Love Will Tear Us Apart

I nearly walked out of The British Heart Foundation charity shop in Chepstow that day without noticing the box of singles near the checkout, but I'm glad I stopped to look as there were several good things therein, best of which was an original 1980 pressing of 'Love Will Tear Us Apart'. My copy is one of those on translucent deep purplish-red styrene, rather than black vinyl.

On the 33rpm B-side are two tracks: 'These Days' and (uncredited) the earlier and less morose "Pennine" version of 'Love Will Tear Us Apart'. I was unaware, until reading it on Discogs just now, that the text "For ML" on the A-side label refers to Martha Ladly (of Martha and the Muffins and, later, The Associates) who was apparently designer Pater Saville's then-girlfriend.

Would I have heard the song when it was first released? I was eleven at the time so maybe not - but it had a persistent afterlife owing to its status as Ian Curtis' swansong, and I surely would have known it by the time of its re-release in '83.

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Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

Onslow

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Influencías

In my original blogging days, I would occasionally run giveaways to offload unwanted books or CDs to whomever claimed them. Sometimes the recipients would offer to send me something in return. It was in this way that, ca. 2007, a Catalan correspondent sent me Influencías: a CD of perfomances by the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals. The CD begins with Maurice Ravel's renowned string quartet: I hadn't known the piece before receiving this disc, but I was sold on it by this fresh & bright performance. Next is a quartet called 'Vistes al Mar' by the Catalan composer Eduardo Toldrá. Its evocative maritime movements are prefaced by recitations of poems by Joan Maragall, a Catalan author whose works directly inspired the piece. Lastly there's an arrangement of Joaquín Turina's atmospheric 'Oración del Torero', originally composed for a lute quartet. I'm on the fence about the cover photo: it's a well-composed picture & not a bad idea, but with 2...

This is a Recording

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