If the unbearable heat of the British summer was making life unpleasant for us ordinarily-dressed folk at Truck Festival, I can only imagine how the mini-hipsters were feeling in their jeans so tight that they looked like leggings, their immaculately unruffled shirts and their variously decorated lavish waistcoats. But despite the efforts of that most mysterious of deities, the Heat Wave, Oxford’s beloved Truck Festival was once again a resounding success. Small Oxford band Candy Says kicked off the festival in style on the Market Stage, accompanied by their mascot Candy, a manikin wearing a lei and holding a maraca. With the Velvet Underground-esque sound that one would expect from the band name, they charmed and intrigued all those Truckers who had arrived for the start of the day’s music.

The site itself was charming; Truck had paid close attention to their themed tents. From the outrageously Wild West saloon to the Caribbean themed bar to the large haystack filled farm-themed tent which was full for most of Friday as people sheltered from the sun, no detail had been spared. Furthermore, they kept true to their promise of a family-friendly environment, with pantomime shows for the kids. Tents from the Oxford Playhouse and a few other dramatic groups kept things interesting for everyone, while all the food was locally sourced.

Friday’s musical highlights came at the end of the day on the Market Stage, where Patrick Wolf performed a typically eclectic set. His 30 minutes included him forgetting some of the words, his harp failing to work and an extended discourse on Russia’s recent ‘gay propaganda’ legislation. A medley of ‘Bermondsey Street’ and ‘Magic Position’ was, he said, a song that was now about the situation in Russia, a place where “it’s now illegal for [him] to be [himself]”. Dry the River followed with a headline set filled with their usual poignant tragedy and elemental energy. Peter Liddle’s eyes glistened with hidden sadness and crazed genius but Scott Miller, who dubbed himself “the sweaty one”, got most of the crowd’s adoration. It was immediately obvious that the band’s new material, only heard previously at intimate shows in the Berkshire area, held all of the same trembling beauty as their debut album Shallow Bed, and we await the upcoming sophomore effort with eager anticipation.

The next day, welcome clouds covered the oppressive sun, and it was finally safe for even the palest of us to spend some time outside. Oxford’s own Marvellous Medicine played a frenetic set at the start of the day, and had many Truckers pulling out some of their most adventurous dance moves with the ska/reggae stylings that have become familiar to many Oxford students from balls and gigs at Cellar. The rest of the festival, however, was stolen by shoegaze. Up-and-coming psychedelic rockers Toy played to a packed-out Market Stage, whose audience included festival headliners The Horrors, standing right in front of us. The tenebrous rock giants have often been quoted naming Toy as their favourite band, and clearly they just couldn’t stay away from Tom Dougall’s gothic soundscapes.

Later on, as night gathered around the Truck main stage, the time was finally here. The Horrors played a show-stopping, weekend-stealing set full of their usual dark, enigmatic mystery. Lead singer Faris Badwan gazed down from the high stage, leaning on his microphone and looking like a dying Edwardian vampire as he veered between classics like ‘Sea Within A Sea’ and ‘Who Can Say’ and unsurprisingly impressive new material. After time out from touring, the band clearly relished being back on stage, and Badwan made it known that he was glad to be back before the melding chords of ‘Still Life’ signalled a heart-stopping end to a magnificent Truck Festival 2013.

Christoph Prégardien is warmly recounting his first encounter with pianist Menahem Pressler, at last year’s Verbier Festival for classical music.  “I was really stunned by his humility: even with his wide experience, an 89-year-old man, he approached me and said, ‘Oh Mr Prégardien, I am so happy that we are playing Winterreise: I learned so much from you.’  I nearly had tears in my eyes that this wonderful old musician was willing to learn.  I think this is a very good approach, in every field of life, that Man is able to learn until he is dying.”

This almost epistemic humility that Prégardien admires in Pressler, with whom he will be performing Schubert’s Winterreise in Oxford this August, strikes me on numerous occasions during the course of our interview.  Winterreise is a work he has performed countless times, yet remains one he is readily exploring and learning about: his recordings of it include a version with accordian and wind quintet, and a ‘composed re-interpretation’ of the work by Hans Zender.  He explains, “Each time you sing a piece, [with] different pianists [and] different ensembles, you learn more about yourself, your possibilities, your abilities on stage.”

Indeed, as he talks about these different performances, one gets a sense of continued musical development and discovery.  “I started to learn about Winterreise quite early.  But I think you learn the whole psychological and emotional content of that piece by getting older, by having experiences, by having losses.  You have to fall in love and then to lose your lover– you have to really have this experience, to feel what is happening to you, with your soul, with your brain, with your body, in that situation.”

It is a sobering thought that a musician of Prégardien’s standing, who has performed in the world’s top concert halls, with the likes of the Berlin Philharmonic, Staatskapelle Dresden, and conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, has such a desire to learn and develop further.  His recordings, with major labels such as EMI and Deutsche Grammophon, and numbering over 130 titles, have been received to great critical acclaim, winning international awards, such as MIDEM Record and Vocal Recital of the Year.

