H.D. Rouse, said the hallmark of all great poets is plain, unaffected language. Perhaps this is why a child’s painting can be simple yet possess unexpected beauty. Now, what does her act of painting achieve? Phoebe’s smears reach to seize what the wonderful scene whispers. That there is thought— Logos —somewhere there. Of course, she does not call it Logos . She doesn’t even call it beauty. She calls it something more elemental and uses pure description as only a child can. Perhaps she calls the sunset a rainbow or a dance. Maybe she calls it a color song. This Logos touches all living things in creation. I love meditating on the truth that God thought of creation before it, or I, existed. And it is my existence that recognizes this mysterious and supreme Logos-Existence in everything and reaches to hold it. I’m reminded of how the French philosopher Pierre-Marie Emonet described the radiant thrust ( phys ) within a flower that reaches toward the light so that it may acquire its flower characteristics or flowerness. Phoebe, like the flower, possesses this radiance of being, the echoes of which are smeared in paint strokes on the page. Reaching to hold. As Psyche reached toward the mountains. Why? On June 26, 1954, Lewis wrote to a young admirer named Joan, who had sent Lewis a sample of her writing. She’d described a very special night in her letter and asked Lewis about the art of writing. Lewis replied: “ … you describe the place & the people and the night and the feeling of it all, very well—and not the thing itself—the setting but not the jewel. And no wonder! Wordsworth often does just the same. His Prelude is full of moments in which everything except the thing itself is described.” Then Lewis discloses his own creative journey to Joan. “If you become a writer,” he says, “you’ll be trying to describe the thing all your life: and lucky if, out of dozens of books, one or two sentences, just for a moment, come near to getting it across.” Joan and Phoebe’s–and even Lewis’s–creative paths are similar. Each experienced something special in the event of beauty—the blazing sunset and the memorable evening. Each used what Lewis might call their raw materials to build something to document their encounter. Joan used words, syntax, intuition, and imagination. Phoebe used her imagination, paper, paint, brushes, and fingers. The reaching ignites building. We never create, wrote Lewis in Letters to Malcolm , “We only build.” And that might dent our modern sensibilities. We create, we express , or so we like to say. Lewis, however, points to the fact that only God truly creates; he alone brings something from nothing, and he alone brings forth existence itself. We shouldn’t bristle at Lewis’s distinction between the verbs create and build. With the rise of the autonomous self and the art world’s emphasis on self-expression and transgression as the goal of art, our culture could use a dose of creative humility and a guiding hand away from a more Promethean approach to the creative process.  Lewis himself never believed he’d captured beauty once and for all. It was the hunt—the reaching—he loved. Timothy Willard The late Oxford philosopher and writer Sir Roger Scruton believed we live in a time of desecration. Our society values the profane over the sacred. The goal of art before the Enlightenment, says Scruton, was beauty–something beyond the self, transcendent. Now the artist’s goal bends inward. This bent-in notion emerges in Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy, manifesting in the Bent One ( Out of the Silent Planet ), the Uman ( Perelandra ), and the insidious political agency N.I.C.E. ( That Hideous Strength ). All embody the theological concept of incurvatus in se or “curved in on oneself.” Sin takes root, and beauty is banished, replaced by the profane, often disguised as progress. Let’s follow the trajectory of Phoebe’s gaze. She looks toward the image of beauty, reaching beyond herself to capture the dazzle of heaven within it. Jane also gazes outward. She describes a brim-full experience with words too feeble to capture the moment’s weight. Both offer a public work ( liturgy ) expressing private adoration of Beauty itself. They build cathedrals of imagination and wonder. A kind of artisan workmanship is attached to Lewis’s thought of “building.” Even a humility that understands the beautiful moment, tends to it, and works with tools and imagination to free the angel in the marble. You and I are reachers. Artists, writers, educators, bankers, ministers, gardeners, it matters not. Our “building” occurs in the pursuit of our callings. Some of us follow Phoebe and Joan’s path, rushing daily to build out our view of beauty on a canvas, in verse, a photograph, in song, in clay. The reaching and the building forge us into people of “gentle hearts.” Lewis himself never believed he’d captured beauty once and for all. It was the hunt—the reaching—he loved. His raw materials? Inkwell, nib, loose leaf paper, and an imagination baptized by Beauty itself. “Yes, you are always everywhere. But I, Hunting in such immeasurable forests, Could never bring the noble Hart to bay.” —C.S. Lewis, “No Beauty We Could Desire.” Timothy Willard is a writer and independent scholar. He studied beauty and northern aesthetics in the works of C.S. Lewis for his Ph.D. under the supervision of Alister McGrath. He is the author of four books, including his most recent, The Beauty Chasers: Recapturing the Wonder of the Divine (2022). He lives in Waxhaw, North Carolina. Follow Tim’s writing on Substack: Further Up .

by RR Staff In the past few years, I’ve grown increasingly attached, first to the development of Rabbit Room Press, which is constantly growing into new and exciting areas, and more recently, to Rabbit Room Theatre, which has exciting things coming up in the near future. At the same time, the organization has grown by leaps and bounds since I was appointed Executive Director in 2016. Over the course of the last couple of years, I’ve consistently asked the Rabbit Room Board to allow me to focus more intentionally on the Press and Theatre, and now we’ve collectively agreed that the time make that shift has come. As of today, we are officially searching for a new Executive Director, and I’m directing all of my efforts toward the continued health and growth of the Press and Theatre programs. I could not be more excited about this opportunity to lean wholly into my creative gifts. And I’m equally excited to discover the person who will fill my previous role and usher the organization into its bright future.  –Pete Peterson At its heart, the Rabbit Room aims to cultivate a joyful working environment in which each member of the team is empowered to think creatively, to strive for excellence, and to faithfully, generously, and humbly pour out their unique gifts in order to reveal the beauty of Christ to the world. As our Executive Director, you will manage and oversee the implementation of directives set forth by the Rabbit Room Board of Directors. You will get to develop strategic plans for driving the mission of the organization and will play a key part in shaping the public’s experience of the Rabbit Room and its programs. You will get to collaborate with team members and senior leadership to develop new processes and gain insight into current ones. To be successful, you will need to be a self-motivated professional with proven experience and an outstanding track record in leadership, critical thinking, business relationships, communications, and team collaboration. You will need the skills to lead a creative team as they engage with a global audience through a variety of media and will need to show a creative approach to problem-solving while embodying a spirit of generosity. Most importantly, you will use your skills and experience to help the Rabbit Room in its mission to cultivate and curate stories, music, and art to nourish Christ-centered communities for the life of the world. What You’ll Be Doing Acting as a liaison between the Board of Directors and the Rabbit Room staff Leading and encouraging a collaborative, productive, and healthy culture among the Rabbit Room staff Developing strategic relationships with supporters and organizations Overseeing business management as well as tracking progress toward financial goals and budgetary plans throughout the year Analyzing and managing operational processes and performance, recommending solutions for improvement when necessary Ensuring that Rabbit Room communications adhere to the voice, ethos, and orthodoxy of the organization Executing contracts and liaising with general counsel on legal and strategic matters Ensuring insurance compliance Acting as a Rabbit Room representative at conferences, conventions, etc. Conducting regular staff meetings Conducting quarterly employee evaluations for program heads What We Are Looking For At least a bachelor’s degree in organizational development, business, communications, public relations, or related fields A desire to make and maintain personal connections within a broad community of creators, artists, organizations, and supporters Five years of experience in related fields Proven gifting in leadership, emotional intelligence, collaboration, and communication Strong analytical and quantitative skills; ability to use hard data and metrics to back up assumptions and drive good choices Ability to work collaboratively across departments Strength in creative problem-solving, attention to detail, and the ability to work in a deadline-driven work environment Other Information Location : Nashville, Tennessee (Cane Ridge). This is an in-person role. Beginning : Spring/Summer 2023 Reporting to : Board of Directors Compensation & Benefits: Minimum starting salary is $90,000/year (plus healthcare package) 4 Weeks paid time off annually + 15 days off for holidays Paid parental leave Paid learning stipend Flexible schedule You get to work in the beautiful North Wind Manor and staff office. Access to Rabbit Room events year-round, including international conferences Opportunity to work in a creative environment in a growing organization About the Rabbit Room The Rabbit Room was conceived as an experiment in creative community. After author/singer/songwriter Andrew Peterson’s first visit to the Oxford home of C. S. Lewis, he returned to Nashville with a renewed conviction that community nourishes good and lasting artistic work. The Rabbit Room, the name of the back room of the pub where the Oxford Inklings (including Lewis, Tolkien, and Charles Williams, among others) shared their stories, began as an online store for books and music and a blog with contributors who are authors, songwriters, artists, and pastors. Over the years, it has grown to include a publishing house, podcast network, an annual arts conference called Hutchmoot, a theater program, a beautiful community and event space called North Wind Manor, and a vibrant community of artists and creators. To Apply Email andy@rabbitroom.com with your resume and a cover letter to apply.

by Matt Conner The last few years have found Jess Ray wrestling on several fronts—with her calling, her music, her spirituality. She’s not the only one. A global pandemic shook the trees for a lot of us, a forced reconsideration of most aspects of life as routines were interrupted and institutions were weakened. What has made Jess’s music so compelling is how her lays bare such struggles and questions in ways that invite us in. She gives us permission to wonder (or wander) and makes us feel less alone on the journey. It’s found in the beauty of albums like Born Again or even her work with Taylor Leonhardt in Mission House. We recently asked Jess to update us on what she’s doing musically these days and what to expect at this week’s special edition of The Local Show . I’d love to start with a musical update from you on all fronts, just to keep readers informed as to what you’re doing. Well, I put out a record called Born Again last year. It came out like September or October and I worked all year long on that. I just loved making that album. I loved every bit of it. In some ways, I’m a little sad it’s over, I think, because I’d started a podcast related to it and was hosting conversation around what I was getting at with that album. It was all different themes that will probably be relatable to a lot of people, everything from deconstruction and the reconstruction of my faith to being at a mega church at the beginning of the pandemic and then left that. I really went through about a year-and-a-half of sabbatical and the time of healing after that was just a challenging season. So that album is full of songs that were related to a lot of things going on personally in my life and in the world over the past few years. Getting to share the songs and then the podcast and the conversation around that has been a really meaningful thing to do the past year or so. I think I want to keep doing that. I’m sure anyone else who’s creating music these days feels the same, but it just seems really consumable. People on Friday will kind of check out your song or album or whatever, and by the next week, they’re kind of moved on to the next thing. So there’s some frustration, I think, being an artist these days. I think we want our music to last longer. We want people to care about full albums and stuff like that, but the systems don’t really lend toward that. So I would say, I am probably going to finish up the podcast. I don’t know that I’m going to do a second season, but I’m leaning more towards that than not at this point. And then I’ll just continue to release songs related to a lot of the same content that should feel really compatible with my album born again. That is probably what I’ll do for the next year. I want to continue to host conversation both in song form and podcast form, specifically aimed at people who find themselves in an interesting spot given this moment of crisis we feel both in our nation and in church. So I’m trying to continue to offer resources and companionship for people who find themselves in that spot. How does all of this fit with Mission House ? Because you have this whole other project we’ve not even mentioned, right? Yeah. With Mission House, Taylor [Leonhardt] and I writing worship songs for the church. It started in 2018 or 2019 after we had realized we had kind of this pile of worship music, and then we got signed to Integrity [Music]. Then a pandemic happened as we were starting a band. So I would say there are numerous things that really knocked the wind out of us as a band. We were literally writing songs for church gatherings, and then everyone stopped gathering for church. I believe if God means to continue to work through Mission House, I’m sure he will, but yeah, it’s been a bumpy road keeping the thing going. At the same time, we didn’t go looking for it, it wasn’t something that Taylor and I wanted to do. Doors were just opening and it was something we felt more called towards than necessarily something we’d dreamed of. So it’s been a really good and meaningful couple of years, even with the challenges. But we’ve just turned a corner. This year, I have an even clearer vision of what we’re going to do, at least for about a year or two, for Mission House. We are hosting these live recordings where we’ll pick locations in the U.S. We’ve sent out practice tracks for people to actually learn alto, tenor and soprano parts for the songs. So we’re actually turning our crowd into a choir, and they can really feel involved in a special way. Our hope is that we write good songs that are easy for people to sing. We were literally writing songs for church gatherings, and then everyone stopped gathering for church. Jess Ray We just did one in Dallas, and it was beautiful. It was so fun. We know we’re going to do three of those potentially this year. If they go well, that is probably what we’ll do for now with Mission House—a mix of a touring experience and recording albums at the same time. It would just be a running list of what we’re calling family nights, with these albums that come from those recordings. With how it went so well in Dallas, I can’t help but imagine us doing this kind of for the next couple of years. And then, yes, I’m still trying to produce produce my own music, and I produce a lot of Mission House stuff and then trying to have at least an artist or two each year that I’m working with to produce their music as well. It’s mainly those three things that go around. You said people were responding to Born Again , but is there one song in particular that you hear about again and again? It’s not one. I have little stories from a number of them, but one would be “Place to Land”. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback on that. I think the number of people who just feel the frenzy of the days we’re living in… this era is just forcing us to live an inhuman pace of life. It shows our desperate need for Sabbath and rest and to disconnect from things. So I get a lot of feedback about that song. “At Your Mercy” is another one that people talk about. I call that song “my trust fall back into God.” I wasn’t ever fully walking away from God, but this past season has brought me to rededicate my life to Christ, to come face-to-face with the stuff that are hang-ups for me and work through those. It’s not that they’re all completely sorted at this point, but it’s me coming to that decision again saying, ‘Into your hands, I commit my spirit. I can’t understand this. But I am giving myself completely to this again.’ And I think there are so many of listeners who have been in that same moment, coming kind of to the end of themselves and then giving themselves again to God. I love to hear that! You’ll get to play some of these songs at The Local Show coming up. Any special plans there? Oh, they’ve let me pick all the people which was so cool. My friends, The River Indigo , a husband and wife, will be there. Cecily Hennigan , an incredible singer-songwriter, has the coolest voice ever and will be there. And then Paul Demer writes beautiful acoustic folk and has a wonderful voice. I’m so excited because I haven’t really collaborated with any of them before, but I like all of them. So that’s gonna be really cool. And in that kind of setting, it’s cool because it makes you strip back all of your songs to just a guitar or piano. That’ll be really fun, especially these new songs that are so pop-driven. It’s fun to get to kind of present those in a very stripped back way, but it’s also a little bit vulnerable. Because the songs have so much built up on the tracks, it’s a fun challenge to say, ‘All right, is this a good song? When you just play piano or guitar, does it still work?’ I love The Local Show. I mean, I credit it for numerous opportunities that I’ve received since the first time I did that. So I’m very grateful for it and I’m excited to be back. Matt Conner is a former pastor and church planter turned writer and editor. He’s the founder of Analogue Media and lives in Indianapolis.

