the gathered thoughts of Richard Pinnell

Spot the difference

Following a difficult week I took the rare opportunity provided Saturday evening by a for once peaceful Pinnell Towers to switch off my phone, and with it the rest of the world and spend some time alone, slouched on the sofa with a chilled bottle of chardonnay, a good book and three different versions of Morton Feldman's For Bunita Marcus. At around an hour and a quarter in length, listening with close attention to three consecutive recordings of this beautifully melancholic, yet expansive, challenging work for solo piano may not seem the most relaxing way to spend your time, but I found the evening very enjoyable and somewhat enlightening. Of the three ...

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Wise after the event

I turned in my review of the i and e festival for ParisTransatlantic at the weekend after ...

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Mass Consumption

I've had a pretty depressing, stressful last few days, work as ever the culprit. Often ...

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Beneath the surface

So this lunchtime before taking a long walk out across the hills of the Ridgeway I bored Julie to tears by dragging her to the small but perfectly formed Oxford Museum of Modern Art to catch the last day of the Callum Innes exhibition entitled From Memory. Innes is a Scottish painter I have admired from a distance in the past, always enjoying his paintings when I come across them, but never really investigating his work any further. From Memory contains about two dozen paintings, most of which are quite large in size, and all from the last ten years. Innes' work is hard to categorise. There are obvious links back to the abstract expressionists of the 50's ...

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Old Friends

When you try and keep up with the continual stream of new releases that come out in any ...

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