Pau

I've not been doing much on this blog recently. For the last six months, in fact. Shameful. Although I have been more active on my other blog, http://eatslutes.blogspot.com/, which is more specifically lute-related.

Anyway, sort of covering both areas, I've just played a couple of concerts in the magnificent Château de Pau. It's in a fabulous location, with a long south-facing facade giving a panoramic view of the nearby Pyrenees. The Château itself is strongly associated with king Henri IV, who was born there in 1553, and our concert presented pieces by his musicians. Which means that our music might actually have been played in the same space 400 years ago...

Antiphona is a Toulouse-based vocal group, largely made up of professors and former postgraduate students of the early music department at the Toulouse Conservatoire. They're a good group, with innovative programming, and I hope to be doing more with them in 2010.

Sodium chlorate

I was nearly as surprised as Fearnley to discover that the Lycée Barral comes in at number 41 out of the 1,909 lycées in France in the recent rankings by L'Express. Barral achieved a 99% pass rate for the baccalauréat in 2008. Pretty impressive.

Look a little further down the tables and an interesting story emerges. Lycées cover the final three years of school: seconde, première, terminale. At Barral, only 62% of those in Seconde make it through to the final baccalauréat exam at the end of terminale, against 75% nationally. So there is some pretty ruthless weeding going on. And, according to the tables, there are 142 students in seconde, whereas in troisième (Fearnley's year) there must be close to 200. More weeding. Where do they all go? Mostly to Castres' biggest lyceé, the Borde Basse, which presents nearly four times as many Bac candidates and comes in at a still-respectable 713 in the national rankings.

In the Figaro listings, Barral comes even higher at number 26.

France's got talent

We have some excellent local bands here in the Tarn. Such a shame I'm not around this weekend to see Burning Fart in action. I assume they take their inspiration from the Flaming Lips.

Marten not Martin

Just saw one of these outside the dining window. Quite startled me - it's a bloody great thing, the size of a large cat. It ran along the window ledge, up the wall and disappeared into a hole at the top of the window with just its tail hanging out. Nesting, maybe.

Pine martens are extremely rare in Britain: the few that are left are almost all in Scotland, though it's believed that they're beginning to reappear in England and Wales. They're more common in France, especially in hilly or mountainous regions. We have pine trees in the garden, so maybe it's not so surprising to see a marten here.

Rising Sun

This makes it seem real. The Tokyo Bunka Kaikan calendar for March 2009 includes, on Sunday 15th:

"The first concert of Chuckerbutty ocarina quartet in Japan"

Suddenly it's scary.......

Les voitures

More words you never wanted to know:

Rotule = broken bit on car
Barre de direction = broken bit on car
Amortisseur = broken bit on car
Pris en charge = covered by insurance : )
Franchise = excess on insurance : (

Social progress

French TV is showing a programme on 27 January called L'abolition about the end of the death penalty in France in .... 1981. The last person to be guillotined was in 1977. Britain got there rather earlier, with the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965.

One of the main forces behind the abolition in France was a lawyer called Robert Badinter, who became Minister for Justice in 1981. He was also responsible for decriminalising homosexuality in 1982. Again, England got there first, in 1967, although the Scots had to wait until 1980 and the Northern Irish, for some reason, until 1982.

France has also lagged behind on other social reforms. Women have been able to vote in the UK since 1918, subject to limitation, and all women since 1928. French women got the vote in 1945. British 18-year olds have been able to vote since 1969; French ones, despite (or maybe because of) the 1968 riots, only since 1974. Britain has had separate taxation of husbands and wives since 1989; France hasn't got there yet.

Still, in one area of life the French are a century ahead. Church and state were formally separated in 1905, and laïcité is now a central Republican value. Not so in Britain, where the connection goes right up to the very top and, incredibly, 25 bishops still sit in the House of Lords.

Underground music

At last, someone discovers how to make money playing the theorbo.
Thanks to David Hill for the cartoon. More here.

Córdoba

These characters are Galatea and Polyphemus. You can tell it's Polyphemus because of the eye in the middle of his forehead. This large mosaic from the second century AD was dug up 50 years ago in Córdoba and now adorns a wall in the Alcázar de los Reyes Cristianos in the city, along with various other equally splendid mosaics.

I was in Córdoba at the weekend to play a concert for the Sociedad de la Vihuela, the Spanish lute society. Such a specialised audience could have been intimidating, but they were actually extremely warm and friendly and the concert went well. José Romanillos, maker of Julian Bream's guitars, was in the audience and came to chat to me afterwards. A good weekend.

My concert was in the Casa Góngora, in the old part of the city near the Mezquita. Luis de Góngora, as it happens, was a Cordoban poet who wrote La Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea in 1613, long before the mosaic was uncovered. The Mezquita or mosque is an astonishing building from Córdoba's Arab past: endless pink and white arches below a low roof, with a cathedral plonked in the middle of it by the Christian reconquerors. I wandered around it for an hour just admiring the space.

Musical extremes

Last week was the Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet, recording a new CD in advance of our Japan tour in March 2009. Our usual bizarre mix of repertoire, ranging from renaissance pieces on super-large bass ocarinas (which feels like playing a set of weights) through to a new addition to our repertoire, Michael Murray singing the serenade from Don Giovanni to the accompaniment of ocarinas and charango. His new English words are nicely lascivious yet in keeping with the spirit of the original (we persuade ourselves). The CD will be called 'I love my Ocarina' or, for the Japanese market, Okarina ga dai suki desu. I'm sure they'll like it....

Then next weekend I am playing a solo concert in Córdoba for the annual meeting of the Sociedad de la Vihuela. The Sociedad has put together a fine programme for the weekend. I'm going to play more or less the same programme that I played last year for the Lute Society in England, with renaissance lute music by Dowland, Holborne and Spinacino followed by Britten's Nocturnal for classical guitar. I hope it'll be warmer than it is here - it was below freezing this morning. I'm looking forward to seeing Córdoba, especially the Mezquita , the old Moorish mosque which was converted into a Christian cathedral. Meanwhile, lots of practice.

Home from home

There are relics of France's colonial past scattered around the world. Commonly known as "les DOM-TOM" (département / territoire d'outre-mer), they have their own government ministry to look after them.

Some of them - Guadeloupe, Guyana, Martinique, Réunion - are treated as départements equivalent to those on the mainland. This apparently means that they are part of the European Union, despite being thousands of miles away. Then there's a whole bunch of lesser island territories in the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans, plus a chunk of the Antarctic. The journalist Matthew Parris once wrote about his voyage to the Kergeulen Islands in the Southern (i.e. cold) Indian ocean. It was pure whimsy - he just liked the name. There wasn't much to see when he got there.

Possibly the strangest is Clipperton. No, I'd never heard of it either. Clipperton was discovered in 1705, taken over by France in 1858, and confirmed as French in an arbitration by the King of Italy in 1931. It is a tiny uninhabited island 1,300 km off the west coast of Mexico. Even though it is only two square kilometers in area, this gives France sufficent grounds to claim an Exclusive Economic Zone of 425,000 sq. km. around it, and the right to catch lots of Pacific tuna. It boasts some coconut trees, lots of crabs, about 300 rats, thousands of seabirds and a pervasive smell of guano. See the pictures here.

Half cat, half computer

This computer has no mouse.