by JJ Heller Graduation season is almost upon us! Five years ago I wrote letter to my high school self, and I just released a song inspired by some of these thoughts. Here’s some of what it said… Dear JJ, Congrats on making it into vocal ensemble! You won’t get very many solos, but don’t let this discourage you. God has something amazing in store for your future. I would tell you about it, but you wouldn’t believe me. Don’t beat yourself up too much for missing that potentially game-winning shot sophomore year. You worked hard in practice and gave it your all. You can rest in that. Life is more than wins and losses. When you have a house of your own someday, you won’t have a single trophy on display. You’re not going to find the love of your life in high school, so don’t take things too seriously. Just use this time to learn about relationships. Now listen up, because this is important. When your senior-year boyfriend tells you that he doesn’t care for brown eyes, tell him that you don’t care for his insensitivity. Someday soon you’ll marry a man named Dave who will love your brown eyes. The two of you will have a daughter named Lucy whose dark brown eyes will melt your hearts. And then you’ll have a daughter named Nora who will have your husband’s gray/green/blue eyes that will look just like the ocean. Make sure to thank your freshman English teacher for telling you that you have a talent for creative writing. Her suggestion to move you up to honors English will be one of the best decisions of your life. You’ll fall in love with the power and beauty of words in that class. Give your sister a compliment now and then and look for ways to connect. Make sure to tell her you love her. High school is hard on everybody. Thank Mom for not just coming to every single volleyball match, softball and basketball game, but for being the most enthusiastic one there. No one could deny the love in her voice. She will always be your cheerleader. Thank Dad for taking you to “the little gym” every Sunday night so you can practice your shot. You will shoot thousands of times over the next few years, and with every rebound, Dad is saying, “I love you.” The popular kids will disappear from view as soon as you pack up your graduation gown, so spend time with the people who love you. Invest in your family. They will be in your life when high school is just a memory. In some ways, life will surpass your wildest expectations, but it will also bring darker times than you ever imagined. It may take a while to learn, but you’re stronger than you give yourself credit for. You will make mistakes, but you are loved. Don’t try to grow up too fast. Love, Your future self Make sure to visit JJ Heller’s official site for more music and updates!

by Caroline Cobb I started dreaming about the theme of my next album just before 2020, and found myself drawn toward the Psalms. So in my personal devotion time, I began studying and meditating on a new Psalm each day, praying them back to God and letting these ancient prayers shape my own. Little did I know how difficult the next few years would turn out to be, or how the Psalms would end up giving me words to pray through a worldwide pandemic, my own ministry burnout, and the unexpected death of my dad after heart surgery. Psalms: The Poetry of Prayer is the fruit of those years praying the Psalter, its songs giving voice to trust, joy, confession, thanksgiving, lament, and more. The tracklist is ordered intentionally, loosely patterned after the A.C.T.S. model of prayer or the flow of a church service. I also attempted a quasi-chiasmus structure, with the first and last song being about God’s Word and the center song being the only one that names Jesus explicitly. My hope is that these songs will give listeners the language to sing, pray, and converse with God through all kinds of emotions and circumstances. 01 – “Like A Tree (Psalm 1)” Psalm 1 serves as an introduction to the Psalter, so it felt right to have this song kick off the album and set the table for the rest of the tracklist. As I pray/sing in the chorus, I want to be like a tree planted by God’s river and rooted in his nourishing Word and presence… even when the sun gets hot and the winds pick up. Musically, producer Paul Demer and I had a lot of fun with this one – the echoing gang vocal was his idea – and I love the rootsy (get it? A rootsy tree song?!) sound we captured: part Americana foot-stomper, part spiritual. 02 – “No Place Better (Psalm 84),” co-written with Wendell Kimbrough This was one of the last songs added to the tracklist and, to be perfectly honest, I only started writing it because I felt the album needed another upbeat moment. But now it’s one of my favorite songs on the record. This one is super-visual for me: the drum rolls, hand claps, and trumpets conjure up the image of a marching band on parade, pilgrims joyfully making their way through the wilderness, all the way home to Zion. 03 – “Better Than Life (Psalm 63)” I hope this song serves as a worshipful prayer for those longing for God; but I also hope it gives words to the person who doesn’t feel much desire for God, yet wants to want him even still. David wrote this Psalm in the wilderness, where he allowed his physical thirst for a sip of water to point him to that deeper, more fundamentally human thirst for God Himself, the only one who can truly satisfy. I have a clear memory of writing this one: it came almost all at once while I was on a solo hike in Chattanooga before a concert. 04 – “Have Mercy (Psalm 51)” Psalm 51 seems to be the penultimate prayer of confession in scripture, so I knew I wanted to write a song from it for this project. I love that David acknowledges both the dark severity of sin and the bright hope of forgiveness in this Psalm, knowing his appeal for mercy is being heard by a God who has revealed himself as “rich in mercy,” a God who will not turn away a broken, contrite heart but runs out to meet the prodigal. I’m hopeful this song is congregational enough to find a home in Sunday morning worship, and the male vocal singing an octave down is a nod to the idea that we can confess both individually and corporately. 05 – “Like A Child With Its Mother (Psalm 131),” featuring Jess Ray I wrote this song in a season of melancholy and worry, when a complex, lose-lose situation in our community left me feeling disoriented, misunderstood, and questioning how God could possibly make things right. As I’ve struggled with bouts of anxiety over a number of things in recent years, this image of a weaned child calmed and quieted in her mother’s arms has been one I have returned to again and again. This song is both a prayer and a heart posture. My self-sufficient pride, anxious wrestling, and emotional upheaval are all regulated by God’s loving presence and sovereignty over all things. Musically, Paul Demer’s production and Jess Ray’s beautiful voice invoke these same themes: peace, rest, and quiet trust. This is another favorite on the record. My self-sufficient pride, anxious wrestling, and emotional upheaval are all regulated by God’s loving presence and sovereignty over all things. Caroline Cobb 06 – “Shepherd, Walk Beside Me (Psalm 23)” The only track that explicitly mentions Jesus by name, I intentionally placed this one at the very center of the album: a chiastic nod to the idea that Jesus is central to the story of scripture and to our ability to access God in prayer. Hundreds of songs have been written from this Psalm, but I hoped to take a unique angle by addressing the Shepherd directly and then pointing to Jesus as the Good Shepherd (John 10) by the third verse. To me, even the music feels “pastoral” (in the agrarian sense), with its three-part harmonies (Paul & Trisha Demer) and the pedal steel from Aaron Fabbrini rising and falling like the hills in the countryside. I’ve loved singing this one as a corporate worship song. 07 – “Good To Give Thanks (Psalm 92),” co-written and feat. Wendell Kimbrough Wendell, Paul, and I had a ton of fun with this one. We were able to “paint” with a lot of different sounds throughout: stomps, claps, trumpet solos, and a call-and-response vocal in the outro. A worship song with major kid-song energy, this track reminds us that it’s good, right, and life-giving to give thanks to the Lord using all musical instruments we can find. It made sense to me to put this song right after the song about what Jesus has done for us, and my hope is that it will help listeners dance and laugh like kids again—for “he has made us glad!” 08 – “My Refuge, My Fortress (Psalm 91),” featuring Paul Demer During the pandemic of 2020, two separate Kickstarter supporters commissioned a Psalm 91 song. I struggled with the theological tensions this psalm contained: it says “He will deliver you from the deadly pestilence…it will not come near you,” and yet we know God does not always physically protect us from pestilence like COVID, from suffering, or even from death itself. In writing this song, I tried to hold this seeming contradiction together even as Jesus did when he prayed both “take this cup from me” and “thy will be done.” I hope this song becomes a simple hymn for the suffering, a prayer of trust on hard days. 09 – “Don’t Hide Your Face (Psalm 102),” co-written by Rachel Wilhelm Old Testament scholars estimate that laments make up two-thirds of the Psalter. And yet, as I neared the start of production for this Psalms album, I realized the working tracklist did not yet include a true lament. A few months before, our close neighborhood friends had lost their young daughter Lily. My friend Kathy, Lily’s mom, had posted online about how Psalm 102 had given her words in her grief. So, with their story heavy on my heart, I sat at the piano and started writing. My friend Rachel Wilhelm – a songwriter known for her work in lament – helped me finish it, adding even more ache and really unique chord choices. 10 – “I Love Your Word (Psalm 119),” co-written with Anne-Claire Cummings As I sat down to put the tracks in order, I intentionally chose to bookend the album with songs about God’s Word. In writing this track, my hope was to condense the famously-long Psalm 119 down to its core message: we love and desire God’s Word because we love and desire God. My prayer is that this is a song someone could use both in their alone time with God—say, at the outset of a “quiet time” in the early morning—and in a corporate setting—say, the song a congregation sings just before a Sunday sermon. I really, really love this one and I’m grateful my friend Anne-Claire would help me take it across the finish line. 11 – “Selah” We had recorded a long instrumental at the end of Psalm 119, but decided late in the game to make it a solo track. There were several reasons behind this choice, but one was to make sure Psalm 23, the Jesus song, sat at the center of the record. My friend and fellow singer-songwriter Graham Jones had the idea to call it “Selah,” an idea I loved right away. The word “selah” occurs 71 times in the Psalms. Though its exact meaning is difficult to nail down, many believe it’s a musical term directing us to pause and praise God for whatever was just prayed or sung in the previous verse. On this album, this song offers a moment of rest, a moment to pause and praise God after all we have covered in tracks 1-10. It feels like a perfect ending to a Psalms record. You can listen to Caroline’s new album, Psalms: The Poetry of Prayer here.

by David Mitchel This Friday last, pastor, teacher, and author Tim Keller took one final drag on the air of old creation, then breathed his first breath of the unadulterated rest of Christ, in which rest he now awaits the further glory to be revealed at the Resurrection. For Tim, this transposition is great gain, though it is a hard loss for many left behind: thousands whom Tim pastored and mentored; hundreds of thousands whom he taught through his incomparable sermons, lectures, and writings; many personal friends; and, of course, for Kathy, Tim’s wife of nearly fifty years, and their three children. It would of course be too much to say that Tim’s voice was the stability of our times. But everything about Tim’s faithful discharge of his vocation – in pulpits, at lecterns, and in his many books and articles – exuded the reassuring stability of a man firmly rooted in the grace of God in Christ. In the midst of interesting times, his voice remained clear and steady, his rhetoric measured, his mind nimble and curious, and his heart warm and hospitable. These were gifts of God to Tim, and gifts to us through Tim. We will miss them. There were too many notable features of Tim’s life and teaching to do many of them justice in a brief remembrance such as this. But for a community committed to story and beauty, two may be particularly salient: his robust application of common grace, both in his teaching and, evidently, his life; and his emphasis on working from rest. First, regarding common grace. During his public career Tim did not, so far as I know, change his mind about any significant point of doctrine or morality. He remained committed to the doctrinal distinctives of the Protestant reformation, particularly as touching matters of sin and the doctrines of grace. Yet even a cursory glance at his engagements and the content of his output show that this doctrinal and moral constancy did not hold for the reasons usually given by the suspicious – reactionary fear and anger, financial or power interest, the Dunning-Kruger effect. He was plainly a marvelously curious and open man. This essential openness I ascribe to his robust view of common grace: he knew God could plant startling goodness and beauty anywhere, in anyone, any painting, or song, or novel, or stageplay. He could be open to the veins of beauty in anyone’s story. His doctrinal consistency over time, then, owes much to the fact that his robust view of common grace made all his other doctrinal and moral commitments uncommonly supple: his theological and philosophical wineskins retained enough newness, enough give, to take in good vintages old and new, retaining their form while holding the wines. Second, regarding working from rest – specifically, from rest in Christ. Tim spoke and wrote often about functional saviors and self-justification projects. These could relate to family or other relationships, financial status, or success in one’s vocation. Self-justification by vocational success can be particularly vexing for artists, for success in painting, creative writing, or composing is hard to measure. Even good efforts remain subject to reproach, especially the artist’s self-reproach. This is one of the many places where Tim’s broad application of the grace of God in Christ shows its quality: for those whose ultimate validation and identity are found in Jesus, vocational success need not be a cripplingly stern master. To Tim: If messages go from blogs to the Church Triumphant, thank you. Thank you for leaving us a substantial body of work from which we may yet learn and grow. Enjoy your well-earned rest in the peace of God. David Mitchel is a small-town lawyer who has represented clients in a broad spectrum of causes, ranging from foster care to business transactions to property disputes to the defense of criminal charges to federal habeas corpus and Civil Rights actions. His passion for literature and story, which he caught first from Tolkien, informs all of this work—which requires patient, careful adjudication of competing stories and creativity to help clients and courts write the rest of the story justly and wisely. David was born and raised near Baltimore, Maryland, went to law school at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, and now lives in central Virginia with his wife Libby and their two young daughters.

by Rebecca Reynolds Creators of dystopian fiction often emphasize the losses of a post-apocalyptic world by featuring remnants of a former, easier life. From the H.G. Wells 1936 film  Things to Come  to the 2023 HBO release  The Last of Us , directors show everyday objects we take for granted grown precious in the realm of the survivor: a box of shoelaces, a Top 100 Billboard Hits book, airplane parts, a can of peaches–bits and bobbles of pre-disaster ease now precious to people trying to scrap together life in a world grown dark.   Maybe “apocalyptic” is too strong of a word, but many Western Christians have experienced severe spiritual disorientation over the past decade. Leaders, organizations, and ideologies aren’t what we thought they were. Our lives and relationships don’t look like we were told they would. There have long been disappointments surrounding the use of the name of Jesus, but the recent concentration of trust-destroying events has been the highest I’ve seen in fifty years. As I survey the wreckage of faith systems that once felt like home to me, a few pre-disaster relics have held their value. Tim Keller’s life and ministry are on my short list here. I don’t mean that every word he ever wrote or spoke gees and haws with how I now view the world. I no longer expect that of any teacher. However, when so many other pastors sold out to political panic and manipulation, he didn’t. He remained kind, focused, curious. 'The sky is falling' was never Keller’s vibe. How badly I needed to see at least one older pastor behave this way in our present chaos. Rebecca Reynolds In a reductionistic culture intent on forcing us to choose between extremes, Keller continued to think outside many boxes, even on issues that made him a pariah in extremist circles. His nuance made feverish corners of the establishment itchy. Yet, he also held to certain tenets without wavering. He stood confidently in those beliefs while maintaining a posture of respect for other viewpoints, offering to share his platform and engage in civil discourse. “The sky is falling,” was never Keller’s vibe. How badly I needed to see at least one older pastor behave this way in our present chaos. But even more critical than these marks of ethos, Keller’s teaching reminds me of a redemption that I desperately need, freely given by a Prodigal God. It feels weird to talk about needing redemption post-’90s religious trauma. Shame was used to control many believers in decades of my young adulthood. Youth speakers drove forks violently into oranges, warning us about the ruin we would bring upon ourselves and our future relationships if we made a sexual mistake. We were given rule books telling us how God wanted us to date, do marriage, parent, and engage in outreach. Extreme examples of devotion were constantly set before us, and we didn’t want to be the sorts of fools who strove to keep what was fading while forfeiting what we could never lose. So, we committed to radical “obedience.” Eventually, though, it became evident that some of the teachings we followed were dead wrong. Radical religious advice was doing harm to our marriages and our kids. Sin-talk was being wielded to keep us inside damaging systems run by narcissistic leaders. We realized that corrupt political machines had been using religious language and religious networks for earthly power grabs. Our early willingness to give our lives for faith began to ring with the disillusionment of Wilfred Owen’s grave poem “Dulce et Decorum Est.” In the aftermath of such trauma, who wouldn’t flinch at the suggestion that we need redemption? Our spiritual vulnerability was commandeered by selfish and dangerous people pointing fingers at us and telling us we needed someone to die for us—doesn’t it make sense that we would at least temporarily feel safer shedding that entire dynamic? Recently, however, I re-opened Keller’s Prodigal God , and after a few pages, I realized how thirsty I’ve been to hear the pure, simple good news of the gospel. While I’ve needed to learn more about manipulation, boundaries, and inherent self-worth, those discoveries haven’t negated my deepest need for a savior. Hebrews 12:27 describes a hard season of revelation in which debris is shaken off truth so everything which cannot be shaken becomes evident. Think of a white sheet snapped in the summer sky. Lies fall away. Beauty, truth, and goodness linger almost weightless in the breeze. Maybe what has felt like dystopia has actually been some sort of Divine reclamation instead. And on the other side, I find I still need the grace Keller describes. “There is no evil that the father’s love cannot pardon and cover; there is no sin that is a match for grace.” “Nothing, not even abject contrition, merits the favor of God. The father’s love and acceptance are absolutely free.” The true gospel is freeing, not constraining. Rebecca Reynolds “It’s not [the older brother’s] sins that create the barrier between him and his father, it’s the pride he has in his moral record; it’s not his wrongdoing but his righteousness that is keeping him from sharing in the feast of the father.” Liberty. Wave after wave of liberty. Keller doesn’t wield sin as a tool to corral us into an earthly system of religious power. In fact, such teaching can protect us from the conniving of harmful religious organizations and leaders. The true gospel is freeing, not constraining. A few days ago, my sister-in-law sent us a photo of a coffee shop called Shadrach, Meschach & ABeanToGo. Their slogan is: “Master roasted, never burnt.” I bet you just groaned. We did, too. But some things do pass through the fire and emerge sweeter. Papa Keller’s ministry has been that sort of gift to me. I’m going to miss his ready presence on earth. But, I’m so thankful he held our hands through the chaos. I’m so thankful he didn’t go crazy when so many others did. I’m so thankful he continued to walk with Jesus to the end. I’m so thankful his words linger to guide us still. Rebecca K. Reynolds is the editorial director of Oasis Family Media and Sky Turtle Press. She is the author of a text-faithful modern prose rendering of Edmund Spenser’s 1590’s epic poem, The Faerie Queene and of Courage, Dear Heart by Nav Press. Rebecca is a longtime member of the Rabbit Room, and she has spoken at Hutchmoot both in the US and the UK. She taught high school literature for seven years and has written lyrics for Ron Block of Alison Krauss, Union Station.

