Typical...

I heard, as attentive readers - is there anyone out there? - will have noticed, a fun concert a couple of weeks ago. Malcolm Arnold and Dmitri Shostakovich. I'd never knowingly heard anything by Arnold before - I've never, for example, seen The Bridge on the River Kwai

Incidentally, did you know that the novel on which The Bridge on the River Kwai was based - Le pont de la rivière Kwai - is by the same author, Pierre Boulle, who wrote Planet of the Apes, or, I suppose, La planète des singes? Anyhow, even though everybody thinks he's seen The Bridge on the River Kwai - you know, Alec Guinness, evil Oriental soldiers, stiff upper lips, something getting blown up at the end - I realise I never actually have sat down and watched the thing all the way through.

But this is a digression. I liked Malcolm Arnold. I liked the Fifth Symphony. I was going to get interested in him and hear some more of his music. And I still may. But I opened the papers a few days ago, and - yes - was slightly pertubed to find that he had died.

I have previous with this sort of thing. In 1997, I went to live in Moscow for a year. Before I went out there, one of the Russian musicians I was slowly getting to like and enjoy was Bulat Okudzhava. I thought I'd be able to find some of his songs on cassettes somewhere - a slightly vague, but certainly heartfelt plan. Then I bought the paper one day, and - all over the back pages - fulsome obituaries, assessments of his impact, discussion of his work....

If you follow the Okudzhava link, you'll find a nice quote from his mother: 'Bulat Okudzhava spoke and wrote only in Russian. This was because his mother, who spoke Georgian, Azeri, and Armenian, had always requested that everyone who came to visit her house "Please, speak the language of Lenin - Russian".'