Daily Mail asks bookish questions to writer and former actress Lynda LaPlante.
WHAT BOOK . . . first gave you the reading bug?
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. During a school trip to visit the family parsonage, I was astonished to see its actual size. In recent times an extension has been added, but I was there when it was in its original state [sic; impossible--the Wade wing has been there since 1874].
The wallpaper reminded me of a Laura Ashley design. It was all very neat and tidy, but made me think of lots of questions; some remain unanswered still.
You see, in that rather small parsonage, and at the peak of what would have been their formative years, there were three adult women, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, living there.
There was also a large overweight cook and cleaner and a 12-year-old helper. The Brontë’s domineering father, Patrick, always ate alone in his study.
Then there was the drug-addicted, alcoholic, eccentric brother Branwell. The women remained mostly in the small drawing room writing and studying, where they ate their meals together on a table they always had to clear afterwards.
At this time there was no running water and a pump was used in the small yard outside the kitchen.
There was also no toilet; a privy was built a short distance from the back kitchen door. So since that school trip, it has been a persistent and subsequent fascination regarding the vivid imagination of all the three women, cloistered together and each writing their incredible novels.
And of them all, Emily’s depiction of the wild moors remains my favourite read.
Phoenix New Times interviews Chuck Palahniuk about his new novel,
Not Forever but for Now.
Were there other things that influenced the plot of the book?
I can’t help but be really influenced by Shirley Jackson, “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” siblings who live alone in this huge house. “Jane Eyre” is thrown in there. It’s very much “Turn of the Screw” with the two very corrupt children. (Jennifer Goldberg)
Limelight Magazine gives 4.5 stars to the recent Singapore Symphony Orchestra recording of Bernard Herrmann's
Suite from Wuthering Heights.
There have been many attempts to stage Emily Brontë’s seminal novel Wuthering Heights over the years, but the first composer to make an opera out of it was Hollywood film maestro, Bernard Herrmann. The inspiration came almost as soon as he started writing the score for Orson Welles’ 1944 film adaptation. Set to a libretto by his wife Lucille Fletcher, who supplemented text from the novel with some of Brontë’s poetry, it took Herrmann eight years. Even then, he struggled to find a producer and it wasn’t staged until seven years after his death in 1975.
Hans Sørensen’s 2011 symphonic treatment – the term suite somehow seems inadequate – honours Hermann’s hefty orchestral demands, including 12 woodwinds, 11 brass, a battery of percussion, two harps and an organ. It also fillets the opera, presenting the story as a kind of ghostly conversation between Cathy and Heathcliff, their voices fading in and out like ships that pass in the night. It’s an effective treatment, relying on swathes of grand and often haunting instrumental music to conjure visions of the moor in all its moods.
The pounding timpani and snarling, muted brass of the Prologue melt into the ravishing pastoral themes of the idyllic I have been wandering through the green woods, before turning increasingly passionate for On the moors, on the moors. The lovers’ tangled relations and Cathy’s death are depicted in music of immense power and equally immense pathos. Herrmann’s melodic gift is only matched by his talent for subtle and imaginative orchestration.
The Singapore Symphony Orchestra plays magnificently for Mario Venzago and the two singers are masterful. Keri Fuge’s dashing soprano catches Cathy’s air of recklessness and longing, while Roderick Williams’s burnished baritone and way with the text make for a refreshingly pensive Heathcliff. It certainly whets the appetite for a decent recording of the complete opera.
The companion work, Echoes for Strings, is an orchestration, also by Sørensen, of Herrmann’s single span, ten-movement string quartet, Echoes. Written in 1965, it’s a brooding yet richly satisfying 20-minute roller-coaster that explores what one can only imagine to be the unhappy recesses of the composer’s mind. The music, which suggests many of his film scores and quotes from at least two, Vertigo and Psycho, is given a superbly structured workout by the Singapore strings, this time under Joshua Tan.
Chandos have done their usual first-class SACD engineering t
rick, with well-caught voices enfolded in rich orchestral sound in the Suite and full-bodied tone in Echoes. Outstanding sleeve notes, too, from David Benedict. (Clive Paget)
BookRiot discusses pen names.
Condé Nast Traveler features Portuguese hotel Paço da Glória describing it as 'Located at the end of winding hill roads, its
Wuthering Heights’-worthy façade – writ in stormy, glittering granite – is an 18th-century baroque beauty'. Finally, an alert for tonight in Barcelona, Spain. A live recording of a podcast devoted to
Wuthering Heights:
8 de setembre de 2023 20:00
Escenari 2, Moll de la Fusta
Participen: Blanca Pujals i Carlota Freixenet
Cims borrascosos (Emily Brontë), Viena
Blanca Pujals i Carlota Freixenet, les dames victorianes del S.XXI, parlen de Cims Borrascosos.
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