In three weeks time, mid January, Mary Dullea, Alex Van Ingen and myself will converge upon Wyastone to record the CD. Hopefully we can complete the task in a weekend even though it looks very much as though we will be making a double CD. I doubt whether all the pieces can be compressed onto one disc. The Three Sonatas also occupied two discs and that entailed three days of recording. It will be a very intense, very focused two days as always. Wyastone is in Monmouth, that’s very near one of the many places where England meets with Wales. It’s a long way to travel for all of us but we give it lots of pluses, the Steinway piano, recording facilities and the efficiency of its staff.
I will not attempt to describe Wyastone, how we go about the recording, for I have written about this already. If you wish to catch a glimpse of what we do, what it is like, how we go about our tasks, scroll down to two previous posts – A Weekend at Wyastone, September 2013 and Wyastone Revisited November 2013.
And how do I sign off this, my last post of the year? I have struggled. I have drafted several attempts but each falls short of how I completed the corresponding post of last year. Owing to a paucity of invention on my part I am not able to improve upon it. I have decided to repeat the last paragraph ad verbatim. I regard it sadly, disappointingly, as relevant to the now as it was one year ago. I can only hope that in the future this, or something closely resembling it, does not become some kind of vapid, stale, trope but I am struggling to find sense in a world which I feel has become a moral and ethical vacuum,a world which is so often characterised by an increasing absence of social values, bereft of empathy or tolerance.
“As we approach the turn of the year we must hope that our political leaders will together work with an urgency and purpose to facilitate change. Change which will result in a more egalitarian, humane and compassionate global society. We have to hope. I guess that in some of the most desperate regions of the world hope is all that people have. May I offer a similar line of thought from Miguel Cervantes via the mouth of his alter ego Don Quixote, “Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not what it should
be”. It is with these thoughts and in this context that I conclude this last post of the year. I sincerely wish you all peace, good health, good fortune”..
Eric Craven - Composer 