On The Brink Of Losing 800-Year-Old Family Mansion | Country House Rescue

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Lord To The Queen Risks Losing His Family Home | Country House Rescue | ...

  14 Oct 2022  #abode #renovation #mansion

Colbrook Park has belonged to the Brookeborough family since the 1600s. The current Brooks residents are on the brink of losing the house. Entrepaenur, Simon Davis, is on a mission to help them keep their doors open. However, with every idea being shot down, it seems like the couple don't even want to help themselves. Can Simon save this historic house?

Pajama Party: A History of Leisurewear

Largest collection of Johannes Vermeer paintings on show in Amsterdam –Vermeer review – one of the most thrilling exhibitions ever conceived

Review

Vermeer review – one of the most thrilling exhibitions ever conceived

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Moments of profound absorption, a glance, a letter… the mystery and stillness of the Dutch master’s work deepens the closer you get in this near-perfect show

 

Laura Cumming

@LauraCummingArt

Sun 12 Feb 2023 13.00 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/feb/12/vermeer-rijksmuseum-amsterdam-review-one-of-the-most-thrilling-exhibitions-ever-conceived

 

The scene is unassuming – rinsed cobbles, whitewashed walls, a woman stitching in an open doorway as the Dutch gable facade ascends towards motionless clouds. Yet every visitor stands before it amazed. Perhaps the spell has something to do with the Advent calendar of open and yet to be opened windows, or the chain of absorbed and absorbing figures, or the abstract arrangement of frames and arches, or the brickwork that seems made of the very thing itself? The eyes and mind, beguiled, search the image for answers. How can Johannes Vermeer’s painting be so infinitely more beautiful than the scene it depicts?

 

The Little Street (c.1657) hangs at the beginning of one of the most thrilling exhibitions ever conceived. Vermeer, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, brings together more of his paintings than ever before – and possibly ever again, given the cost and their fragility – 28 of the 37 known works. The show is superbly dramatic: a sequence of darkened chambers, where the paintings (like their subjects) appear sometimes alone, occasionally in twos or threes, each in its solo spotlight. The design reflects the revelatory aspect of Vermeer’s art at every turn.

 

Revelatory – and yet profoundly mysterious; that is where the show starts. It opens outdoors, with the View of Delft and The Little Street, and then turns inwards, asking us to look ever closer at the interiors. A box of light, a figure, some props, occasionally a framed picture: the means appear so restricted, yet the scenes are mesmerisingly various.

 

Vermeer’s is a world on hold; not suddenly frozen in the moment so much as bypassing motion altogether. The maid pours her milk – but only in theory. In fact the liquid is not flowing at all, its passage (even in a gigantic magnification in the foyer) entirely imperceptible.

 

Nor do people come and go from these rooms, always lit from the left. Girls in ermine, yellow velvet and lace, men in cloaks and beaver hats are depicted, but they have not arrived from elsewhere. There is no conversation, no matter that transactions may be implied. All those musical instruments, and still no sound. Equally, you are not supposed to work out what is going on in these scenes, but instead to let each fine mystery hover before you undisturbed.

 

Vermeer takes from Pieter de Hooch’s shining interiors, but rarely shows women at work to make them so immaculate. A brush lies idle on a floor, maids have brought, or wait for, letters. But only the marvellous Lacemaker, from the Louvre, bends over her intricate task. Time is held in profound and productive absorption, which feels far more significant than the creation of any lace.

 

This is surely where the notion of secular madonnas enters in. For what is the girl there for, in Vermeer, if not to receive the extraordinary beneficence of his light – a light like no other, more than any real room could contain. For some it is supernatural, to others sacred; it feels the very essence of grace.

 

Vermeer’s annunciations – news from nowhere, by letter – have a stillness and quietude that does not seem related to the proposed scenario, any more than the reading, writing, gazing or weighing of (completely empty) scales. The sense of prolonged meditation seems to come from the creative act itself. The curators show (in panels set at a tactful distance from the art) how often objects, clothes and even people were moved or excluded in Vermeer’s protracted deliberations. He is known to have made only one or two paintings a year.

 

And then, quite suddenly, the show pivots and a tremor disrupts one’s sense of Vermeer. Three apparently similar interiors appear in one gallery. Stand in the middle and you witness a thousand differences. This scene is jewelled with raised pinpricks of crackling light; that one is soft and subdued; a third far less intimate, with a blazing expanse of bare wall. The Rijksmuseum slows the pace down to show how Vermeer might have thought about the making of each picture.

