2011 threesomes

The New Year is the signal for a bit of meme time around here. I like the meme – it’s a socially sanctioned excuse for theft. I stole this idea from a post on Becca’s Blog a year ago. So, what was my 2011 like, in various things?

Top 3 books
It was a pretty decent reading year. One book stands out among all the others, and that is Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, which I began reading on holiday, sitting in Cologne Cathedral while I waited for an organ recital by Martin Baker to begin, and finished back in the UK. An utterly engrossing, lovable book. Perhaps I should investigate the family saga further in 2012. John Cheever’s Falconer was another highlight – a short novel about a university professor coping with life in prison. Like nothing I’ve read before, and Cheever is a writer with a magnificent eye for detail. On an arguably less exalted level – but no less wonderful – are Alexander McCall Smith’s 44 Scotland Street books, all seven of which I devoured in the space of a few months in the middle of the year. His humanity and tolerance are infectious.

Top 3 CDs
Of the year’s new releases, I listened to The Prince Consort’s recording of Brahms’ Liebeslieder-Walzer and Stephen Hough’s Other Love Songs a lot. I was fortunate to be at the premiere of the Hough in the summer, and it is a work I have grown to love. Simon Standage’s Mozart violin concerti with the Academy of Ancient Music and Christopher Hogwood have reminded me of the beauty of this music. I also found Christian Bruhn’s Timm Thaler soundtrack tremendous fun.

Top 3 films
I watched a titanic number of films last year (not Titanic; I am not mad). I rarely feel in the mood for watching Bergman, but I found it was his films that impressed me most of all. A genius. The Seventh Seal, Through a Glass Darkly, The Silence, but most of all Winter Light. I’ve been watching Fanny and Alexander over the New Year, for the first time in about ten years, and am enjoying being dazzled by it anew. Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp struck me as a great masterpiece, Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook both quite irresistible, and I’m delighted to hear that there is a new print being released in cinemas in a few months’ time. And I might name any of several others as my third film, but for the sake of variety let’s say Before Sunrise, which is a lovely film if you’re of a romantic disposition. (I saw a handful of brilliant new films at the cinema too, so for an alternative three try The King’s Speech, The Guard and Tomboy.)

Top 3 live music
It was a thrill seeing Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s production of Parsifal at ENO in February. It’s only recently that I’ve started going to see Wagner live, and Parsifal is perhaps my favourite opera. John Tomlinson was a superb Gurnemanz, and I marvelled at the economy of the scoring. It exposes as misguided the popular conception of Wagner as sprawling and overblown. Love Stephen Hough at the Wigmore though I did, I think Marc-André Hamelin provided my piano recital of the year at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, playing Haydn, Schumann, Wolpe, Debussy and, as his barnstorming finale, Liszt’s Reminiscences de Norma in the composer’s bicentenary year. And last of all, Pulp at Wireless. Jarvis has still got it.

Top 3 theatre
I’m including musicals and comedy, so there’s only one echt play, and even that’s not particularly echt – namely Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors, which I saw just before Christmas. A breathtaking thing to behold, and quite the most I’ve enjoyed myself in any theatre, perhaps anywhere ever. A rollercoaster, and wrong to single out individual performances in a production so delicious in every aspect (not least its superb music), but I must say I thought Oliver Chris particularly wonderful, funnier than I’ve ever known him before, not to mention James Corden, Tom Edden, Trevor Laird, Daniel Rigby, etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum. My trip to Chichester to see the new production of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd was a great treat, the cast superb (in spite of some doubts about Michael Ball), and I will make a point of revisiting it in London this year. And thirdly, Jonny Sweet’s lovely solo show, Let’s All Just Have Some Fun (and Learn Something, for Once), which I saw at the Soho Theatre in January. He stands at the front giving the audience bear hugs as they come in; one cannot but love the man.

Lastly, I must add another happy discovery, which has been on the periphery of my consciousness for a while but which I only began to pay attention to this year, John Finnemore’s radio sitcom Cabin Pressure. I think its central cast of four – Finnemore, Benedict Cumberbatch, Roger Allam and Stephanie Cole – must be just about the strongest and most likeable since Rising Damp. A fourth series has just been commissioned. There is no end to Finnemore’s talents, apparently. He also wrote an excellent sketch show for Radio 4, and drew a picture a day on his blog, Forget What Did, as a sort of Advent calendar last month. You owe it to yourself to have a look.

Here’s hoping 2012 is similarly happy, for me and for all of you!

Timm Thaler

Well, I stop posting for a bit and the blog’s hit rate increases dramatically. Perhaps you prefer it when I’m not here. I think it’s actually because Benjamin Grosvenor has been in the news. There’s a super interview with him here in case any pianophiles are interested. I think the thing I like most about Grosvenor’s approach to performance is his great appetite for learning from the pianists of the past. I would feel the same way if only I could play the piano well enough for it to matter. Anyway, on with the show.

