Category: Cambridge
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The Cambridge-Heidelberg Youth Orchestra in 1972
In 1972, with a number, I can't remember how many, of other young Cambridge musicians, I was selected to be part of the exchange trip to Heidelberg. These began in 1962, hence the fiftieth anniversary celebrations at which I write these reminiscences. In alternate years a group would make its way from one city to…
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Fest-Konzert ‘O Fortuna”
I am in Heidelberg for the fiftieth anniversary of the Cambridge-Heidelberg-Montpellier youth orchestra and have just heard the most sensational concert. I was last here forty years ago when I was lucky enough to be picked as one of the Cambridge contingent to visit Heidelberg for ten days of rehearsals, culminating in a concert at…
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Tower of porn (with apologies to Leonard Cohen)
Anne Jarvis, the University Librarian, disappointed her audience at Senate House by telling us that the undergraduate rumours that the tower of Cambridge’s University Library is stuffed full of pornography acquired under legal deposit are baseless. In fact, there is now a project to exploit and make known the riches of the collection in the tower,…
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Cambridge
In Cambridge for the first time since 2008, to attend the Cambridge Greek Play, and staying in a hotel opposite the house where I spent my childhood, I had the chance to reproduce nearly exactly the TAG route, that is to say, Trumpington and Grantchester, a family tradition. The word tag thus came to stand…
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Boat Race day
It’s a pleasant coincidence that this year the Oxford and Cambridge boat race should fall on my father’s birthday. He would have been ninety-eight, but he died thirteen years ago. It was an event he enjoyed immensely, for he was part of that peculiarly Cambridge medico-athletic milieu; it is also frequently referred to in the…
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Most highly flavoured gravy
Today, 25 March, is the feast of the annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. May I reassure regular readers that my normal stance of militant atheism has not given way to religious mania, still less to Mariolatry? I continue to strive for the day when all priests, rabbis, mullahs, lamas, shamen and other functionaries of…
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CYCO
I heard a piece of music on the radio that I had not heard for forty years, Torelli’s Trumpet Concerto. It is a commonplace piece of baroque writing for the trumpet, but the opening figure, played first by the orchestra and then by the soloist, has stayed in my head ever since I first heard…
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De Arte Natandi
Continuing to catch up with delayed posts, my attention was caught by a piece in the Guardian magazine a couple of weekends ago, on river and lake swimming. Two books have recently appeared on the subject, and this was a review by Margaret Drabble of one of them, by Kate Rew, published by the newspaper…
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Usque conabor
I’m not sure I would ever use my old school motto in a speech; it doesn’t seem to me to strike the right note. Mind you, mine, from the Perse school, was ‘qui facit per alium, facit per se’, that is to say who does things for others, does them for himself, an example of…