 

 

Sometimes the view is partially blocked by a man with his back to us, or a heavy chair. Perhaps the girl appears remote, on the other side of a table, or way across the room. Or she is brought into abrupt closeup: such as the girl with the red hat, the flute or the veil (all three tiny) or the life-size girl with the pearl earring turning to us out of pitch darkness with her cinema flash.

 

Young Woman with a Lute, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is so spectral she might be a memory or a ghost, unlike the solid objects all around her. The window is unusually narrow and small, the sheer curtain arranged so that the light falls sidelong, illuminating the studs in a leather chair like bright stars but dissolving the girl in blurry haloes, as if she were herself a secret.

 

In the Rijksmuseum’s own entrancing Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, there is no window and the whole scene is suffused with the blue of the dress, as if it were an extension of her mind. The letter she holds is now just a sliver of light. Surely this is the same girl from a picture painted about five years earlier, borrowed from Dresden, her face slightly older, her absorption now deeper. Vermeer’s wife gave birth to 15 children. Perhaps some of his daughters appear in these pictures?

 

Everything changes, and yet remains. One maid looks out of the window with cool (or is it wry?) impatience, as her overdressed mistress labours over a letter. Another looks Flemish, as if hired from elsewhere. The letter may be folded, inscribed, worn thin as silk with repeated readings, or passed unopened by maid to disaffected mistress in a distant scene viewed through a door – like a momentary glimpse in Alfred Hitchcock.

 

Details are enigmatic: a single red drop on the floor (perhaps sealing wax), a playing card brandished as if in warning by a cherub, friezes of Delft tiles that existed in reality but look as if they might be decoded. One girl has a curiously flat moon face, another appears androgynous, still others are stalled like sleepwalkers, held still by a kind mystical gravity.

 

For reasons unknown, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna refused to send Vermeer’s The Art of Painting – with its artist-magician turning his back upon us, even as he paints the scene – so that we might have entered even further into the chamber of his mind. But everything else about this show is as perfect as it could possibly be. More paintings, greater (and more condensed) visions and variations, it offers every opportunity to look longer, slower and more keenly than ever before. Yet Vermeer’s paintings have the mystery of their own making, their beauty and meaning as part of their content. The closer you get, the stranger he seems.

 

Vermeer is at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, until 4 June

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Burt Bacharach | 60 Minutes Archive / Burt Bacharach obituary

Burt Bacharach: an astonishing creator of impermeable classics and supersmooth pop

Alexis Petridis

He was dubbed ‘easy listening’ but this was nonsense. His dazzling music, a result of classical tuition and nights in bebop clubs, defied categories – and made stars of soul singers, rock bands and mum-friendly crooners

 

Thu 9 Feb 2023 16.19 EST

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/feb/09/burt-bacharach-an-astonishing-creator-of-impermeable-classics-and-super-smooth-adult-pop

 

With the arrival of rock’n’roll, pop music divided, broadly speaking, into two categories. There was music aimed squarely at the recently discovered teenager that frequently seemed to have the specific intention of alienating their forebears. And then there was the music that carried on much as it had in the years between the end of the second world war and the appearance of Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, Little Richard et al. Look at the charts from 1952 or 1953, and they’re packed with songs that seem to target an older demographic, who didn’t want shock or rebellion or white-hot excitement, but something to soothe or buoy them along, what eventually became known as easy listening.

 

The twain very seldom met: if anything, the divide became more pronounced as the 1960s wore on and a cocktail of new technology and new drugs meant the music aimed at teenagers became more adventurous, strange and innovative. Look at the charts from 1966 or 1967 and you’ll find a stark split: Strawberry Fields Forever and Purple Haze v Engelbert Humperdinck and Ken Dodd’s Tears.

 

Dionne Warwick sued both Bacharach and Hal David for damaging her career by splitting up

But Burt Bacharach’s music existed somewhere in the middle. He often got lumbered with the term easy listening. You could see why – his own albums, such as 1965’s Hit Maker! or 1967’s Reach Out, tended towards syrupy arrangements and cooing vocal choruses. Usually compilations of songs other performers had already made successful, they seldom showed off his compositions to their best effect. But in reality, the easy listening label was lazy to the point of being nonsensical, not least because – as any musician will tell you – Bacharach’s songs were seldom easy.

 

No matter how mellifluous the melody, he dealt in changing meters, odd harmonic shifts, umpteen idiosyncrasies that were perhaps the result of Bacharach’s eclectic musical education, which variously took in studying classical music under the French composer Darius Milhaud, listening to bebop musicians in the jazz clubs of New York’s 52nd Street and hanging out with avant-gardist John Cage.