by Adam Whipple The drug of comeuppance no longer satisfies me. I’ve tasted it too many times, mostly in movies, or in the rolling celluloid fiction of my mind. The high has vanished now, leaving in its place a shadow that looks like Saint Peter drawing a sword at Gethsemane, an echo that sounds like a Savior disappointed, even slightly alarmed. Comeuppance is a thing we all covet to some degree, as evidenced by its mass-market appeal. Storytellers go to great lengths to keep their heroes from glorying in victory though. Disney plays variations on the theme of throwing villains off cliffs. Clint Eastwood types have post-shootout crises of conscience, or they leave town. Antagonists get taken down by accidents, or by their own machinations. The dynamic of oneupmanship between enemy and hero gets neatly answered. Real life is rarely so simple. Good justice might be poetic, but I don’t think it should always rhyme. Like everyone I know, I grew up with bullies. I didn’t really see them as people very often, just elements, forces of nature, things that could be avoided by a degree of manipulation. Imagine rain. You can’t really beat it, but you can stay dry with a raincoat. There was no avoiding the weather of cruel schoolmates. There was only keeping one’s head down, using a side entrance, or on rare occasions, spitting out a timely riposte. These aren’t always manipulation, of course, but for me, the spirit was certainly there. I grew street smarts. Street smarts are made to work by manipulating a situation, reading terrain, and making it work for you instead of against you. Troublingly, manipulation is itself a bully’s game. Underneath it (again, for me), was that desire for comeuppance, the longing for young oppressors to get what was coming to them, or better yet, to admit they were wrong. The problem with comeuppance is that it’s not extemporaneous, in a very literal sense of the word. We understand things done extemporaneously are done with no preparation, but the Latin ex-tempore literally means outwith time or out of time . When the villain gets his in the story, he gets it within time . With the exception of Revelation, Daniel, and lesser smatterings of apocalypse salted through the literary corpus, all judgment is both temporal and partial. It is not God’s final judgment; therefore, it is not an ultimate word. Even in dealings with the diabolical, we do well to temper our sense of heroism. On days when I wish to see a villain beg for mercy, I hear a warning in Jesus’ admonition to his disciples. In Luke’s account, seventy-two of them go out with instructions to preach and heal the sick. Then back they come with, “Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name!” You can almost hear the mix of emotions in Jesus’ response. “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven,” he says. “Behold, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy. Nothing will harm you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” (Luke 20:18-20) “Yes, indeed,” he seems to be telling them. “Satan is defeated, and through me, you partake in that victory. Yet there’s danger in being grossly happy over this particular thing.” Revelation, perhaps predictably, is understated in its description of the devil’s doom. Even in a book that, if we may say so reverently, is gloriously Lovecraftian as a creature feature, Satan’s end is a little dry. Yes, there’s a battle, and he’s thrown into the lake of fire. Yet it’s followed by John’s simple “tormented day and night for ever and ever,” and we don’t hear from Ol’ Scratch again. No one really gets to see him squeal. I kind of want to. In missing Jesus’ point, in reveling in an enemy’s fall, even The Enemy’s, perhaps we become something other, something self-obsessed. Adam Whipple What is the danger in this? In missing Jesus’ point, in reveling in an enemy’s fall, even The Enemy’s, perhaps we become something other, something self-obsessed. I’m not often one for changing the lyrics to old hymns; we move menhirs at our peril. Still, I chafe at the verse in “Be Thou My Vision” that sings, “High King of Heaven, my victory won.” My victory? My own? My precious? That’s too easy a thing to say, especially for an American like me. Irish journalist Mary Byrne, in 1905, translated part of the original Old Irish as “With the King of all, with him after victory won by piety.” She followed this with a verse translation that reads, “Beloved Father, hear, hear my lamentations. Timely is the cry of woe of this miserable wretch.” Hardly victorious. Even Eleanor Hull’s later translation, from which the ‘my victory’ line is drawn, has an alternate reading: “High King of heaven, Thou heaven’s bright Sun, O grant me its joys, after vict’ry is won.” There, the ownership of such victory sings more as though it belongs to the Lord than to me, the singer. Real fights don’t feel victorious. The few times I’ve been part of a physical altercation, the emotions were overwhelming. I can revisit with great clarity the moments of fights or possible fights, even down to colors and smells. Adrenaline courses, and the busy scribes of the subconscious start writing in capitals. Given time to reflect, the wolf in me that wishes to glory in some outcome feels eerily akin to the wolf I saw in the other person or persons involved. In arguments of various stripes—fights not with bodies but with words—our ideology is built not only on its coherence but on our tactics and the way we employ them. We cannot become wolves and bullies. What I want—what I used to want—was for people to change their minds. I still desire this, but in hoping so jealously for it, I have felt the vapidity of coveting such a thing. Hearing scripted nonsense in my head—those with whom I disagree finally admitting their wrongfulness—I can also hear my own continual hunger for something more. The little book of Obadiah is a powerful indictment of Edom for the way they stood by, and even profited, as Babylon sacked Jerusalem. This was a divine punishment rendered. Yet even to take a prideful, arm’s-length joy in it, for Edom, was deadly. “Do not gloat when your enemy falls,” says Proverbs 24. “When they stumble, do not let your heart rejoice, or the Lord will see and disapprove, and turn his wrath away from them.” Let’s say, ideologically, that I get everything I want in an argument. Two things happen. Firstly, I find myself in grave danger of an unassailable and all-consuming self-righteousness. Secondly, being in triumphant possession of others’ admissions of error does not make me love them. And I am commanded to love people. Perfect justice belongs to the Lord and shall be rendered in His time only. Kairos, not chronos. Adam Whipple Do not hear in this a disavowal of orthodoxy or of non-contradiction. There is always room for discussion. We follow Scripture, and we pray the Spirit guides us into all truth. It is natural, in most disagreements, that someone is wrong. Yet if Scripture cannot be broken, I can also depend on the fact that, on some level, the person who is wrong is me. Regarding cruelties both large and small, we look for earthly justice—insofar as we may render it—to reflect Christ’s justice. As lawyers may note, this is a great way to beat our heads against a wall. Our justice system is not perfect and must never be recreated due to its native fallenness. Our native fallenness. Perfect justice belongs to the Lord and shall be rendered in His time only. Kairos , not chronos . I love the new-seeming focus in school systems and parent groups on the dangers of bullying. We must continually confront ourselves with the harm that we cause and, in following Jesus (and by His own grace), make efforts to better serve our neighbors. Part of that, I think, means not becoming bullies ourselves: refusing to cheer when the cruel are punished. This confrontation of the self means recognizing that cruelty, since the Fall, is seeded like a poison plant in the heart of each of us. I, for one, am thoroughly exhausted by my own continued belligerence, along with that of everyone else. It feels as though a combative spirit is demanded of me, a constant sword. In better moments, I want nothing so much as to lay it down. Chased down for years now by a Sho Baraka line, by the book of Proverbs, and by my own addiction to shifts in the earthly power dynamic, I finally wrote a poem to codify my thoughts, or at least to wrestle with them. I’m not sure it is complete, but here it is in part. from “ Fear and Trembling, Southbound, 2022” “Do I want peace, or do I want power so I can try it?” —Sho Baraka Once, we came easy, intuiting and fearful, to biting tongues, thin-lipped when bullies got theirs. Darian MacMahan sniffed out trouble to taste it, for example, another grade school farm-punk laurel-crowned by hiding his fears in cruelty. He bet our Sunday school teacher, a Navy Seal, that he could whip him in a straight wrestling match, till amid a chorus of laughing boys, the man tied him in a granny knot in our small basement classroom and sat on him; it was different than mornings of sandpaper nerves when going to school again meant walking past the boy, past his orbit of hungry sycophants, knowing his father had chastened him after a phone call the previous evening: your own parents, confronting. Then after the boy died early, drunk-wrecked, the reverend shooed away the unsure gang guzzling piss-cheap beer in the churchyard, grasping with Protestant, redneck blindness the gut-deep emotion of an Irish wake. They were still boys, and gone was their leader, flame-to-glory in boondock martyrdom. Now in every wiry, bookish child is a skeeving, rat-hearted thing that gnaws the faces of bullies until they weep penance. What we hope to know by grace, unspoken, is that not all hungers can be quelled. Some grow like crocodiles, to fill available space.

by Janna Barber We could never go back and be strangers All our secrets are mixed and distilled But you’ve taught me to temper my anger And you’ve learned what it’s like to be still Jason Isbell sings these lines in a song called “Running With Our Eyes Closed,” which is also the title of a new documentary by Sam Jones that follows the recording and release of Reunions –the chart-topping record put out by Isbell and his band, The 400 Unit, in early 2020. “Jason Isbell is one of those songwriters that makes you feel like you know him and he knows you,” Jones, the director, says from the jump. “This collection of songs are some of the most personal he’s ever written so I wanted to discover where the life and the art connect.” Twenty-two minutes into the documentary we’re treated to a scene of Isbell belting out a heartbreaking ballad called “Dreamsicle” that delves into his chaotic childhood rooted in small-town Alabama and his parents’ divorce when he was an adolescent. “There was a pretty big religious undertone to everything down there,” Isbell says, and this preacher’s kid from Arkansas can relate. Creative Writing classes regularly teach students about three kinds of stories: Romance, Comedy, and Tragedy, but Isbell says there’s essentially one kind of story, “Will you listen to what my life is like and let’s compare?” After Isbell finishes singing, he joins his wife, Amanda Shires, under the soundboard and they share a quiet moment holding hands as the vocals replay and you understand just how deep this song cuts for everyone in the room. It was at this point in the documentary that I began wishing for a happy ending to Jason’s (and perhaps my own) story. I’ve been listening to Isbell since 2017, when songs like “Cumberland Gap” and “Anxiety” became a regular part of my husband’s kitchen rituals. Whether he’s cleaning up after dinner or preparing to try out a new recipe, John usually has loud music blaring from the Google speaker as he putters around the kitchen, and after twenty-five years, I can tell what kind of mood he’s in based on the playlist. That Spring was a particularly tough one as we prepared for our oldest to fly the coop. Lyrics like, “Even with my lover sleeping close to me / I’m wide awake and I’m in pain” and “Mama said ‘God won’t give you too much to bear’ / Might be true in Arkansas but I’m a long long way from there” provided some companionship in that season for our grief, anger, and fear. As we worried endlessly over the future, life felt a lot like this chorus from “24 Frames”: You thought God was an architect, now you know He’s something like a pipe bomb ready to blow And everything you built that’s all for show, goes up in flames In 24 frames Isbell’s songs from the last few albums cover everything from his own struggles with addiction to his longings to change Southern culture. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the level of intimacy this film sheds on Isbell’s early life—particularly the storms his marriage has weathered over the last ten years. These storms have produced songs like “Cover Me Up” and “It Gets Easier,” both powerful anthems, that also carry the potential to trigger former addicts as well as victims of domestic violence. The documentary does not end with the entire Isbell family sitting in church on Sunday morning–the neat and tidy ending my crooked heart longs for, but it does show an authentic story of redemption. And if Christianity has taught me anything, it’s that redemption is messy and difficult, rather than clean and easy. Which reminds me of the main character in the song “River.” He’s a man who’s done terrible, awful things, but the melody feels like a lullaby, and Isbell ends the song with these words: The river is my savior She’s running to the sea And to reach her destination Is to simply cease to be And running ’til you’re nothing Sounds a lot like being free So I’ll lay myself inside her And I’ll let her carry me The initial savior in Isbell’s life is Shires, as she helped him get on the road to recovery; by the end of the film, it’s clear that Isbell needs more. Shire’s sacrifices are not capable of providing a lasting solution for all his sins. As Isbell attests when speaking about his mother’s failed attempts to change his father’s behavior in the early nineties, “For a long time I thought that was possible,” he says. “And… it’s not, turns out.” Isbell’s story, as it turns out, is just as complicated as either of his parents, but this movie sparks hope in my heart as it bears witness to a life that’s still in process, just like mine.