One of the good things about going abroad is that it always prompts me to do things that I feel I ought to do regularly but normally fail to, namely watching films and reading books in foreign languages. I’m off to spend a week in Cologne very soon, and have been dipping into a book of Ostfriesenwitze (East Frisian jokes) in preparation. The East Frisians are the Irish of German culture, a perennial butt of jokes. They are big drinkers of tea, which perhaps marks them out as odd. Sample Witz, with my translation:

F. Warum haben die Ostfriesen einen Knoten im Penis?
A. Damit sie das Pissen nicht vergessen.

Q. Why did the East Frisian man tie a knot in his penis?
A. So he wouldn’t forget to piss!

I will also be taking some Böll and Mann in translation on holiday with me. I know how to have a good time. As far as watching films is concerned, I’ve seen a couple of desperately depressing Fassbinders recently, and also revisited Charlie Brown und seine Freunde, which is a tremendous film in any language; but most of my revision has consisted of watching the 1979 ZDF TV series Timm Thaler, based on the 1962 novel of the same name by James Krüss. The series was broadcast in a dubbed version on CBBC in the late 1980s, renamed The Legend of Tim Tyler, which is where I first encountered it.

Timm Thaler, die Hauptperson unserer Geschichte, hat sein Lachen an den mächtigsten Mann der Welt verkauft, den Baron. Zugegeben, für einen fantastischen Preis. Timm Thaler gewinnt jede Wette, und sei sie noch so ausgefallen. Doch, dann merkte er, daß sein Lachen sein kostbarster Besitz war. Er will es wiederhaben.

These are the words that open nearly every episode. For the benefit of those who do not speak German, permit me to explain. 13-year-old Timm is approached by a mysterious stranger, the Baron. The Baron is the most powerful man in the world, but his business interests are suffering because his inability to laugh inhibits him from forming alliances with other powerful businessmen. He proposes to buy Timm’s laugh, in exchange for which he will provide Timm with the ability to win any bet. Timm is in a pickle. His father has just died, and his mother has been saddled with an expensive mortgage to pay off. Timm consents to the Baron’s offer, and proceeds to amass a pile of money, but he comes to realise that a life bereft of smiling and laughter is no life at all, and sets out to find the Baron and get his laugh back.

The Baron (Horst Frank) and Timm (Tommi Ohrner)

It’s a fun enough premise, but when it was on TV in my childhood I didn’t manage to stay with it past a couple of episodes, despite my good intentions. Hardly surprising. The first episode is superb, and ends with a chilling and brilliantly realised scene that on rewatching made me shiver. It writes a cheque that the remaining twelve episodes cannot cash. Thirteen episodes! It should have been four, maximum. Timm takes forever to work out the obvious solution – that he must make a bet that he can win his smile back. There is a scathing assessment of the UK version here. It’s hard to argue with many of its criticisms, and there’s no doubt that the dubbing dulled the programme’s impact. It is more fondly remembered in Germany.

You can’t get hold of the programme in English now, so I was compelled to try out the German release. It’s undeniably overlong and rambling, and I lost interest as I waded through episode after episode devoid of plot development, but it benefits from not being dubbed, and there are at least a handful of excellent things about it. Firstly, Tommi Ohrner, who plays Timm, is greatly charismatic. He must have been the pin-up of every German tweenage girl in 1979, and might have been chosen to play Timm on the basis of his smile alone. Of course, he has to spend almost all of the series frowning, which must have been tricky. I imagine take after take having to be discarded because of accidental smiling.

Die Hauptperson unserer Geschichte, up to mischief

Even better is the late, lamented Horst Frank as the glassy-eyed Baron. Baron de Lefuet (try spelling it backwards, speakers of German) is basically a Bond villain, if a somewhat lacklustre one (think Drax rather than Blofeld). He has a futuristic lair, Lunopolis, built on the exotic volcanic island of Aravanadi, from which he is able to survey the movements of apparently everyone via his special video screen. He may not be the most malicious man in the world, but he’s certainly the most voyeuristic. The Baron is both stylish and irresistibly magnetic. One almost welcomes his purchase of Timm’s smile. It is marvellous to watch this heretofore humourless man practising his smile, and eventually mastering his own demonic brand of laughter.

The Baron, flanked by his bungling assistant Anatol (Richard Lauffen)

Everything comes back to music with me, doesn’t it? I’d forgotten it, but presumably what made me love this series in the first place (apart from an infantile crush on Tommi Ohrner) was Christian Bruhn’s score. The regular theme tune plays not at the start but at the end, and it is fabulous. The greatest TV theme tune ever? I tentatively suggest. For me it’s right up there with this and this and this. And this. Bruhn is presumably better known in Germany than elsewhere. His synthy score is mesmerising throughout, by turns atmospheric and knockabout. In some respects it’s not unlike the music that the immortal Roger Limb was writing for BBC children’s programmes around the same time. Take the incongruous but delectable tierce de Picardie at the end of the theme tune – it might have come straight out of Look and Read.

Anyway, all of this means that when I finally get to Germany I will know what to do if I am propositioned by an evil genius. If you fancy seeing what all the fuss is about, the first episode (auf Deutsch) can be watched here.