 

The truth was that no obvious label or category could contain what Bacharach did: his style was once memorably summed up by Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen as Ravel-like harmonies wedded to street soul. He could come up with Magic Moments for Perry Como, but he could also write for the Drifters, Gene Vincent, Chuck Jackson and the Shirelles.

 

Listen to Herb Alpert’s version of This Guy’s in Love With You. An unbelievably beautiful, lushly orchestrated ballad, introduced to the world via a light entertainment TV special on which Alpert sang it to his wife, it’s the epitome of grownup, sophisticated 60s pop: you can imagine it floating around in the background of a cocktail party entirely populated by people who agreed with James Bond’s assessment that the Beatles were best listened to wearing earmuffs.

 

Then listen to Love’s 1966 version of My Little Red Book, a song originally recorded by Manfred Mann: it’s raw, distinctly strange garage rock, complete with a pounding, descending riff that inspired Pink Floyd’s even stranger psychedelic opus Interstellar Overdrive. Bacharach wrote them both. He made music that was genuinely sui generis: rock bands could record his songs, so could mum-friendly crooners, so could soul singers and jazz musicians.

 

He occasionally seemed to have an affinity with artists that similarly resisted categorisation. How would you label Dionne Warwick, perhaps the most celebrated Bacharach interpreter, who recorded the definitive versions of Walk on By, Do You Know the Way to San Jose?, A House Is Not a Home, and – with all respect to the late Cilla Black – Anyone Who Had a Heart, and who described her relationship with Bacharach and the lyricist Hal David as “a triangle marriage that worked”? Was her music and her approach soul, or pop, or easy listening or something else?

 

He first had hits in the 1950s, Magic Moments among them, but it was as the 1960s dawned, and his partnership with David blossomed that his career ignited. They started writing one impermeable classic after another – to the songs already mentioned you can add The Look of Love, I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself, Wives and Lovers, I Say a Little Prayer, (There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me, Make It Easy on Yourself and I’ll Never Fall in Love Again among umpteen others. The songs came in such profusion, and were of such an astonishing quality, Bacharach and David made amassing a catalogue the equal to anything written in that decade look weirdly effortless.

 

Perhaps after that, anything would seem anticlimactic, but the 1970s proved trickier. The hits started to dry up, and the increasingly fractious Bacharach and David partnership ended in a flurry of lawsuits in 1973.

 

For good measure, Dionne Warwick sued them both for damaging her career by splitting up. It wasn’t until the early 1980s, and a new partnership with Carole Bayer Sager – later to become Bacharach’s third wife – that his career was reinvigorated, although this time around, his writing seemed to fit more easily into a niche of supersmooth, sophisticated adult pop: Christopher Cross’s Oscar-winning Arthur’s Theme (The Best That You Can Do), Neil Diamond’s ET-inspired Heartlight, Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald’s 1985 duet On My Own.

 

At the other extreme, his 1960s oeuvre was attracting lavish praise from some unlikely sources: at the height of their early riot-provoking notoriety, the Jesus and Mary Chain announced that if they ever wrote a song as good as This Guy’s in Love With You, they would immediately split up, perfection having been achieved.

 

 By the 1990s, he seemed to alternate between exploring unexpected new avenues – 1998’s Painted from Memory was a genuinely spectacular collaboration with Elvis Costello that demonstrated Bacharach’s melodic facility was undiminished – and basking in the legend of the songs he had written in the 1960s: conducting the orchestra for star-studded tribute shows, making cameo appearances in the Austin Powers movies, noting with approval that Oasis had prominently displayed a poster of him on the cover of their debut album Definitely Maybe.

 

One school of thought had it that interest in Bacharach had been boosted by the 1990s’ interest in 1960s kitsch, of which the Austin Powers films formed a part, but the truth was that the oeuvre of Bacharach and David had never really needed reviving. Even in the years when Bacharach’s latest songs had failed to make the charts, you were never too far away from hearing something the pair had written in their imperial phase: either someone was covering them or the radio was playing the vintage versions, or they were appearing on TV or film soundtracks. It’s a state of affairs that’s true today, and a state of affairs that seems unlikely ever to change.

Obituary

Burt Bacharach obituary

 

Songwriter whose hits, including I Say a Little Prayer and Walk on By, became classics of easy-listening pop

 

Adam Sweeting

Thu 9 Feb 2023 11.03 EST

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/feb/09/burt-bacharach-obituary

 

Few songwriters have been able to enjoy hits across six decades, as well as the bonus of a dramatic revival of interest in their work during the later years of their careers. Burt Bacharach, who has died aged 94, could claim both.