Karen Swallow Prior. Photo © Ashlee Glen I (Joel J Miller) first met Karen Swallow Prior a decade ago while working at Thomas Nelson as vice president of editorial and acquisitions. I signed her book Fierce Convictions—a biography of British social reformer, educator, and abolitionist Hannah More—back in 2013. I’ve followed and benefitted from Prior’s work ever since. She’s written and edited several other books, including (most recently) The Evangelical Imagination, On Reading Well, and Booked. Her guide to the classics series for B&H Publishing features such titles as Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Sense and Sensibility, Frankenstein, and The Scarlet Letter. Beyond her books, Prior’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times, Christianity Today, First Things, Vox, and several other publications. She also pens a monthly column for Religion News Service and has recently started her own newsletter here on Substack, The Priory. In this conversation, Prior and I talk about the role of imagination in shaping our experience of the world—whether we realize it or not. Joel Miller: As I read your new book, The Evangelical Imagination, I reflected on the role imagination plays in our daily experience. We know the world through both external sensation and internal imagination, but even the external is filtered through our imagination because it’s how we make meaning of what we sense. Our entire experience is one of the imagination. Karen Swallow Prior: Exactly. Imagination is so much more than just the obvious, creative activity we tend to think of when we think about “using” our imagination. All of our thinking, dreaming, and processing relies on the imagination. As you said, our entire experience! JM: In the 1990s, it was popular in some circles to talk about worldview. Since Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age in 2007, it seems more popular to speak in terms of social imaginary, a term you put to good use. What do these concepts share and how do they differ? KSP: This is such an important question. The two concepts are related but refer to very different elements of thinking. Worldview is the conscious, rational application of beliefs or principles to some specific, concrete question or issue. It is a very cognitive and intentional activity. Social imaginaries, as Charles Taylor describes them, are precognitive, communal pools of inherited or traditional visions, assumptions, myths, metaphors, and so on. These lurk beneath the surface, often driving or directing our sense of how things should go, whether we realize it or not. Obviously, there are thoughts that can fit into either category. But a social imaginary contains elements that we often don’t know are there until something causes us to realize such an assumption exists. That something might be an experience in a different culture where expectations differ, or a conversation or book (ahem!) that brings to the surface something assumed that is not a conscious, chosen belief or understanding. For example, a Christian might apply a biblical worldview in deciding how to vote. But the sense that it is a duty of a responsible citizen to vote might originate from within a particular social imaginary. JM: You’ve written a bookish memoir, Booked, along with a very popular book on how to read well, On Reading Well. What role do books play in shaping our imaginations? KSP: Books, of course, are not the only way to shape our imaginations. As we noted above, humans use the imagination all the time. But books—stories in particular—expand our imaginations with materials, images, characters, events, outcomes, possibilities, people, problems, solutions, disasters, delights, and so much more than we’d ever “see” in our minds without them. We could say the same of any works of the imagination—film, music, and so on. But I do think there is something inherently more rigorous to the mind (and therefore the imagination) about worlds created by words. Words must be translated into images, feelings, sensations, and experiences. Words are more mediated, requiring more from us, and therefore yielding more for us. JM: Are there ways of being more intentional about that shaping? KSP: Absolutely. And it’s not an all-or-nothing deal. Whatever our entertainment/leisure time diet is, we can always be more intentional about taking in more of the good, true, and beautiful and less of the easy, comforting, and familiar. If it takes a year to read one great classical work, you’ll have read that work when the year is over. It will stay with you forever no matter how long it takes. You can also be intentional about shutting out more of the noise (no easy feat these days). That’s something I’m working on myself because, in my case, my life centers on the good stuff—but I have also been drawn in too often and too easily to the bad stuff (the latest Twitter dustup or church scandal or whatever). It’s not that we ought to ignore or escape from the real world. But it’s about being more intentional with what we do in our discretionary time to form our minds, tastes, and imaginations toward a desire for the good. Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books JM: One of the points you make in The Evangelical Imagination is that a massive overlap exists between Victorian and evangelical sensibilities since they were concurrent social movements. That seems true today as well with American Christianity. How do we tease out what’s Christian from what’s merely American? KSP: Well, this is really what I’m trying to model in The Evangelical Imagination. The fact is that the Victorian Age, taking place during the reign of the British Empire, affected all of the world, especially America. So what we see in contemporary American evangelicalism was shaped significantly by Victorian culture. But what I’m trying to show in the book is that it doesn’t matter what culture a Christian society is or was part of or developed alongside. The task will always be the same: to distinguish between what is cultural and what is eternal. We will always be products of our culture to some degree. And that isn’t necessarily bad. It’s just a matter of discerning the difference. I was explaining to a friend recently, for example, it’s not wrong to have an altar call or ask people to raise their hands to make a decision for Christ (something I discuss in the book). But it is wrong to assume that this method is universal and necessary for all church gatherings across time and place and that those who don’t practice it are wrong. Yet those who have grown up without knowing anything else can find themselves assuming that churches that don’t use this modern practice are somehow less Christian. That’s another example of an assumption that is part of the social imaginary. JM: Americans tend to be highly individualistic and therefore prone to biases and blindspots when it comes to larger social constructs. What impact do you think that has on seeing the role of institutions and shaping our imaginations? KSP: This is an important point. As I said above, the duty of distinguishing between what is cultural and what is eternal in our faith applies to all Christians in all times and places. Yet I do think this task of distinguishing is a bit harder for contemporary Americans because of the way we have been formed—as you say, more individualistic, more autonomous, and so forth. Our less communal culture puts up particular obstacles to seeing the way a social imaginary works. JM: Since we presuppose most of the stories and metaphors that shape our imaginations, we’re mostly unaware of them and how they function in our lives. What can we do to become more aware of these formative stories and metaphors? I think the first step is to recognize that language itself is metaphorical. This understanding comes more easily for those who study other languages. (Think of the difference, for example, between what we say in English about the weather—it is cold—as opposed to the same idea in French—it makes the cold. It’s a subtle difference but shows how the same experience can be expressed in terms of existence or createdness.) Once you become aware of how language itself is metaphorical, it is easier to see the patterns and archetypes in a culture for expressing those ideas, even the Christian ones. Conversion, for example (to which I devote a chapter in the book) is both a key Christian concept and one central to human experience. We see conversion stories everywhere! JM: Final question: You can invite any three authors for a lengthy meal. Language is not an obstacle. Who do you pick, why, and how does the conversation go? KSP: I am inviting Jonathan Swift (eighteenth-century British satirist and Anglican priest), Flannery O’Connor (twentieth-century American Catholic writer), and Gustave Flaubert (nineteenth-century French novelist). O’Connor brings her mother, Flaubert brings the wine, but Swift is not allowed to contribute the main dish. Regina (O’Connor’s mother) dozes off, but the rest of us stay up until 1 a.m. discussing Romanticism-versus-Realism, satire, empathy, and consubstantiation-versus-transubstantiation-versus-“doing this in remembrance of Me.” No one changes their mind about the Lord’s Supper, but O’Connor leaves with a new short story idea. [This conversation was first published at MillersBookReview.com, where Joel J. Miller publishes essays, reviews, and other bookish diversions.]

It is only natural that those of an artistic temperament will be drawn to the natural world. Forms of human creativity are almost bound to be captivated by aspects of divine creativity. Consider the landscapes of the Hudson River School (like those of Frederic Church or Thomas Cole); or the profound attention to nature’s exuberance in Vincent van Gogh or kaleidoscopic shifts in light in Claude Monet; or the human realities in the biblical story as captured by Rembrandt or Giotto. Then, when it comes to words, just a couple of minutes in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s company will awaken us to what we’re constantly surrounded by but too often overlook. Yet it should come as no surprise that the world of birds is a profound inspiration for musicians, those perhaps more likely to be captured by the aural than the visual. Of course, the avian world has all kinds of wonders to recommend it: being able to fly is pretty cool, for one thing; then there are the colours, gaudy and gratuitous. But above all, there is its sound. Even in big cities, close attention to the dawn chorus is surely worth fewer hours in bed on occasion. This is divine music! How else can you explain it? Concerto in D ma ‘Il Gardellino’ (RV428 – Allegro-Cantabile-Allegro) Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741, Italian) Sébastien Marq (flute), Ensemble Matheus, Jean-Christophe Spinosi (cond.) Where possible, I try to introduce new names to each 5&1 list (although today’s has a couple of repeat offenders, inevitably). But I can’t quite believe it’s taken twenty-three lists to welcome the renowned red-haired priest of Venice onto the podium. He was an ordained catholic priest who spent many years teaching in an orphanage for abandoned girls. The music there was of such high quality that people would travel from all over Europe to hear it. Vivaldi was prolific and influential—J. S. Bach, his junior by seven years, was a notable fan—and wrote for many instrumental combinations alongside his many choral and operatic works. This short flute concerto (a concerto is usually a piece for solo instrument plus orchestra, commonly with a standard fast-slow-fast three movement structure, as here) has the name ‘Il Gardellino,’ meaning ‘goldfinch.’ No prizes for figuring out why flutes and piccolos are commonly used to convey birdsong. You might think we’re listening to a cuckoo at the start. Perhaps goldfinches in the Venetian republic were particularly good mimics. In Vivaldi’s mind, though, they can certainly sing their hearts out (cantabile means songlike, after all). The Swan of Tuonela (Op. 22, No. 2) Jean Sibelius (1865-1957, Finnish) Barry Davis (cor anglais), Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Sir Neville Marriner (cond.) We’ve flown a thousand miles from the Venetian lagoon and find ourselves in the frozen mists of mythical Finland. Sibelius had a Tolkienesque fascination with Finland’s mythological epic, the Kalevala. He wrote an early orchestral suite called Four Legends from the Kalevala, of which this is the second movement. Admittedly, we don’t have the swan’s cry evoked here, so strictly speaking it doesn’t entirely belong on this playlist. But it is a gorgeous piece, and it is about a bird, and Sibelius gives it a unique voice. Tuonela was the realm of the dead in Finnish myth (akin to Hades in Greek myth, the underworld where all people end up) and the eponymous Swan hangs out there, generally being sacred and mysterious. The epic’s hero, Lemminkäinen has been told to kill this swan (you can just tell that’s a bad move, can’t you?) and the music depicts the mysterious bird minding its own underworld business (as it would). The swan’s haunting call is portrayed by the cor anglais (known as the English Horn in north America), a beautiful instrument in the oboe family. Just stunning. Livre d’orgue: IV. Chants d’oiseaux (‘Organ book: 4. Birdsong’) Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992, French) Olivier Latry (organ) Okay, I can almost guarantee you’re not going to like this piece. You’ll probably be thinking on first hearing that it is a grim cacophony of mechanical noises and arbitrary notes. But bear with me. Olivier Messiaen was an organist and composer, one of the most influential of the twentieth century. He was also a devout Catholic and passionate ornithologist. After France fell to the Nazi Reich in 1940, he was made a prisoner of war, during which he wrote the extraordinary Quartet for the End of Time, a difficult piece that is endlessly fascinating and incredibly powerful. But unlike many Twitchers (you know, those obsessive ornithological types who trample the world to bag rare bird sightings), Messiaen applied his profound musical knowledge to the study of their songs. He would listen very carefully, trying to notate all the variations and fluctuations. Naturally, they don’t follow standard rules of western musical harmony and the like, but they do display clear patterns and forms. He would then include these little motifs in all kinds of compositions, to provide incidental colour or as a primary focus. Next time you’re out in the countryside, try to listen with a musical ear. How might you try to replicate a blackbird’s call or nightingale’s song? Even for the most adept at music theory, it’s hard! But so interesting. Because if you believe in a creator, it follows that their songs are divinely composed. Having considered this, now listen to this short organ piece. Concentrate and imagine a walk in the countryside. I hope you’ll gradually find yourself more attuned to the glorious sounds of woodlands than the dehumanised hell of a mechanical world. I enter the meadow beside the hills Where the fern casts its net of foliage. And I hear speaking the soft, divine voice Of calm nature, the milieu of birds. —Cécile Sauvage A Farewell to St. Petersburg: No. 10, The Lark (arr. M. Balakirev) Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857, Russian) Tara Kamangar (piano) Glinka was one of the first home-grown composers to gain fame throughout the territories of the Russian empire. He was a key figure in the development of Russian music, through his orchestral works, operas and songs particularly. His song-cycle A Farewell to St. Petersburg was written in 1840 for voice and piano, setting twelve poems by the playwright Nestor Kukolnik. The tenth in the cycle, The Lark, is apparently quite sentimental and even mawkish in the original, but the melody is gorgeous. Perhaps this is the reason why many opt for this arrangement for solo piano by composer, conductor and pianist, Mily Balakirev (leader of Russian composers known as ‘The Five,’ Glinka protégés who sought to create a distinctive Russian sound in music—the others were César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikola Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexander Borodin). Laideronette; Apothéose. Le jardin féerique (Ma mère l’Oye suite) Maurice Ravel (1875-1937, French) Orchestre Symphonique De Montreal, Charles Dutoit (cond.) Okay, so this is definitely stretching things. Ravel wrote a set of piano duets under the title of Ma mère l’Oye (‘Mother Goose’) for the young children of some dear friends. Mother Goose was the imaginary author of some French fairy tales, which subsequently gained popularity over the Channel in Britain in the 18th century. He later arranged it for orchestral suite and combined some of the elements into individual movements. This one combines Laideronnette (the Little Ugly Girl who becomes the Empress of the Pagodas) with Le Jardin féerique (the fairy garden). This is gorgeous, lush musical story-telling at its best, and is one of the pieces that made me fall in love with Ravel’s music in the first place. But if I’m honest, I’ve only included it in this list because it has a type of bird in the title. Gli Uccelli ‘The Birds’ (1928) Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936, Italian) Orpheus Chamber Orchestra Respighi is best known, perhaps, for his three Roman tone poems (the Fountains of Rome, The Pines of Rome, and Roman Festivals) but it was The Birds which I first heard through a music teacher when I was about twelve. I loved it immediately. Respighi would be influential on a 20th century musical movement known as neo-classicism, spearheaded by Igor Stravinsky in particular. It was a reaction against (isn’t everything?!) the emotional density and melodrama of late Romanticism, as they perceived it. They sought inspiration from the more disciplined and distilled music of the classical period from the late 18th century. You can certainly hear the echoes of a musical world with which Vivaldi, for example, would have been very familiar. Taking its cue from several classical pieces which sought to notate birdsong (much like Messiaen two centuries later), Respighi depicts doves, hens, nightingales and (inescapably) cuckoos in five movements: Prelude La colomba La gallina L’usignuolo Il cucù Bonus! No. 4, Liten Fugl ‘Little Bird’ (Lyric Pieces, Op. 43, 1886) Edvard Grieg (1843-1907, Norwegian) Nelson Freire (piano) Finally, an added bonus. It should have taken Mother Goose’s place, but I just couldn’t bring myself to delete it. This is a piano miniature, one of sixty-six so-called Lyric Pieces that Grieg wrote throughout his life. It’s as delicate and fragile as the little bird it depicts.

