The Who always managed self-mythology better than their rivals. As well as a hard-earned reputation as the world’s best live act (and loudest – Pete Townshend and John Entwistle are said to be as deaf as retired miners) they always had more ideas than their peers Though they weren’t always good ones. Pinball never did displace football as the national sport, no one knows what possessed Entwistle to sport a luminous skeleton suit at the Isle of Wight Festival, and you don’t hear too many “rock operas” these days But plenty has stood the test of time. “IT WAS a rough area that – Shepherd’s Bush. Kids of 16 walking round with machine guns in violin cases.” So Roger Daltrey described his manor in 1967, when the nation associated the west London suburb with Steptoe and Son. The words sounded comfortable for singing, the freshness of their music suggesting the spirit of renewal harboured in the fragment of text from the legend of St Christopher, and the sense of expectancy of our present times.. While Tavener’s work avoids the drama of key-changes, which is part of its effect, Dove feels free to rove, and makes of his journey a tale to remember.Though characteristically simple, his tonal manoeuvres in the closing pages were perfectly timed to resolve the tension between opposing tuneful strains – a serene but buoyant tenor melody and a rocking cradle song.

Interestingly, Blake was also the key in Tavener’s “The Lamb”. In “Love bade me Welcome”, he attempted to match the complex mysticism of George Herbert. Sounding at times more like the modality of Vaughan Williams than of Byzantium, the composer’s arrangement of parallel chords also implied a musical archetype in the forms of Anglican chant.Receiving its second performance, “I am the Day” by Spitalfield’s future artistic director Jonathan Dove used similar techniques to different ends. Everyone had to keep their wits about them in the last stanza of Stephen Jones’s version of Bach’s In Dulce Jubilo. In Judith Weir’s “My Guardian Angel”, the audience was confined to a threefold plainsong Alleluia repeated five times.
Against it, however, the City Chamber Choir, with Jones conducting, set dancing melodic patterns that echoed the composer’s favourite medieval intonations, though the words chosen were from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.The choice of Peter Warlock’s “Bethlehem Down”, magically sung like a hushed chorale, added to the desired effect, while Peter Skellern’s “So said the Angel”, and the “Gloucestershire Wassail” added a boisterous touch.But perhaps the most interesting was in the response of different generations of living British composers to the poetry still latent in our native choral tradition.

But not at the Spitalfields Winter Festival where they’ve turned it to good account, unmarred by excessive jollity. True, there was community singing on Wednesday evening at Christ Church. Yet it was more demanding than the sort which gets ever slacker and slower. IT MIGHT prove a comforting paradox for anyone dismayed by “God rest ye merry gentlemen” that what, with so many cultural alternatives now thriving in our midst, reports of that most English of institutions, the carol concert, sound like “news from a far country”.

The design of this new stadium at Wembley is generated by the need to perform well for the athletes, footballers and spectators.”As he says: “The project has become a political football – and I’m not a politician.”. They may be curious to see what is in the offing.”What makes Sir Norman Foster mad is that he really believes that the platform solution is “a brilliant, clean, swift, pre-fab, state-of-the- art solution to staging major athletic events in a stadium. “That’s how robust it is.”That stadium is going ahead, which means that one cannot rule out that demountable track. When the dust settles and they look at Twickenham as a site for athletics, the penny will drop. Now Wembley will still be built so that track events can be run on a demountable platform “There is no question of redesigning it,” says Foster.