I wonder how Prégardien manages this vast repertoire, that spans the likes of Bach, Schubert, Britten, and Rihm. “I try to handle all composers equally,” he explains. “I try to hear the music, to find out what emotion the composer wants to bring over.  What is very important for me is that I get an emotional impact from the music and the text.  If I am not touched by them, it is very difficult for me to go on – but this is rare.”

The relationship between words and music is one of great importance for Prégardien, who uses both to find inspiration.  “Singers are very lucky, because we have the text. Other musicians don’t have this; we have poetry.” It is noticeable how often he refers to the ‘poetry’ of music, the ‘musical text’; for him, the two are deeply combined.  “To really understand music, it is necessary to understand the words.”  Winterreise comprises a set of poems by Wilhelm Müller, that were then set to music by Schubert.  When Prégardien considers the work, these two aspects hold equal weight.  “If you look at Schubert’s music, you find many hints for how to colour your voice and attitude, in order to give so many different approaches to the emotional content [of the text].”

Not that Müller’s text is emotionally straightforward either. “You have 24 songs, in the same depressing attitude — you have to find the real colours, to find possibilites… there is not only sadness, there is also anger, there is despair… the real challenge is to find a logical way for yourself through these 24 songs, to show character and development during just three days… for in three days you cannot go through a whole love.”

Emotion is at the core of Prégardien’s music-making, partly thanks to one of his early teachers, Hartmut Höll, accompanist to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.  “He didn’t care about our technical problems — he just said, ‘No, forget about that.  Look at the text, at the music — let pictures and imaginings come, and try to find the right sound and the right expression for them.'” 

A dedicated music educator himself, teaching at German Hochschule music academies, as well as international masterclasses, and having produced several musical publications, it is this emotional side of a musician that Prégardien is most interested in fostering.  “I want to see a very personal approach to the music.  I don’t want to hear a very well-trained voice, who has studied this song and brings it over in a beautiful manner.  That can be good, but I like to find real musical and emotional personality.”

It was his personal ideas about ‘not just my part… but how the passions, the dramatic impulses of the whole should be’ that last year prompted Prégardien to take up the conductor’s baton, leading a tour with the Ensemble Le Concert Lorrain.  Singer, turned teacher, turned conductor; one can’t help but think of what Prégardien said of Menahem Pressler earlier: “If you want to learn, you can learn.”

Christoph Prégardien will be leading a Lied masterclass at St Hilda’s and performing Winterreise with Menahem Pressler at the Sheldonian Theatre on 5 August.

★★★★☆
Four Stars

“Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling and unwitting participants. You steal their desires, their dreams, pocket their flaws, their suffering. You take what does not belong to you. You do this knowingly.”

Afghanistan has been brutally scarred by the violence of its recent past; the pain of decades of conflict lies at the heart of Khaled Hosseini‘s novels. It is an indelible feature of a country’s history, the country of Hosseini’s birth; and yet one wonders how cynically the author recognises the currency of suffering in writing. The quotation is from the mouth of Nila Wahdati, poetess and protagonist in the latest work, but is also one of Hosseini’s many reflections on his own creation.

Abuse, domestic and martial, dominates his first two books (The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns). And the Mountains Echoed, returning to the Kabul of the last sixty years, is another study in human cruelty – this time accompanied by a catalogue of horrific accidents. Yet Hosseini also hunts for suffering beyond his usual domain: this is not just fear in a handful of dust, but arthritis in Paris, dog attacks in Athens, Alzheimer’s in New York.

Hosseini has been compared to Dickens; and like his literary forefather, he understands only too well the “attraction of repulsion”, our macabre fascination with woe that draws our noses only closer to the page. The Dickens comparison is not wholly damning: for adversity is also used to show the enduring benevolence of the human condition, and to deepen our empathy.

Guilt is an equally important theme. Amir’s shame drove The Kite Runner: reluctant to drop a winning formula, And the Mountains Echoed has nine protagonists, nine parts, nine betrayals. Each is connected to the misfortunes of a family living in rural 1940s Afghanistan; each must remorsefully come to terms with the wrongs of the past. Hosseini deftly condenses sin, reducing it to a simple impulse: The Kite Runner memorably describes all evil as theft, where And the Mountains Echoed explores the ways that humans turn their backs on family, friends, and countries.

Just as we feel Hosseini in each of his characters – many share biographical similarities, most a startling honesty that endears them to us – we also detect his own guilt. Certain protagonists are troubled by their dislocation from Afghanistan (notably a doctor who, like Hosseini, emigrated to California as a child), and we find this problem even in the mechanics of his prose: ethnic words are quietly translated (“the qarias, the small villages”), and Hosseini’s American idiom sits uncomfortably in the mouth of a 1960s Afghan butler (“she had promised to write me”).