Without warning, Twelfth Night opens with Duke Orsino’s appearance on stage. He’s not alone, of course, but accompanied by a grand retinue which includes ‘Musicians playing’. If music be the food of love, play on. Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken and so die. (Act 1, Sc 1) Orsino feels that the only way to be cured of his lovesick heart is to have too much music, in the same way that appetites are cured by eating too much food! Whether he's right is for you to decide. But music was as significant for Shakespeare's Comedies as it was for the rest of his output. Now, many come away disappointed from their initial experience of Shakespeare’s Comedies for one simple reason. Quite frankly, they’re not that funny. Not in a Saturday Night Live or Monty Python sense, let alone the sophisticated brilliance of Tom Stoppard’s plays. But that, of course, is to make a category mistake. To describe these plays as ‘comedies’ is to take a cue from the ancient Greeks, with the difference between comedy and tragedy being primarily one of trajectory. The former end well while the latter end badly for the protagonist(s). This is not to say that Shakespeare is unfunny; there are some wonderful moments of laugh-out-loud humour and they’re not restricted to the Comedies. The tensions resulting from Macbeth’s regicide, for example, are superbly released immediately by the drunk doorkeeper. Shakespeare is always breaking dramatic boundaries and so even some of the plays in today’s list defy strict categorisation. So long as expectations are reordered, there is so much to love and relish in these plays. No wonder composers have been creatively inspired by them. A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM A Midsummer Night’s Dream Act 1:1-3 (Op. 60, 1960) Benjamin Britten (1913-1976, English) Alfred Deller (countertenor), Elizabeth Harwood (soprano), Choir of Downside School etc, London Symphony Orchestra, Benjamin Britten (cond.) Fitting to start here having enjoyed Midsummer in the northern hemisphere just last week. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a weird play, full of relationships gone awry and gender politics, set around various weddings in the Dukedom of Athens (ruled by Duke Theseus who is about to marry his fiancée Hippolyta). It’s a world that seems curiously like Tudor England (funny that). But with fairies. Not necessarily the kinds of fairies you might expect, mind you, because they’re ruled by King Oberon, aided and abetted by his impish sidekick Puck. He’s got his own domestic difficulties with Queen Titania, so for all the chaos he and Puck bring to the human world, he rather has his own house to set in order. Britten was one of the 20th century masters of opera (we have already heard a couple of excerpts from his Peter Grimes). His setting of Shakespeare’s play seeks to convey the alienness and threats of fairy meddling in the affairs of men. We can hear that in the eerie slides in the orchestra’s introduction and especially in his decision to make Oberon the central character and sung by a countertenor (an adult man who sings falsetto). Countertenors were common in Handel’s time and were regularly used in choral music, but they had largely fallen out of fashion. Britten’s opera was instrumental in resurrecting interest in opera in the 1960s. This recording, conducted by Britten himself, features the great Alfred Deller as Oberon. It was for him that the part was specifically written and he sings it with a strange majesty, here giving orders to Puck and the other sprites. Up and Down, Up and Down (from Such Sweet Thunder, 1957) Duke Ellington (1899-1974, American) Duke Ellington & His Orchestra Puck is the character in the Duke’s mind in this track. We heard Hank Cinq in the History Plays list. The mood here feels quite similar, putting one in mind of the confident Sprite-about-town. Puck is up to his old tricks but he’s invulnerable, safe in the knowledge that he’s doing his king’s bidding. After all, who can possibly take on a fairy monarch and win? Though, to be strictly accurate, Titania is no pushover and is certainly a heady match for her husband. Ellington is not particularly concerned for the eeriness of the fairy realm here, but he’s certainly out to catch the swagger. Puck might be other-worldly but he’s also mischievous and that is here in dollops. THE MERCHANT OF VENICE Serenade to Music (1938) Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958, English) Carla Huhtanen (soprano), Emily D’angelo (mezzo), Lawrence Wiliford (tenor), Tyler Duncan (baritone), Elmer Iseler Singers, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Peter Oundjian (cond.) A different play now, and one that isn’t an obvious candidate for comedy, even by Greek standards (but this is how it was placed in the First Folio). I don’t really know it at all, having never read it through nor seen it performed. I just know the odd purple passage. But it’s included here because of this piece of choral brilliance. I suspect it’s not quite to everybody’s taste. Vaughan-Williams is laying it on thick: the musical equivalent of triple layers of double cream, meringue and large drifts of icing sugar. But I am unashamed. I just love it. It is a serenade to music after all. These are the opening words: How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here will we sit and let the sounds of music Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night Become the touches of sweet harmony. —”Serenade to Music,” Ralph Vaughan-Williams Vaughan-Williams took various lines from Act V of the play, setting them to music for full orchestra with sixteen (yes, 16!!) solo singers. It was written as a tribute to Sir Henry Wood, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his first Promenade concert (which continue to this day in the Royal Albert Hall as the BBC Proms, the world’s largest music festival). Composer and conductor together chose the soloists from the cream of 1930s British music to perform the premiere. However, since assembling such a group is no small challenge, RV-W made another arrangement for four soloists, which is the version here. THE TEMPEST Prospero’s Magic (1991, for Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books) Michael Nyman (1944- , English) Michael Nyman Band Michael Nyman is much more than a film composer and yet, to many, he’s best known for the soundtracks to Jane Campion’s Oscar-winning The Piano, and many of Peter Greenaway’s visually arresting and stunning but, frankly, pretty disturbing films. But you can admire Nyman’s music without having to love the films (and naturally, vice-versa). Prospero’s Books is Greenaway’s version of The Tempest, another of the First Folio’s comedies (although it is far too complex for that). It’s a deeply fascinating play and one of my favourites. I’ll never forget an amazing RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company) production in the 90s with the much-missed Ian ‘Bilbo’ Holm as Prospero and a surprising Simon Russell-Beale as Ariel. Greenaway cast the aging John Gielgud as Prospero (who had a lifelong ambition to film the play) and it was to be his final cinematic appearance. It was also to prove Nyman’s last collaboration with the director and he drew on several cues written for previous films. His style is minimalist (akin to the Philip Glass and John Adams tracks from previous 5&1s) but there is a grandeur to this piece. He creates a neo-Baroque soundworld, which seems vaguely fitting. But it is unsettling too, as befits a narrative about an inscrutable magus with magical powers. The Tempest Overture (Op. 109) Jean Sibelius (1865-1957, Finnish) Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Jukka-Pekka Saraste (cond.) Sibelius is the composer par excellence to capture vast, frigid landscapes and the terrors of wild weather. This is on brilliant display in the overture to his incidental music for a 1926 production in Copenhagen. It would prove to be one of his very last compositions despite living for another three decades (dying in 1957 at 92). The storms that led to the shipwrecks on Prospero’s island are vivid and thus prove the perfect way to open the play. The unpredictability of the winds and waves are hard to miss. A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Op. 21, 1826; Op. 61, 1842) Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy(1809-1847, German) Judi Dench (narrator), Kathleen Battle (soprano), Frederica von Stade (mezzo), Tanglewood Festival Chorus, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa (cond.) We come full-circle to the most famous setting of Midsummer, by a composer whose first 5&1 nod this is. That is a little awkward since Mendelssohn was prodigious and brilliant (as was his sister Fanny, an accomplished composer and performer in her own right). It is quite possible that without him, the modern obsession with J. S. Bach would never have come about, since it was his performances of a ‘rediscovered’ St. Matthew Passion and other masterpieces that rescued Bach from cruel obscurity. Be that as it may, Mendelssohn originally wrote an overture inspired by Shakespeare’s play aged only 17, although it was not intended for a specific production. It was an instant hit and contributed to his growing international fame. Sixteen years later he returned to the play on a special commission from King Frederick William IV of Prussia to write incidental music to accompany a production of the play. If Britten captures the sinister chills of the fairy world, and Duke Ellington conveys its mischievous swagger, then Mendelssohn’s fairies are impish but fun. But of course, the play is about so much more than fairies, which is why the incidental music captures so many other moods and narrative developments. Several numbers have become popular as standalone pieces, including the Wedding March (which has now become almost too clichéd, although that’s hardly Mendelssohn’s fault). So, it is interesting to hear a recording of the whole work with every section in its right context. This performance is precisely that, complete with readings by the incomparable Shakespearean Judi Dench. This is music of unalloyed vivacity and joie-de-vivre; you won’t hear much darkness in Mendelssohn unlike with his Romantic era contemporaries. That is one reason for some unfairly dismissing his music as light and lightweight; either that or it is plain old anti-Semitism that lies behind it. No, we all need injections of joy, perhaps now more than ever, for which Mendelssohn is an ever-reliable envoy.

How on earth do you pick six compositions to represent an entire continent? Answer: You don’t. Because you can’t. So perhaps this is the first of a few more Latin 5&1s to come. My knowledge of what is out there is patchy, to say the least, but here are a few gems I’ve picked up over the years, with a bit of a geographical spread thrown in. Classical music, as conventionally understood, is not often associated with Latin America, though, as we will see, this is a situation that needs rectifying. Some extraordinary soundworlds were being created long before the Conquistadores arrived from European shores, and together with the cultural impact of the transatlantic slave trade from Africa, the musical mix that resulted is unique. To put it at its most simplistic, we could say that the two key musical influences were the Catholic Church and the complex rhythms of percussion and dance; and often, it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Missa de Lima: I. Kyrie (1730s) Roque Ceruti (1683-1760, Peruvian) Barbara Kusa, Flora Grill (sopranos), Ximena Biondo (contralto), Pablo Pollitzer (tenor), Ensamble Louis Berger, Ricardo Massun (cond.) Ceruti was Italian by birth and the music of his homeland clearly influenced his own work (to give some context, Antonio Vivaldi was only five years his senior). He was recruited by the Viceroy of Peru to become the conductor of his court orchestra in Lima, and he would remain there for the rest of his life. Like his countless European counterparts, he would therefore have focused on composing on music for both court and chapel. This track is the first component of Ceruti’s setting of the Catholic Mass, dedicated to his adopted city. As it opens, this liturgical cry for the Lord’s mercy (kyrie eleison) could easily be mistaken for a setting by Bach or Vivaldi but as it develops, something about the rhythms in both instruments and soloists hints at a different context. Misa Criolla: I. Kyrie (1963-64) Ariel Ramirez (1921-2010, Argentine) José Carreras (tenor), Jorge Padin (percussion), Coral Salvé de Laredo, Sociedad Coral de Bilbao, José Luis Ocejo (cond.) Fast forward over two centuries and the world is radically changed. Spain’s rule over the continent is a distant memory and the Catholic church is a very different institution. The Second Vatican Council (1962-65) has started shaking things up. No longer was Latin the only, exclusively permissible language of the mass, for one thing. So, the Argentine composer Ariel Ramirez lost little time in making the most of the new freedom. It is not just the text of the mass that is now in vernacular Spanish, but the music is too. It is hard to imagine this originating from anywhere other than South America, and the Andes in particular. Scored for choir and soloist (who can be soprano or tenor), this recording is led by the sublime voice of the Spanish tenor, José Carreras. With his flawless breath control and tuning, he seems to float the plea for mercy all the way up to heaven’s throne-room, while the choir chant it on its way. Dos Aires Candomberos: No. 1, Nubes de Buenos Aires Máximo Diego Pujol (1957- , Argentine) Guido Bombardieri (Clarinet) & Gabriele Zanetti (Guitar) We have now travelled far beyond the cathedral walls into the plazas and community spaces of the towns. Under the weight of Spain’s influence in the region, it’s hardly surprising that the guitar is so important to Latin American music. In this track we hear it enjoying a thorough work out. The Candombe was a dance style that originated in Uruguay among African slaves, many of whom had been trafficked from Angola particularly. This spread throughout the Southern American countries where there were former slaves and other African diaspora communities, such as in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. With this piece, Argentine composer and guitarist Máximo Pujol uses various forms associated with the Candombe style as one of his Two Candombe Airs. This, the first, means ‘Clouds of Buenos Aires’ and was originally scored for guitar and flute. This arrangement for Clarinet is even better (give me a clarinet over a flute more or less every time). The piece is by turns evocative, mesmerising, thrilling, romantic and utterly Latin. Hard to believe it is all squeezed into just a few minutes. Dame Albricia Mano Anton Gaspar Fernandes (1566-1629, Mexican) Grupo de Canto Coral, Grupo Canto Choral Baroque Orchestra, Nestor E. Adrenacci (cond.) Further north to Spanish Mexico now and back into church confines. But musically, we are far from constrained. The influences of mediaeval polyphony (choral music featuring the interplay of several different lines simultaneously) and early European Baroque music are clearly audible. This is a four-part anthem, a common feature in churches for centuries. But as this performance illustrates brilliantly, contained within its simple melodies are the rhythms of both Africa and indigenous American populations. So the use of percussion and guitars or lutes was entirely authentic. The style was known as Guineo (i.e. from western Africa) and followed a standard call and response model. But the most striking element is the language, which is a kind of Spanish creole, an organic dialect forged by a mix of Africans, indigenous Nahua-speakers, plus some Portuguese thrown in for good measure. The result of this is that I can’t figure out what on earth they’re all singing about. Sounds great though! Tango por una cabeza (1935, arr. Armen Babakhanian) Carlos Gardel (1887-1935, Argentine) Cadence Ensemble There are many dance rhythms that deserve a place on this list. The samba, rumba and salsa, of coruse; then there’s the paso doble, the Cha cha cha, and the bossa nova. I could go on (after googling, naturally). But the one that just has to be given airtime on this first Latin 5&1 is surely the tango. It is the epitome of Argentine style and who better to turn to than Carlos Gardel. This one, ‘por una cabeza’ (a horse-racing term which refers to winning ‘by a head’; in other words, a very close thing), is one of the most well-known. I’m sure you’ll recognise it, even if you couldn’t put a name to it. Gardel was originally born France to a single mother, Berthe, and they emigrated to Buenos Aires when the boy was three. He was to become the consummate entertainer (actor with movie-star good looks, singer, songwriter, composer), indisputably the greatest tango-singer in history and revered the world-over. He was killed in a plane-crash in Colombia along with a group of other musicians and thousands travelled to Montevideo to see his body lying in state. This arrangement evokes all the overwrought thrills and undercurrents of aggression for which the tango is known—and in a rather wonderful sign of how globalised we all are, it is performed by an Armenian folk music group, Cadence. They preserve all the authentically Argentine elements, with piano, guitars and band accompanied by the bandoneon, the concertina-like instrument that is so integral to that tango sound. Yet with a knowing wink and a knowing nod, the piano opens the proceedings with a homage to Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz! How’s that for a cultural melting pot?! Such joy! Chôros No. 8 “Dance Chôro” (1925) Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959, Brazilian) Linda Bustani & Ilan Rechtman (pianos), Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo, John Neschling (cond.) Finally, we come to the Brazilian master, Heitor Villa-Lobos. His output was simply enormous and I’ve only found myself beginning to explore it in recent months. He was a guitarist and conductor in his own right, quite apart from his composing (there are over 2000 works to his name). So I feel like I’m in the foothills of the Himalayas. Or perhaps Andes is more appropriate (despite them bypassing Brazil altogether)? He was a great champion of Brazilian culture and identity while at the same time drawing from rich seams from the European classical tradition. He was especially obsessed with J. S. Bach and composed nine suites for all kinds of instrumental combinations under the title Bachianas Brasileiras (meaning something like ‘Brazilian Bach pieces’). But for this week’s longer piece, I’ve gone for Chôros No. 8, an orchestral work on a grand scale. In Portuguese, a chôro is ‘weeping’ or ‘a cry’. Villa-Lobos wrote 15 chôros, for all kinds of different combinations or even soloists (just as he did for the Bachianas Brasileiras). This one is scored for a full symphony orchestra plus several surprises: two harps, saxophone, a large percussion section, and two grand pianos! Talk about a wall of sound. This is dense and It’s not hard to hear why it was nicknamed “le fou huitiême” (‘the mad eighth’) after its Parisian premiere. It is complex and wild, with repeated rhythms and snippets of melody, all weaved together into an atmospheric and at times alien whole. Just stunning.

