festival front door

much seasonal hilarity upon arriving to work and barely being able to find the front door due to the perhaps slightly excessive baubles, only to be trumped by finding these baubles throughout the office and my office covered in fairy lights. The Christmas elves have been busy indeed...

Dorothy Porter

very sad news just in, again from Australia, that leading poet Dorothy Porter has died at the age of 54. I had the great fortune of studying poetry with her mainly at the Meanjin writing camps in the late 80s, and I've spent many hours enthralled both in her company and with her writing.

back

back now from the 30+ degrees of Brisbane humidity to the low digits of the West Midlands and swamped by emails, post and phone messages, and epic todo lists. In early yesterday to work my way through the majority of them and dealing with the urgent ones, and today is focussed on my later-than-ideal ACE Grants for the Arts application. Been up since 3am, so a little fuzzy.

Naturally, over the last three weeks, many things have happened that I would otherwise have blogged about. In no particular order, these include

• the sudden and sad death of Richard Hickox (1948-2008). Hickox gave his first Lichfield Festival performance on Monday 4 July 1983 with an all American programme with the City of London Sinfonia, and most recently conducted the BBCNOW in Lichfield Cathedral during 2003. He will be deeply missed both here and back in Australia
• the ongoing fight of the Australian National Academy of Music to retain both its funding and its integrity in the face of what appears to be gross ignorance and a fundamental lack of understanding on behalf of Peter Garrett, the Arts Minister for the Australian Government, even despite a last minute reprieve
• Brett Dean, who performed at the 2004 Lichfield Festival, became the first Australian to win the coveted Grawemeyer Award
• the Tallis Scholars performance in Lichfield Cathedral on 5 December was attended by over 500 people and by all accounts was extremely well received
• the extraordinary Elliott Carter turned 100 on 11 December and is still, amazingly, going strong
• went to the relatively shiny GoMA in Brisbane and found myself enjoying the Monaro Eden sound installation by composer Thomas Meadowcroft, an old uni friend of mine