 

With his writing partner Hal David, Bacharach launched himself into the front rank of pop songwriters with a brilliant streak of hits for Dionne Warwick during the 1960s, beginning in 1962 with Don’t Make Me Over and proceeding through (among others) Walk on By, Anyone Who Had a Heart, I Say a Little Prayer, Trains and Boats and Planes, and Do You Know the Way to San Jose. All became standards in Bacharach’s chosen pop-easy-listening genre, their apparent simplicity concealing his mastery of different rhythms and metres.

 

He had soaked up the music of the jazz big bands and bebop, and also studied with the French composer Darius Milhaud, who urged his pupil to “never ever feel embarrassed or discomforted by a melody that people can remember or whistle”. Bacharach’s melodies were not only memorable but also frequently suffused with melancholy and regret. His gifts as an arranger allowed him to exploit all the resources of an orchestra with precision, and his use of plaintive “Bacharach trumpets” became a distinctive trademark. Meanwhile he was turning out imperishable classics for a string of different artists. Tom Jones never particularly liked What’s New, Pussycat?, the Oscar-nominated theme from the 1965 film of the same name, but acknowledged its enduring popularity.

 

Herb Alpert topped the US chart with the winsome ballad This Guy’s in Love With You, Jackie DeShannon did likewise with What the World Needs Now Is Love, and BJ Thomas was the lucky recipient of Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head, from the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (which brought Bacharach and David Oscars for best theme song and best original score). Bacharach was an Oscar-winner for a third time in 1982, with Arthur’s Theme from the film Arthur.

 

The son of Bert Bacharach, a sports star turned nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, and Irma Freeman, an artist and songwriter, Burt was born in Kansas City, Missouri. The family moved to Kew Gardens in Queens, New York, when he was a child. At the insistence of his mother, Burt studied the cello, drums and piano. His ears were opened by the innovative harmonies and melodies of jazz musicians of the day such as Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker, and he played with several jazz combos before enrolling in music courses at the Mannes School of Music, New York, and at McGill University in Montreal.

 

He served in the US army (1950-52), and while acting as a dance band arranger in Germany he met the singer Vic Damone. Back in the US after his discharge, Bacharach worked as piano accompanist to Damone and to numerous other artists on the club circuit. One of them was the actor and singer Paula Stewart, whom he married in 1953.

 

He was fortunate to fall into one of the all-time great songwriting partnerships with David, whom he first met at the New York songwriting beehive, the Brill Building (also to be the home of other renowned songwriting duos including Leiber & Stoller, Goffin & King and Pomus & Shuman). David had been writing hits for such luminaries as Sarah Vaughan and Frank Sinatra since the late 40s. Bacharach and David scored their first big commercial coup when the country singer Marty Robbins took their song The Story of My Life into the US Top 20 in 1957. A cover version by Michael Holliday reached No 1 in the UK the following year, and Perry Como brought them another smash with his recording of Magic Moments, which spent eight weeks at No 1 in Britain.

 

After the breakdown of his marriage (he and Stewart divorced in 1958), Bacharach travelled to Europe to become pianist and bandleader for Marlene Dietrich, a role he would sustain until 1964. By 1961 he was back in New York, and wrote some material for the Drifters, as well as the Chuck Jackson hit Any Day Now before resuming his partnership with David. Their song (The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance, inspired by the John Wayne/James Stewart western, became a US No 4 hit for Gene Pitney in 1962. Pitney did better still with the duo’s composition Only Love Can Break a Heart, which reached No 2 later that year.

 

Then came Bacharach and David’s historic hook-up with Warwick. She was a member of the Drifters’ backing group, the Gospelaires, and the songwriters invited her to make some demo recordings at their office at the publishers Famous Music, in the Brill Building. One of them was for Make It Easy on Yourself, which became a big hit for Jerry Butler. David recalled: “She said, ‘I thought that was my song!’ We said, ‘No, you just made a demo’. She was really very hurt and angry. Then we realised here’s this wonderful singer and we’re using her to make demos – she could be a star!”

 

So it proved, and the hits with Warwick became their calling card. They wrote and produced 20 American Top 40 hits for her over the ensuing decade, including seven that reached the Top 10. One of these songs, I Say a Little Prayer, also gave Aretha Franklin a US Top 10 hit and her biggest solo hit in Britain, where it reached No 4. Throughout the 60s anything Bacharach and David touched became commercial gold dust. They wrote film scores for What’s New, Pussycat?, Alfie and Casino Royale, and scored the successful Broadway musical Promises, Promises, whose title song provided another hit for Warwick and spun off a chartbuster for Bacharach himself with I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.