The great jazz bass player Charlie Haden once said: The bass, no matter what kind of music you’re playing, it just enhances the sound and makes everything sound more beautiful and full. When the bass stops, the bottom kind of drops out of everything. —Charlie Haden This is as true of vocal as it is of instrumental music. Unless you’re listening carefully, the bass line(s) might meander merrily around without you taking the slightest notice. But remove the bassline and the piece suddenly seems unstable or even insubstantial. I drive my family crazy because I tend to hum along to bass lines when listening to stuff (which to be fair is quite a ‘niche’ thing to do). But listening specifically for the lower parts can be a lot of fun. On top of it all, basses get some juicy roles. The caricature is that sopranos and tenors get all the glory-hunting romantic leads whereas altos and basses are relegated to ‘best supporting’ or ‘character’ roles. But there are some fantastic bass parts out there, once you start digging around. To get everything into perspective, however, we must head east, to Russia and the treasured depths of the Orthodox church. Because the big question is, how low can you actually go? Evening Bells (Вечерний звон) Alexander Alybayev (1787-1851); text by Ivan Kozlov (1779-1840) both Russian Vladimir Miller, Mikhail Kruglov, Sergey Krytzhenko (The Three Bassi Profundi) & Mikhail Buzin (piano) This track opens with a piano rendition of the great bells of Moscow as captured musically by the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky for his opera Boris Godunov. We then shift into a much-loved 1820s Russian song, based, ironically enough, on a poem by an Englishman. But I’ve picked this recording because of its stunning display of lowness! In operatic terms, the lowest voice (in other words, one that has a range lower than regular basses) is termed Basso Profundo (many technical terms are in Italian because of opera’s roots in Monteverdi and others). In Russian music, their equivalents are oktavists, so called because they tend to sing a whole octave below the regular bass part. They give orthodox acapella music its unique flavour. Think of Middle C. Then go down an octave. Repeat. And repeat again! Yup—three octaves below middle C—we’re almost subsonic here, wallowing in the depths at which whales communicate their greatest intimacies. If you don’t believe me, just listen to these chaps. And keep on listening to the bitter end. After listening to this, you’ll even believe a man can fly. . . or at least launch open-cast mining with just the power of his vocal cords. In this recording we don’t just have one oktavist but three! I defy you to keep a straight face once they get under way, especially when one of them gets into full campanology-mode. So much 2 say (from 1990 album of same name) Cedric Dent, Mervyn Warren (1964- , American) Take 6 And now for something equally spectacular (if aural fireworks can truly be described as a spectacle). I first encountered this acapella group from Alabama while I was at university. A friend who was a choral scholar and destined for professional music introduced me to this album. I was surprised, not least because of its overtly gospel lyrics. But he ignored the words. After all, on most days of term, he could be found in the college chapel singing all kinds of religious stuff while somehow keeping the meaning of it all at arm’s length. It was simply that, as a professional singer in training, he had never heard anything quite like Take 6. It needs to be heard to be believed. The sextet came together in the 1980s at Oakwood College, Huntsville, and have more or less stayed the same since (with only a couple of line-up changes). They’ve won Grammies, Doves and performed at the White House and Saturday Night Live (probably the only 5&1 artist to have done all that so far). Blink and you’ll miss this track; it’s only a minute! I suspect you’ll need to give it several listens just to figure out the magic tricks they squeeze into that minute. The way they slide at around 50 seconds (a glissando, to be specific) in perfect sync is just astonishing. But I picked this one out simply for the use of the bass vocal as a rhythm section. He is the one who holds it all together, providing the song with impetus, harmonic intrigue, and joy, all at once! I don’t think I’d really encountered beatboxing before these guys, so it was a rather overwhelming experience! Bear in mind that no instruments were used in the creation of this track. For behold, darkness shall cover the earth and The People that walked in darkness (from ‘Messiah’) George Frederic Handel (1685-1759, German then English) Christopher Purves (bass), The Sixteen Orchestra and Choir, Harry Christophers (cond.) The first two songs are clearly outliers. The vast majority of mere mortals can only dream of such vocal superpowers. Even so, these two consecutive numbers from Handel’s masterpiece, Messiah, make perfect use of the regular bass voice. Taking the famous verses from Isaiah 60 and then Isaiah 9, Handel conveys a sense of spiritual fog with the creeping strings and the sinuous vocal line. But as soon as he mentions ‘the Lord shall arise’ the tone instantly changes as the fog begins to dissipate. Likewise in the second track, the people seem to be groping in the dark until the light comes. He doesn’t tell the whole story of course in this piece. He doesn’t want to give the whole game away. But listen carefully to how the orchestra reflects the slightest shifts of tone or imagery in the text. It’s hard to imagine another voice managing to convey both Isaiah’s spiritual gravity and peril here better than a bass. Handel was the master of the voice, putting his training in Italian opera to good use in this oratorio. He was a musical revolutionary and many contemporaries objected to his dangerous import into church life of musical styles normally associated with the theatre’s loose morals. But he knew what he was doing and nobody would bat an eyelid today. He sought to dramatize aspects of the gospel story in music and the whole of Messiah is subsequently one of the most performed pieces in history. Ol’ Man River (from Showboat, 1927) Jerome Kern (1885-1945) & Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1969) both American Sir Willard White (bass), Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Carl Davis (cond.) For many in the west in the mid-twentieth century, the bass par excellence was Paul Robeson (1898-1976). A multi-talented African-American singer and political activist who travelled the world, he was instrumental in making this song a hit. It portrays the struggles and hardship of enslaved stevedores working the ships on the mighty Mississippi, contrasting their sweat and efforts with the river’s relentless but effortless current. It’s a poignant song, and unusual in Broadway shows for giving a musical’s signature number to a bass. This recording is much more recent. Sir Willard White is a Jamaican-born Brit who was knighted in 2004. His repertoire is vast and long-lasting—he sang in a production in Vienna even this year while in his seventies. I first saw him live singing Porgy in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, even getting to meet him backstage afterwards. Unfortunately, I was rather overcome by his star power and was completely struck dumb. Awkward. His performance of this song here is glorious—full of pathos and pain but also great presence. “Don Giovanni, a cenar teco m’invitasti,” Don Giovanni (K. 527, Act 2) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791, Austrian) Vitalij Kowaljow (Commendatore, bass), Ildebrando d’Arcangelo (Don Giovanni, baritone), Luca Pisaroni (Leporello, bass), Mahler Chamber Orchestra & Vocalensemble Rastatt, Yannick Nézet-Séguin (cond.) The Spanish know him as Don Juan; Lord Byron wrote an epic poem about him but pronounced it Don Jewun, to rhyme with ‘true one’ (the English are petulant like that with foreign words); but because Mozart’s opera was in Italian (using a text by his friend Lorenzo da Ponte), he’s known as Don Giovanni. He is the archetypal womanizing aristocrat, seducing left, right, and centre, aided and abetted by his sidekick Leporello. It’s actually quite a grim story, especially in the light of #MeToo. The surprise, however, is not that such things are depicted on stage, but that the drama occurs within a clearly moral universe in which the feckless and selfish Don does not get away with it. In the final minutes of the opera, he gets his comeuppance. And Mozart’s brilliance is on display here yet again because we have a trio of three totally distinct characters each trying to do something very different. In less reliable hands, a trio of two basses and one baritone would have ended up as an impenetrable aural soup. In Mozart’s it is utterly compelling and fraught in its dramatic and musical intensity. Right at the opera’s start, Don Giovanni tried to seduce Donna Anna, daughter of Don Pedro, the Commendatore (a military commander). He gets caught and is challenged by the old soldier to a duel. Remarkably, Giovanni kills Don Pedro and escapes scot-free. But now at the end of Act 2, in a terrifying scene, a statue of the Commendatore appears with the words ‘Don Giovanni, you invited me to dine with you.’ He grips his hand and calls on him to repent. The rogue blankly refuses. The statue then drags him down to hell. All the while, Leporello has been hiding in terror under the table. So, listen out for how Mozart ingeniously separates out each character’s predicament and emotional state while ratcheting up the tension and drama in the music. Astonishing and haunting. *The All-Night Vigil (Op. 37, 1915) Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943, Russian) Gloriæ Dei Cantores, The St. Romanos Cappella, Patriarch Tikhon Choir, Washington Master Chorale, Peter Jermihov (cond.) Finally, back to Russia. And Rachmaninov’s much loved All-Night Vigil (commonly called the Vespers). You want to hear how the rumbling deep of the oktavists can possibly blend well with other singers? You’ve come to the right place. In fifteen short movements, these Vespers are a glorious combination of liturgical prayers, taken from the orthodox service of Vespers, Mattins and the service of the First Hour. You can find the texts and their sources here but in particular, listen out for the fifth movement, which in the western church is known as the Nunc Dimittis (Simeon’s song in Luke 2). In this movement, the composer expects his oktavists to descend to a Bb a full three octaves below middle C. When he played through his composition to his friend the choral conductor Nikolai Danilin, the response was sheer astonishment. Danilin shook his head, saying, “Now where on earth are we to find such basses? They are as rare as asparagus at Christmas!” Nevertheless, he did find them. I knew the voices of my countrymen…

There is no guarantee that one’s last words on planet earth will be weighty, profound or even memorable. None of us know the exact hour of our passing from these shadowlands, so the aspiration to leave a representative grand statement is futile. [Please note my resistance here to that preacher’s rent-a-giggle cliché of googling clickbait sites for some famous last words.] Still less can artists ensure that their final work is either representative or weighty. As one might expect, sustaining creativity throughout one’s life is difficult. Many of those who have poured their life’s energies into making new things find that retirement, when it comes, is very welcome! Sibelius, for example, famously composed no major works in the last three decades of his long life. Others have continued to write, but rarely topped the triumphs of their younger selves. This is why this list is remarkable. These pieces are genuine masterpieces in their own right; the fact that each is a last major work only adds to their poignancy. Contrapunctus VIII à 3, The Art of Fugue (BWV 1080) Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750, German) Rachel Podger (violin), Brecon Baroque Bach never completed ‘The Art of Fugue’ but tinkered and contributed elements to it throughout the last decade of his life. It features a sequence of ‘fugues,’ a form that we have encountered before whereby a theme (or ‘subject’) is repeated in sequence different voices, demonstrating the art of counterpoint. This is the technique of making distinct musical lines work in harmony with each other when played simultaneously. Part of the genius of this work is Bach’s decision to use the same subject for all the movements; each time he adds another layer of complexity. Even just trying to understand this makes the brain hurt; creating music that inspires and satisfies while doing this is little less than miraculous. Bach never specified the instrument(s) the Art of Fugue should be played on, so it has become a proving ground for pianists, organists, string quartets, and even electric guitarists. We will hear an arrangement for a chamber group or small orchestra; one way to listen is to fix your ear to one of the lines and try to follow it as long as you can. The momentum of the music’s logic pulls one along. I find it quite mesmerising! Lacrimosa from Requiem (K626, completed by Sussmayr) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791, Austrian) Barbara Bonney (soprano), Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists, John Eliot Gardiner (cond.) If Peter Shaffer’s brilliant play Amadeus is to be believed, his great rival Antonio Salieri exacts his revenge by covertly commissioning a requiem mass, supposedly with the purpose of driving him to an early grave in some perverted psych-ops strategy. Total nonsense, of course! Yet, what is undoubtedly true is that Mozart died in the course of writing the Requiem, leaving behind only one completed movement and fragments for the rest. So, for the Lacrimosa, we have only the first nine bars (‘measures’ in American!) in his hand. The rest was originally completed on the basis of his jottings and fragments by his student Franz Xaver Süssmayr (and it’s his version that is most commonly performed today). Yet, even with those nine bars, the pathos is overwhelming. The text is from the Catholic funeral mass and so don’t expect it to conform to sound protestant theology! Full of tears will be that day when from the ashes shall arise the guilty man to be judged; Therefore spare him, O God, Merciful Lord Jesus, grant them eternal rest. Amen. The music’s poignancy is only deepened by the knowledge that Mozart in all likelihood knew he was dying. Is this his way of mourning for his own imminent passing? He was only 35. Who knows what might have resulted had he lived even five more years? I. Molto Moderato from Piano Sonata in Bb (D. 960, 1828) Franz Schubert (1797-1828, Austrian) Alfred Brendel How bright some flames shine before they are cruelly extinguished. Schubert was another lost far too young. He was only 31, but his final years brought him bouts of terrible illness and pain (most likely the result of syphilis). He knew he was dying, a fact which seemed to spur him all the more feverishly. In the spring of 1828, Schubert started jotting down ideas for what would become his last three piano sonatas. He was always spinning several compositional plates simultaneously, but there are grounds for thinking that these three (numbered D 958, D 959, and D 960) were the final completed compositions of his short life. And it is this, the third in the trio, to which I find myself constantly returning. It is worth listening to the whole sonata (made up of four movements) in one go. But for now, just focus on the first movement. The initial melody is worthy of a gorgeous song (I’ve mentioned before that Schubert was one of the greatest song-writers in history) and it is filled with yearning beauty. There are few musical moments that give me more teary joy than when that melody resolutely returns. If you want to know how the eighteenth century articulated sehnsucht, you can do a lot worse than immersing yourself in this sonata. Schubert first performed the three sonatas to friends at the end of September. Seven weeks later, he was dead. II. September from Four Last Songs Richard Strauss (1864-1949, German) Jessye Norman (soprano), Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Kurt Masur (cond.) Strauss lived a long life, experiencing German history at its most turbulent and horrendous. How compromised he became under the Nazis is hotly debated, but one thing is certain. He could justify his reluctant membership of the Nazi Party as a means of protecting his Jewish daughter-in-law and (through her) his grandchildren. This no doubt contributed to his being acquitted in the Allies’ denazification process after the war. He composed several songs in 1948, but they were published posthumously under a title given by the publisher: Four Last Songs. He was 84 and already had many masterpieces to his name. How astonishing, then, that he was able to add another to that list in his final months. The other three titles were Spring, When Falling Asleep, and At Sunset. All four meditate on our mortality, as Strauss knew his life was drawing to a close. But what beauty as he does so. September is a Herman Hesse poem, with him standing in a garden at the end of summer, as petals and leaves fall to the ground and the tiredness that comes of facing inevitable winter. This is so alien for modern generations, isn’t it? We perversely live with what the American anthropologist Ernest Becker succinctly described as The Denial of Death. Yet, our ancestors were so much better equipped to contemplate our mortal existence with a healthy realism. As the ancients taught and artists down the centuries have confronted us, we all need memento mori (‘remember that we must die’). This recording by the astonishing African American soprano, Jessye Norman, was iconic, and the Four Last Songs are now forever identified with her. II. Adagio religioso from Piano Concerto No. 3 (BB 127, Sz 119) Béla Bartók (1881-1945, Hungarian) Andreas Haefliger (piano), Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, Susanna Mälkki (cond.) Bartók died in American exile from his native Hungary. He fled in 1940 because his strong anti-fascist views put him at odds with the government after it entered Axis Powers’ Tripartite Pact (Germany, Italy, and Japan). But he never fully settled, even though his son from his second marriage had joined the US navy in 1942 and he took citizenship in 1945. He composed little in the States, until he was jolted into creativity by a leukaemia diagnosis in 1944. This brought an astonishing outpouring. His final completed (more or less) work was his 3rd Piano Concerto, written as a birthday present for his second wife and former student, Ditta. Surprisingly, the piece communicates a light contentedness, a reflection perhaps of his happy marriage and also the sense of coming to terms with his own circumstances. The middle movement, in common with most concertos, is meditative and slow, marked ‘religioso’ because it sounds at times like a Chorale by Bach or Beethoven. But listen out for the sounds of the natural world in both piano and orchestra. String Quartet No. 16 in F (Op. 135) Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827, German) Takács Quartet The last two years of Beethoven’s life were marked by debilitating illness. In addition, he was by then deaf (a process that may have begun in around 1798 when he was only 28). So the last decade and a half were spent in general silence (although he could still detect low or sudden noises). And yet still torrents of music poured out from him. His last completed works were the Six Last Quartets, so-called. So picture him, deaf, sick and most often bed-bound. These quartets are not the most immediately accessible pieces of music, truth be told. But I urge you to work at this one, the last. By which I mean, give it your undistracted attention, try to identify the emotional resonances you might have with it. It is no accident that Schubert loved these pieces, despite the near universal scorn they received at the time. Schubert revered Beethoven and was a torchbearer at the latter’s funeral. Only a year later, he too was dying—and he requested friends play one of these late Quartets by his master. I don’t know of a more profound, simultaneously comforting and challenging, musical memento mori, than this, crafted as it was by a genius facing his own mortality.