Though there are minor flaws in technique (obvious symbols, like the Forrest Gump feather, are clumsy), Hosseini often writes beautifully. The landscape is wonderfully alive – “fat rain fell from the sky, and the village rose thirstily to meet it” could be straight out of D. H. Lawrence. The scope of his book, around the globe in sixty years in all manner of narrative voices, is enjoyably ambitious if at times striving too hard to impress. His characters all have bits that are the same – but maybe that is his point, anyway.

And the Mountains Echoed is published by Bloomsbury. It is available to purchase for £16.99 here.

Released on the BBC3 and iPlayer websites as a series of pilot shows, the BBC Comedy Feeds are, most would agree, a worthy enterprise. The Office, the last truly great British comedy, is long gone. The Inbetweeners has finished, Peep Show is on its last legs and The Thick of It is all but dead. It’s about time there was another British comedy show worthy of the name. The shows are certainly a mixed bag, but there are four very good reasons to be hopeful for the future.

 The Failures:

Kerry – One Star

The sketch shows are only 15 minutes each, and in Kerry this proves to be very problematic. Star Kerry Howard plays four characters, and each appears three or four times, meaning not only that the set-ups are tediously predictable, but that each character manages to outstay its welcome. As they rely on the same punchlines, the sketches – for example, a perfectionist who goes on a destructive rampage at the slightest criticism – have an easily foreseeable shelf life. A series of such characters would be nigh-on tortuous.

The Committee Meeting – Two Stars

It’s filmed with a live audience, who are ostensibly members of the committee, chaired by Mr Chairman (Elis James), helped by his number two, health-and-safety conscious Rex (Chris Corcoran). The two chat, and after a while another local character or two arrives, and later a celebrity guest who they interview in character (a rather bemused Colin Baker). The atmosphere is very genial, and you could be quite content watching it for half an hour before realising that it hasn’t once inspired in you any greater reaction than a wry smile or two.

Nick Helm’s Heavy Entertainment – Two Stars

Nick Helm’s show is glorified stand-up: half an hour of mildly amusing jokes, one mildly amusing sketch, and three terrible songs. He has a winning dedication, and would doubtless win over a small comedy club, but I’m unsure why anyone thought his act would make for a good TV show.

Going Native – Two Stars

A hidden-camera show featuring Mona Yousefi, who plays three separate immigrants to the UK. Though the format works very well when it shows up British assumptions about other cultures (an elderly couple happily watch Yousefi rattle off an impressive number of euphemisms for ‘vagina’ without comment) it is spoiled by the scenes of childishly annoying people, such as playing up on community service with a clearly exasperated cleaner. Also, some of it borders on racism, particularly the “Japanese Youtube sensation”, who introduces herself to everyone with a shrill cry of “Herro prease!”.

The Successes:

The Cariad Show – Three Stars

Though far from perfect, this show from Cariad Lloyd demonstrates that sketch comedy need not be a series of trudges to the same destination. The best sketches are characterised by touches of lovely originality; rival French parkour teams picnic together in playgrounds, and the impossibly sweet fantasy girl who plagues lonely men has cupcakes inexplicably falling from her hair. There is a creative silliness to the show, which suggests that a series would have many such moments.

 Fuzzbox – Three Stars

The script is disappointingly light on jokes, but Fuzzbox should be celebrated for its originality; it is set in a high school and uses puppets, with real teenagers providing the voices. This may seem unnecessarily gimmicky, but in fact adds a surprising realism to the conversations and the relationships, which feel immediately real. The only problem is the teenagers’ constant mumbling which often makes it quite difficult to follow.

Bamboo – Four Stars

Comedy duo Totally Tom (Tom Stourton and Tom Palmer) play two friends who open a nightclub, and they’re a send up of the oblivious, “Gap Yah-style” rich young man. Though the trailer describes them as “two douchebags united by a common dream”, the show works because their naïve idiocy makes them pretty lovable; they get a Buddha statue for luck because they think he’s the Prime Minister of Thailand. Their relationship drives the show, and the actors’ devotion to silly, over-the-top performances makes for a very watchable half hour.

C-Box – Four Stars

Rob Madin stars as Charlie, or “C-Bomb”, the “dubstep Da Vinci” unrecognised outside of his Sheffield suburb. Charlie is a great character; he lives with his mum, but he calls her by her first name and quickly corrects himself when he slips up in company. He’s brilliantly played, Madin giving him the perfect mix of impotence, bravado and honesty to make him instantly likeable. The stand-out moment is when, losing an argument, he fantasises about performing a dubstep hit that says exactly what he wants to say, but can’t. Charlie is a classic sitcom sap, and C-Bomb could be a sitcom with real legs.

This year’s BBC Comedy Feeds are available to watch here.