 

The writers always had a soft spot for the UK, probably because so many British-based artists had No 1 hits with their material, including Cilla Black – whose version of Anyone Who Had a Heart was her breakthrough hit – Sandie Shaw, the Walker Brothers and Frankie Vaughan.

 

The Carpenters ushered in the 70s with (They Long to Be) Close to You, a US No 1 which also reached No 6 in the UK, but although Bacharach’s 1971 album (called just Burt Bacharach) became a sought-after collector’s item, the decade would prove disappointing. In 1973 Bacharach and David collaborated on a new musical version of the 1937 film Lost Horizon, but it was a commercial disaster that prompted angry splits between Bacharach, David and Warwick, and involved them in a spate of lawsuits. The writers parted company after a disagreement over royalties. Bacharach’s second marriage, to the actor Angie Dickinson, whom he had married in 1965, began to come apart, although they did not divorce until 1980.

 

It was not until the early 80s that Bacharach’s magic touch returned, when he won the Oscar for best original song for the chart-topping theme from the film Arthur, which he had also scored. One of its co-writers was the lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, whom Bacharach married the following year. The couple went on to write Making Love for Roberta Flack and Heartlight for Neil Diamond. In 1986, Bacharach enjoyed one of his best ever years, achieving two US No 1s with That’s What Friends Are for, recorded by Warwick with Elton John, Gladys Knight and Stevie Wonder as a charitable fundraiser for Aids, and the Patti LaBelle/Michael McDonald recording of the lachrymose On My Own.

 

In 1991 his marriage to Bayer Sager ended, and two years later he married Jane Hansen. In a 2015 interview, Bacharach – who was nicknamed “the playboy of the western world” during the 60s – admitted: “I didn’t mean to hurt anybody, but when you wind up being married four times, there are a lot of bodies strewn in your wake.”

 

During the 90s, Bacharach and David reunited with Warwick for Sunny Weather Lover, from her album Friends Can Be Lovers, and Bacharach wrote songs for James Ingram and Earth, Wind & Fire. In 1995 he co-wrote God Give Me Strength with Elvis Costello for Allison Anders’ film about the Brill Building era, Grace of My Heart, and this resulted in the Costello-Bacharach album Painted from Memory (1998).

 

Bacharach’s contribution to pop history was acknowledged in a 1996 BBC documentary, Burt Bacharach – This Is Now, and he would find himself being hailed as an icon of cool by bands as varied as Oasis, REM, Massive Attack and the White Stripes. In 1997, an all-star cast including Costello, Warwick, Chrissie Hynde, Sheryl Crow and Luther Vandross banded together at the Hammerstein Ballroom, New York, for a serenade of Bacharach’s songs called One Amazing Night, and the Rhino label issued The Look of Love, a three-disc compilation of his music.

 

Bacharach’s profile received a huge boost from his appearances in all three of Mike Myers’s 60s-spoofing Austin Powers films. He earned an Oscar nomination for the song Walking Tall, his first collaboration with the lyricist Tim Rice, which was performed by Lyle Lovett on the soundtrack of Stuart Little (1999).

 

His 2005 album At This Time unusually found Bacharach writing lyrics as well as music and even provoking some controversy by touching on political themes. “All my life I’ve written love songs, and I’ve been non-political,” he said. “So it must be pretty significant that I suddenly have strong feelings of discomfort with the state of the world, and what our [US] administration is doing.” This did not prevent the album from winning the 2006 Grammy award for best pop instrumental album.

 

In 2008 he opened the BBC Electric Proms at the Roundhouse, in London, with Adele and Jamie Cullum among his supporting musicians. His autobiography, Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music, was published in 2013, and in 2015 he performed at the Glastonbury festival. He continued to tour past his 90th birthday, with concerts in the UK, US and Europe in 2018 and 2019.

 

He returned to movie soundtrack composing with his score for A Boy Called Po (2016), featuring the theme song Dancing With Your Shadow. The film concerned a child with autism, and inspired Bacharach to write the music in memory of Nikki, his daughter from his second marriage, who took her own life in 2007 having been affected by Asperger syndrome. In 2018 his song Live to See Another Day was released, its proceeds donated to families affected by the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

 

In addition to his Oscars and six Grammy awards (plus a lifetime achievement award in 2008), he was awarded the Polar music prize in Stockholm in 2001. In 2011, the Library of Congress awarded Bacharach and David the Gershwin prize for popular song.

 

He is survived by Jane, their son, Oliver, and daughter, Raleigh, and another son, Cristopher, from his third marriage.

 

 Burt Freeman Bacharach, songwriter, singer and musician, born 12 May 1928; died 8 February 2023