It feels rather apt to be considering Exiles for this playlist, since I’m actually spending the week at the Rabbit Room mothership, North Wind Manor (or should that be motherburrow?). Robert Browning perfectly captured the nostalgia of homesickness with his sonnet, “Home Thoughts from Abroad,” as he finds himself wistfully imagining the exuberance of an English Spring from Italy (and within a few years of writing this, he would move there permanently with his new wife Elizabeth until her death in 1861). Here is the first stanza: Oh, to be in England  Now that April’s there,  And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware… That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England—now!  —”Home Thoughts from Abroad,” Robert Browning The Brownings would live in Italy primarily because of her poor health. But many do not live far from home by choice. Their native land has, for whatever reason, become inhospitable or even dangerous. That was certainly true for several of this week’s composers. 1. Flow My Tears (2nd Book of Songs, 1600) John Dowland (1563-1626, English) Stile Antico If anyone qualifies for the title Renaissance King of Melancholy, it is surely the lutenist John Dowland. A shadowy figure from London (or possibly from Dublin), he found favour in the Danish royal court at a time when he was discriminated against by Elizabeth I (or so he claimed) because of his Catholicism (although Elizabeth did employ other known Catholics, despite their potentially divided political loyalties). The subject matter of many of his songs seem consistent: I saw my Lady weepe; Flow my teares fall from your springs; Mourne, mourne, day is with darkness fled; If fluds of teares could cleanse my follies past. You catch the drift. Apparently, he was a more jovial chap than this setlist suggests, but one can’t help feeling that we’re dealing with quite the misery-guts. Still, he was a brilliant misery-guts. And his songs have stood the test of time, with a wide range of fans from Benjamin Britten and Percy Grainger all the way to Elvis Costello and Sting, not to mention sci-fi genius Philip K. Dick (if you know his work, you will recognise this track’s title). This song is perhaps his most famous. It was an early seventeenth century hit, undoubtedly the number one request at all his gigs. It’s one thing if your best-loved hit is a jolly happy number since that’s tough to pull off every time, when being on the road means you’re exhausted, tired, or lonely. But having a misery-memoir as your hit? I’ve no experience of such things, but I imagine it’s tough constantly having to suppress those occasional rays of sun. Anyway, this arrangement is a gorgeous one for choral ensemble sung by a superb English choir, Stile Antico. One of its founding members is a friend and since 2000 they have gone from strength to strength in the realm of renaissance music. 2. On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring (1912) Frederick Delius (1862-1934, English, then French) Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Sir Neville Marriner (cond.) Frederick Delius had German blood but grew up in the north of England. However, he spent the last thirty years of his life outside Paris with his German wife, Jelka, having spent some time on a family-owned orange plantation in Florida. He lived a fairly bohemian lifestyle even after his marriage, so he was never going to blend easily into the mercantile respectability of his family. He certainly had little time for business and was easily distracted by musical cultures he encountered; for example, the African American spirituals he heard in the U.S. or the Nordic sound world of Edvard Grieg. So, it is perhaps surprising to find this composition amongst his most celebrated: a palpable nostalgia trip to the England of his youth written a decade after his marriage. Along with George Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad (1911) and Vaughan-Williams’ The Lark Ascending (1914, in the very first 5&1), the piece is the epitome of so-called ‘English Pastoral’ school, so rudely dismissed in the 1950s by Elizabeth Lutyens as ‘cowpat music’ with its ‘folky-wolky melodies on the cor anglais’! Very unfair. But as in Browning’s poem, the earth’s annual Spring rebirth lies at the heart of the celebration, heralded by noting the first cuckoo call of the year. Beethoven famously included a cuckoo in his great Pastoral Symphony. But Delius here makes it sound particularly English! 3. The Woman Who Lived Up There, from Street Scene (1946) Kurt Weill (1900-1950, German then American) Bonaventura Bottone, (tenor), Janis Kelly (soprano) & Meriel Dickinson (mezzo), English National Opera Weimar, Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s was a seething cauldron of political strife, bohemian morals and insatiable creativity. It was thrilling and terrifying in equal measure. The best way to get a feel for the place is through Christopher Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical novels Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). These in turn inspired a stage play which in turn was turned into the musical Cabaret. Of those most associated today with Berlin cabaret of the era (with its risqué humour and dark satire), most famous were the playwright Berthold Brecht and composer Kurt Weill, along with the latter’s wife Lotte Lenya. You may know her from her role as Bond Baddie Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love!). And you almost certainly will know the much-covered Mack the Knife from the Brecht-Weill work, The Threepenny Opera. But once the Nazis came to power, the cabaret scene died, not least because its leading lights were largely by left-, if not communist-, leaning. Weill was doubly at risk because he was also Jewish. Unlike the millions who never managed it, Weill escaped, first to England and then to New York, alongside thousands of German Jewish intellectuals and artists. An exile, of course, has a creative choice at that point: hark back or embrace the new. Weill did both. But with his Street Scene, using texts from the African American genius Langston Hughes and the German Jewish but American-born Elmer Rice, he created a genuinely American opera. Set in the poverty of New York tenements on Manhattan’s East Side, it focuses on three families during a couple of blisteringly hot days. It is raw and unflinching—and tragic; as far removed as it is possible to get from the common perception of operas as ivory-towered, elitist, and escapist. Here the young Rose Maurrant comes home to find her mother had been killed by her brutal father. Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story would follow a decade later, and the influences of Street Scene are obvious. 4. Escape & Storm / Fog / Cooky / Asleep (from The Sea Wolf, 1941) Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957, Austrian, then American) Warner Bros. Studio Orchestra, Erich Korngold (cond.) Another Jewish émigré musician was Erich Korngold. Instead of New York, however, he settled on the West Coast, becoming one of the most important composers in Hollywood. Despite actually being Austrian (he held several senior positions in Vienna’s musical establishment), the rise of Nazism was clear. Germany’s annexation of Austria (the Anschluss) would not occur until 1938, but Korngold and his wife left in 1931, two years before Hitler became Chancellor over the border. Korngold had already won two Oscars for film scores (the second was for the Errol Flynn swashbuckler, The Adventures of Robin Hood). The Sea Wolf (1941) starred Edward G. Robinson but was far from escapist; and the music richly evokes the dark claustrophobia of being trapped on a ship out at sea dominated by a brutal and brutalising captain. While the drama was set decades earlier, the musical narrative seems to reflect the wartime era, and perhaps could only have been composed by someone watching with mounting horror what was taking place in his homeland. This track especially illustrates the European émigré impact on Hollywood. It might feel dated now but this was the archetypal sound of those movies. How different things would have been had they not found sanctuary across the Atlantic. 5. On The Willows (from Godspell, 1971) Stephen Schwartz (1948- , American) Richard LaBonte, Steven Reinhardt, Jesse Cutler, Original Off-Broadway Cast A very different mood now, composed by someone born in the States, but like Weill and Korngold, also Jewish. It’s a surprise to find him writing a Jesus musical, based on Matthew’s gospel (though perhaps less surprising when we explore the musical’s emphases and themes). On the Willows is based on Psalm 137, surely the ancient world’s number one exile song, but now given a 60s/70s flower-power hippy turn. The musical is imprinted on my memory because I grew up in the 70s and Godspell was one of the few tapes we had in the car! I have always loved it (even after it quickly faded from coolness) so am glad to see it frequently revived nowadays. It is gentler and more wistful than Lloyd-Webber/Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) but they are fascinating to compare. [In my view, JCS and Evita (1978), are their true masterpieces, heights which Lloyd-Webber never again attained (especially once he and Tim Rice went their separate ways.)] Schwarz’s take on the psalm here is sublime, perfectly capturing the exile’s nostalgia (apt since it was itself an ancient Greek word formed by combing the words home(coming) and pain). I especially love the lilting rhythms which evoke Babylon’s rivers and the melody’s conflicting, 2s-against-3s, rhythm. There’s plenty of theology in that fact alone! Verklärte Nacht (‘Transfigured Night’, Op. 4, 1899) Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951, Austrian, then American) Isabelle Faust, Anne Katharina Schreiber, Antoine Tamestit, Danusha Waskiewicz, Jean-Guihen Queyras & Christian Poltera So to our final exile, another Austrian Jewish genius who found safety in the USA. But his music is notorious and much of it is (I must confess) almost impossible to listen to. Devotees will no doubt accuse me of ignorant prejudice, probably justly, and to be fair, I’ve not given it a huge amount of time. He pioneered the 12-note system (which effectively abandons the notion of musical keys) and the principle of atonality. It’s hard work! I’m tempted to say that had the bitingly witty English Conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham, been asked if he ever performed Schoenberg just as he had of Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s, his response might have been similar. He said, “No, but I have trodden in some.” Harsh. So, imagine my wonder a few years ago when listening to BBC Radio 3 in the car (the UK’s main classical music station). I switched on early during a piece that was so overwhelming, I had to pull over to concentrate on it. It seemed emotionally tortured but utterly compelling and starkly beautiful. I couldn’t believe it when the announcer then said it was Schoenberg. Early in his career he was still working within fairly conventional, nineteenth-century rules (thus proving the adage that before you can learn to break artistic rules convincingly, you have to learn how to obey them). And this piece, written for String Sextet in five sections corresponding to a German poem of the same name by Richard Dehmel, is a case in point. So even though this was composed fifty years before most of the others in this list, and long before Schoenberg ended up in exile, consider this simple point: how absurdly evil to reject and seek to murder people of such musical genius simply because of their religion or racial heritage… (for which substitute skin colour, politics, ethnicity, lifestyle or anything else).

I obviously don’t know how it is where you are reading this, but here in southern England, having enjoyed a small run of deliciously warm and sunny spring days, we are again marooned in full grey-cloud immersion. Not a shirt-sleeve in sight anywhere. No wonder April (and by extension, May) was Eliot’s cruellest month. A little escapism every now and then is helpful, especially for those of us whose equilibrium gets seasonally affected. I vividly remember a camping trip somewhere in southern France with my parents and brother (in perhaps ’78 or ’79). Such an adventure. But one lasting impression was the summer heat: the closeness of it, the inescapability of it, and weirdly, the sound of it. I just loved it. And still do. Working out in such heat is naturally a different matter but for this pasty Englishman, it’s always associated with holidays. I suppose that was the source of my lifelong Francophilia, studying the language right up to the end of high school and relishing French culture of all kinds. I love getting back whenever I can. And for the times that’s not possible, there’s always the music… Chants d’Auvergne: No 2. Bailero Joseph Canteloube (1879-1957, French) Dame Kiri Te Kanawa (soprano), English Chamber Orchestra, Jeffrey Tate (cond.) Just around the time that Vaughan-Williams and friends were scouring the English countryside to capture local folksongs, Canteloube was doing the same around his home in the Auvergne, southern France. It is a region with extraordinary history that stretches back to Roman times. (If you read Asterix books—and if you haven’t, you should—this is where the great Gallic rebel Vercingetorix originates!). Canteloube arranged many of the songs into this gorgeous anthology, of which the 2nd, Bailero, is the best known. It is a shepherd’s song in the local dialect of Occitan. Sit back and close your eyes. You will feel, smell, and hear the heat. Deux Novellettes: No 1 in C – Modéré sans lenteur (FP 47) Francois Poulenc (1899-1963, French) Pascal Rogé (piano) Poulenc could do big and brash, full of cubist angles and dissonance (as we heard last December). But he could also be tender and wistful, as with this little piece (the French word does not actually mean novelty, despite appearances; it’s more a short piece, a little thing). I fell in love with it when my piano teacher suggested it—and bizarrely, played it during a scene change for a school play. To my mind, this evokes not the heat so much as the light and joy of summer. Sitting on a park bench or stretched out on the grass in the garden, perhaps, with the sound of children happily playing somewhere (not too near, ideally!) and the general busyness of butterflies and bees. La Mer (1946) Charles Trenet (1913-2001, French) We’ve had languor and wistfulness so far; it’s time for some exuberance and you won’t find anything more quintessentially French than Charles Trenet’s timeless La Mer (‘The Sea’). You’d never know it was written immediately after World War II—but it was a hit because it was evidently just what France needed after the horrors and humiliations of occupation. This is a song about the anticipation of heading off to the beach, of larking about in the sunshine, diving and splashing in the water (preferably Mediterranean rather than Atlantic or English Channel). As he sings in last verse, “And with a love song the sea has rocked my heart for life.” But to be honest, it’s not really the lyrics that get the pulse racing; it’s the arrangement and Trenet’s own performance. How can it not make you happy in the first verse or two? But then, after about 2 and a half minutes, it changes gear completely. Trenet goes nuts and is suddenly joined by a cheesy choir, with the orchestra completely over the top. But after the year we’ve all had, it feels utterly justified. “We’re going to the beach,” it seems to say, “and c’est magnifique!” Long after the fade, I’m left grinning from ear to ear. Trois Gymnopédies: No 2. Erik Satie (1866-1925, French) Pascal Rogé (piano) You will all recognise number 1 of these gymnopédies by that great musical miniaturist, Erik Satie. So, I’ve deliberately gone for the second, which is very similar in form, mood, and style. It is in waltz time, but it is pensive, lethargic, listless almost. So, the title is incongruous since the word is borrowed from Ancient Greece, describing dances by groups of soldiers in formation, men who may have simply been unarmed or who were actually naked (just like all ancient Greek athletics). The music makes it feel as if the dancers are some distance away, perhaps with the summer scene shimmering in the heat-haze. It is trance- or dream-like. And in the heat, we can feel our eyelids getting heavier and heavier… Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (L. 86) Claude Debussy (1862-1918, French) Les Siècles, François-Xavier Roth (cond.) If the previous track is hypnotic and even soporific, this one depicts the next stage, that of snoozing and dreaming, and subsequently coming to again. The title means ‘prelude to the afternoon of a faun’ and it is Debussy’s artistic response to (rather than a narrative depiction of) a poem by Mallarmé. He wants to evoke the faun’s afternoon’s sleepiness. Yes, we’re talking about a distant relation of Mr. Tumnus, but this faun is rather a rascal, having spent the whole morning chasing nymphs and naiads (beautiful, semi-divine creatures who live in fresh water and other places) without success. That has worn him out. Well, it would, wouldn’t it? What made this piece so revolutionary was that Debussy was primarily concerned with the sensory experience of the moment, with the power of orchestral sounds and colours to place the listener in the middle of a scene, rather than telling a story. But perhaps you already realised as you listened, without me having to point it out. L’Arlésienne Suite (1872) Georges Bizet (1838-1875, French) Les Musiciens du Louvre, Marc Minkowski (cond.) Bizet is best known today for his opera Carmen, but of his other works, this suite of pieces is much loved concert regular. Bizet was commissioned to write the incidental music for a play by one Alphonse Daudet, L’Arlésienne (‘The Girl from Arles). The play was a flop and is very rarely performed—unsurprising when you discover that the eponymous girl never appears on stage while the drama revolves around her fiancé, Frédéri, after she has been unfaithful to him. That’s pretty depressing but things spiral for Frédéri thereafter, as he descends into insanity and eventually suicide. And a fun evening out at the theatre was had by all! Thankfully, Bizet’s music was not lost because it is wonderful. There were many short pieces, as one would imagine for a play with several scene shifts and mood changes. But the most famous were gathered together into two suites for orchestra. They stand on their own without the requirement of a theatre company. Frankly, I never had a clue how dark the play was until recently because the score barely hints at it! Instead, the music seems to conjure up a young, happy-go-lucky French teenager, who relishes the attention and wolf-whistles as she flounces through a town square. She might not appear on stage, but she’s a significant presence in the music. And it’s glorious. So allow these pieces sweep you away to a café terrace that looks out over a square in Provence or the Côte d’Azur; waiters whirl around the clientele, somehow elegant in their black aprons bulging with loose change and menus; the belltower of the parish church suddenly comes to life with peals of ringing; a farmer negotiates the narrow streets on his decrepit tractor to deliver another load of grapes to the nearby press. All while you sip your chilled apéritif and lazily observe the casts of local citizens carrying on with their day…

For years as an inveterate night-owl, the dawn has been one of those natural phenomena I mostly appreciate in the hypothetical rather than in experience. But as middle-age has set in, I have found myself waking earlier and unintentionally glimpsing its glories with greater frequency. It’s hard not to be moved, especially if, like the Psalmist’s watchmen, one has found oneself longing for the end of night (Ps 130:5-6). It never palls. No wonder then that composers have been stirred by the first flickers of the sun’s ‘rosy-fingered’ rays (to quote Homer) to capture the ineffable in the audible. We have already heard one of (if not) the greatest dawns in classical music: Strauss’ Alpine Symphony right back in the very first 5&1, so unfortunately that’s banned. But I do recommend you return to it. Turn all the lights off and the volume up high; then as the music grows, gradually open the curtains and/or turn on the lights. Then start air-conducting with abandon. Even better, get up early, go outside and accompany these heavenly glories from your headphones. Plus air-conduct. Introduction & “In the Beginning, God” (The Creation, 1798) Josef Haydn (1732-1809, Austrian) Neal Davies (bass), Chetham's Chamber Choir, Gabrieli Consort, Paul McCreesh (cond.) Haydn’s Creation is a musical epic, inspired both by Genesis 1-2 and by John Milton’s Paradise Lost. If you don’t know it, frankly, this is a problem. It’s up there with the other choral masterpieces like Messiah by Handel and Requiem by Mozart. It’s also a huge amount of fun to sing if you ever get the chance. After the Overture, entitled by Haydn as The Representation of Chaos, the bass soloist flings us into the cosmic drama. Ostensibly, he is simply announcing the opening verses of the Bible. But I can almost guarantee that it is not until you’ve heard the Austrian composer’s setting of them that you will get a senses of how staggering it all is. There should be a health warning, though. I do recommend having the volume on 10 or 11, because it starts very quiet indeed. But make sure you fasten your seatbelts too because otherwise you’ll jump out of your skin. In fact, I suggest you don’t listen the very first time while driving. Four Sea Interludes: 1. On The Beach (Peter Grimes, Op. 33, 1945) Benjamin Britten (1913-1976, English) Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Sir Colin Davis (cond.) Now, I realise we visited Peter Grimes’ beach at Aldeburgh in Suffolk (near where I grew up) in week 2. So, you might accuse me of inconsistency. In my defence, I previously chose the third sea interlude and this is the first. So there. But I adore all four. It really is so evocative of time and place. Suffolk isn’t on everybody’s itinerary when they come to England (thankfully!) but 5&1 readers are a cultural elite, so I give you permission to visit. The beaches are not archetypally great—most do not have expanses of sand but are narrow and pebbly; parts of this coastline are nicknamed Shingle Street for good reason. Because it also lies at Britain’s most easterly point (which is not saying very much, to be fair), it is always the first part of the country to see the sun every morning, creeping over the North Sea horizon. The sun makes all the difference in the world, whether it’s visible or not. And to my mind, this movement evokes a grey and overcast morning where darkness is supplanted by first light. The North Sea rarely offers idyllic views; it is usually battleship grey streaked by trails of muddy brown. But even this is transformed by daylight. And Britten’s depiction is perfection. Tableau III: Lever du jour (Daybreak) from Daphnis & Chloé (M. 57) Maurice Ravel (1875-1937, French) Marion Ralincourt (flute), Les Siècles, Ensemble Aedes, François-Xavier Roth (cond.) Fly a few hundred miles south, of course, and it’s a different matter entirely. Cloudless skies and summer heat—and oh! the glory of those first morning rays! Ravel’s depiction is spine-tinglingly beautiful. He takes an ancient classical story set about a young boy and girl from the Greek island of Lesbos. They had been abandoned at birth but get fostered by two neighbouring goatherds. They grow up and (inevitably) fall in love; they undergo various trials and tribulations; finally meet their birthparents; they end up happily ever after. Ravel was commissioned to write a new ballet by Serge Diaghilev, the famous Russian founder of the Ballets Russes in Paris. The result was a one-act composition, made up of three scenes (‘tableaux’), but lasting almost an hour in total. This track opens the third and we are transported to daybreak in a magical, mythical scene of grotto belonging to nymphs. The music reflects the whole of the natural world as it is gradually returns to life and the rays creep over the horizon. It’s wonderful. The dawn chorus of birds comes to life, sheep are being led out to pasture, and herdsmen can set out to find Daphnis after having previously abandoned the search at nightfall. This is truly the music of the sublime. Dawn (from the soundtrack of Pride and Prejudice, 2005) Dario Marianelli (1963- , Italian) Jean-Yves Thibaudet (piano) From the waking natural world, we turn to a waking household. Jane Austen’s classic has inspired countless dramatizations, rip-offs and satires. But Joe Wright’s film (with Keira Knightley and Matthew McFadyen) is much loved and rightly so. Though I still think the BBC series (with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth) is far better, but perhaps this marks a generational divide (despite the fact that I couldn’t care less about blokes climbing out of lakes wearing baggy white shirts). I particularly love the soundtrack for its simplicity and artfulness. Marianelli is an Italian composer who studied in London for a number of years and who has worked with Wright a few times. He composed something that feels entirely in keeping with the classical sound worlds of a Mozart or early Beethoven in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Yet, he brilliantly manages to avoid pastiche while creating something that feels authentically English and contemporary (perhaps largely because of his deliberate cross-rhythms). With the lead consistently given to the Fortepiano (a classical forerunner of the modern pianoforte and the great embodiment of the era’s domestic music-making so beloved of the Bennets), how appropriate to open the entire movie with a solo piano. It is performed by the superb French soloist, Jean-Yves Thibaudet. The movie’s opening images are of early morning fog floating on the fields just before as the sun creeps up accompanied by a simple melody of heart-breaking beauty. As the sun rises, the Bennet household seems to yawn and stretch and begin yet another day of fraught, domestic frivolity and chaos! Helios Overture (Op. 17) Carl Nielsen (1865-1931, Danish) South Jutland Symphony Orchestra, Niklas Willén (cond.) Nielson was Denmark’s greatest composer, but he was inspired to write the Helios Overture by a visit to Greece. His wife, the sculptor Anne-Marie, had been invited there as part of an award to study ancient artefacts in the Acropolis Museum. While she was working, Carl was given access to a piano and time to roam. The two would go on walks in the Achaean hills and beyond. He was thus inspired to write a piece of an orchestral work depicting the sun (helios in both ancient and modern Greek) rising over the Aegean Sea. However, in contrast to the other pieces in this list, Nielsen takes us to the other end of the day, with the light fading far to the west. Nielsen wrote above the score: Silence and darkness, The sun rises with a joyous song of praise, It wanders its golden way and sinks quietly into the sea. —Carl Nielsen This is another piece to set hearts racing. Prelude from Act I Akhnaten (1983) Philip Glass (1937- , American) Paul Esswood (Akhnaten), Milagro Vargas (Nefertiti), Stuttgart State Opera Orchestra & Chorus, Dennis Russell Davies (cond.) Our final outing takes us even further into back into history, far beyond the realms of Greek myth and Achaean sunrises. We are now in Ancient Egypt, albeit in the hands of an American composer still living. The Pharaoh Akhnaten (aka Amenhotep IV) was a highly controversial ruler over Egypt because convention holds that he sought to revolutionize a famously polytheistic society into one that was rigidly monotheistic. He is associated with the introduction of Atenism, the worship of Aten (the Sun) and Philip Glass’s opera features a modern translation of his Hymn to the Sun. Glass (alongside Steve Reich and John Adams, both featured in 5&1, Part 9 on the mechanical world) is one the best so-called Minimalists, whereby music develops primarily through small, incremental shifts. He was fascinated by individuals whose genius or brilliance enabled them to have a disproportionate impact on their generations and so wrote two other, related operas about Einstein and Gandhi. This track opens the opera, and, through repeated arpeggios that repeat in keys around A minor, we are immediately immersed into a sense of foreboding. Something ominous and unsettling is on the horizon. Now, normally, I would include a full composition as the final element of the playlist. However, minimalism is not everybody’s cup of tea, and most can only handle it in small doses (including me). So see how you go. If you love it, keep going. But while I don’t want to listen to it all day, Glass’s ability to convey something impending as well as grand and even majestic with very constrained musical tools is remarkable. As a side note, scholars have speculated in recent years (largely prompted by no less a luminary than Sigmund Freud) that this determination to turn to monotheism might have had something to do with the biblical Moses. The dates certainly seem to fit, more or less. Who knows? If true, it’s fascinating to find an entirely pagan parallel to, if not actual corroboration of, an ancient Jewish phenomenon. Genesis and Exodus would of course reject the idea of sun-worship; but how amazing that a culture whose polytheism was directly challenged by Moses actually attempted in time and space to do something about it.

Music oft hath such a charm To make bad good, and good provoke to harm. — Measure for Measure, Act 4, Scene 1 Music was crucial to Shakespeare’s plays throughout his career—not just to keep the groundlings (the standing-room-only ticket-holders) amused, but also to propel plots, capture moods, or heighten intensity. He understood, as Duke Vincent observes in this line from Measure for Measure, that music has extraordinary, even dangerous, power to affect us. Few modern productions would consider doing without some sort of musical accompaniment. So perhaps it is no surprise, then, that the Bard has inspired composers and musicians ever since. The surprise is how universal that has been: this very brief list features only one English composer. The rest are Italian, Czech, German, French, and Russian. The convention is to split his output into three main categories (although there is inevitably some overlap): Tragedies, Comedies and Histories. So, since there is just so much, let’s restrict this list to merely homing in on the first. It will then become clear that music might equally be the food of cathartic tears, despairing cries, and vented spleens. MACBETH “Fuggi regal fantasima” Act 3, Sc 2 (Macbeth, 1847) “Patria Oppressa!” Act 4, Sc 1 Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901, Italian) Sherill Milnes (Macbeth), Ambrosian Opera Chorus, New Philharmonia Orchestra, Riccardo Muti (cond.) The “Scottish Play” has it all: Witches and Ghosts! Hallucinations and Night Terrors! Treason and Regicide! Justice and Revenge! It was the perfect gift to that great Maestro of Italian opera, Giuseppe Verdi. Macbeth would be the first of several Shakespearean plays he converted into operas and the result is a rather glorious (if perhaps unlikely) convergence of the wintry and rugged landscape of mediaeval Scotland with fiery Mediterranean temperaments. Even though it is not the most famous of Verdi’s operas, it was my first, helped by the fact that I had studied the play at school. It does help to have some idea of what’s going on, especially when everyone sings in a foreign language! We drop in with Act 3, with Macbeth on the throne but now terrified by the ghosts of Banquo and his successors, the eight future kings of Scotland. “Away, royal phantom! You remind me of Banquo…” he sings. We feel his shudders, even before the witches chime in with their gloating. Then fast forward to early in Act 4, with Scottish refugees singing of their plight as they gather near the English border. “Oppressed land of ours! You cannot have the sweet name of mother now that you have become a tomb for your sons…” We weep with them, rather as audiences did five years before in the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves in Verdi’s opera about Nebuchadnezzar and the Exile, Nabucco. THE TEMPEST Full Fathom Five; The Cloud-Capp’d Towers (from Three Shakespeare Songs) Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958, English) National Youth Choir of Great Britain, Ben Parry (cond.) The Tempest is one of those late plays that doesn’t quite fit with the trio of categories mentioned above. But it certainly has its tragic elements, as these two settings for unaccompanied choir by Vaughan-Williams demonstrate. They were written in 1951 for The Festival of Britain, an event designed to lift the country’s spirits after the horrors of World War II (much of London was still in ruins and most food rationing would continue until 1954). The lines are spoken by two of Shakespeare’s eeriest characters, Ariel and Prospero, respectively. Full Fathom Five is addressed by Ariel to Ferdinand about his father Alonso, presumed shipwrecked and drowned. Vaughan-Williams’s setting is mysterious, other-worldly, as if evoking through voices the murky, bluey-green depths far below the ocean’s surface. Deep down, a bell tolls for Alonso, perhaps from some long-past submerged church (like that of Dunwich not far from where I grew up—its drowned bells, according to legend, can still be heard…). Prospero’s announcement of the end of the play within the play is performed to celebrate his daughter Miranda’s wedding to Ferdinand. Note the word ‘globe:’ the theatre company has evoked the whole world through their art; but they have done so within The Globe Theatre where this was first performed. As with any performance, once the revels end, these conjured realities evaporate into nothingness. The stage has gone dark. Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air; And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. —Act 4, Scene 1 OTHELLO Othello overture (Op. 93, 1892) Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904, Czech) Berlin Philharmonic, Claudio Abbado (cond.) Dvořák was a versatile composer, just a few years younger than Johannes Brahms. But the older man helped to give his junior some helpful nudges at the start and the two became firm friends. Their music shares many affinities despite each having a unique genius. By the time Dvořák wrote this overture, he was fully established and had, in fact, been invited to the United States to become the second director of the recently established National Conservatory of Music in New York. This is a standalone orchestral work inspired by the tragedy of The Moor of Venice, so is naturally full of high drama and pathos and culminates in an arresting but grand finale. The only disappointment is that the curtains do not then part to launch a whole opera! But fear not. The Italians had already got there, twice as it happens: Rossini’s Otello in 1816 and then Verdi’s masterpiece just five years before Dvořák’s overture. If you are familiar with it, you will certainly hear some similarities with his glorious 9th Symphony “From the New World” (Op. 95)—more about which at a later date—written at roughly the same time as this, together with his Cello Concerto. HAMLET 5 Ophelia lieder (W. 22, 1873) Johannes Brahms (1833-1897, German) Jessye Norman (soprano), Daniel Barenboim (piano) Wie erkenn’ ich dein Treublieb? (How should I know your true love?) Sein Leichenhemd weiss wie Schnee. (White his shroud as the mountain snow.) Auf morgen ist Sankt Valentins Tag. (Tomorrow is St Valentine’s Day.) Sie trugen ihn auf der Bahre bloss. (They bore him bare-faced on the bier) Und kommt er nicht mehr zurück? (And will he not come again?) Poor Ophelia. Dad (Polonius) was a bit of a dolt; brother (Laertes) has skedaddled off to France just when he’s needed most; while love interest (Hamlet) seems completely off his trolley. She didn’t really have a chance. So, when it happens, Ophelia’s decline is rapid, witnessed by Queen Gertrude (Hamlet’s mother) and her new husband and ex-brother-in-law, King Claudius (Act IV Sc 5). Shakespeare’s device for portraying her disintegration is a sequence of miniature songs and these form the basis of Brahms’ exquisite, filigree-light collection. He composed them for an 1873 production of Hamlet in Prague, but they would only get published thirty years later, after his death. Blink and you’ll miss them because together they only last six minutes. Brahms composes them as very simple, concise folk songs, but they are as stunning as they are agonised. For example, in the fourth, the constantly falling lines, suddenly interrupted by the terse ending, are heart-breaking. As we heard last week, here again is the great Jessye Norman. KING LEAR Fanfare-Ouverture and Le Sommeil de Lear, incidental music from Le Roi Lear (L.116, 1904) Claude Debussy (1862-1918, French) City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Sir Simon Rattle (cond.) Debussy is not a composer most readily identified with Shakespeare, not least because he seemed the epitome of Gallic sophistication. But he did find momentary inspiration from the plays and planned to write a sequence of incidental pieces to accompany a production of King Lear. In the end, he never finished, completing only two movements and leaving the rest to be filled out and orchestrated by a student. The Fanfare Overture feels a little derivative but the second piece, Lear’s Dream is mysterious and beguiling; it’s vintage Debussy, in other words. It wonderfully transports us to that netherworld between dreamless sleep and consciousness. ROMEO & JULIET Highlights from Romeo & Juliet Suites 1 & 2 (Op. 64, 1938) Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev (1891-1953, Soviet/Russian) Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Riccardo Muti (cond.) Prokofiev wrote a complete ballet based on the Shakespeare play in 1935, but the early years of its existence were fraught. Politics and rivalries, as well as deep-seated fears within the artistic community under Stalin’s regime, meant that it took some time before it could be performed in the USSR. Sections were heard in Moscow and New York; even stranger is that rejected Shakespeare’s original in favour of a happy ending! The whole would not be premiered until 1938, in Brno in Czechoslovakia. Prokofiev fully revised it further after this, so that the Soviet première in the form that it is best known today took place in 1940 in Leningrad. Some of the big themes are familiar no doubt, even though not everyone is able to identify their origins. It is scored for an orchestra on a grand scale and even if not a ballet fan, it is worth tracking the events of the drama along with each section. It is every bit as rollercoasterish as the original play. The selection of highlights on this recording goes as follows (reordered for a live performance to make more musical sense than it does narrative sense!). 13. Dance of the Knights (Montagues and Capulets) 10. Juliet as a young girl 16. Madrigal 11. Arrival of Guests 12. Masks 38. Romeo and Juliet 35. Romeo decides to avenge Mercutio’s death 28. Romeo at Friar Laurence’s 39. Romeo and Juliet Before Parting 50. Romeo and Juliet’s Grave