For a study of Binder’s forty-nine symphonies, see here.

Binder wrote two piano concertos. The first, Piano Concerto In B Flat On A Theme Of Glinka, was for many years, too many to count, thought to be based on a theme by the Russian composer Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (1804-1857). Scholars pored over his scores, trying to find the theme which had inspired Binder, in vain.

The mystery was solved when a researcher found a scribbled note in the margin of a newspaper cutting at the bottom of a box of Binder’s miscellaneous papers. The discovery, incidentally, happened on the very day of a different discovery, when Pickles, a black and white Collie, rooting about in a suburban hedge in Beulah Hill, South Norwood, found the Jules Rimet trophy which had been stolen four months before the start of the 1966 World Cup foopball tournament. Pickles’ owner received a financial reward; the only reward gained by the finder of the marginal scribble was the undying gratitude of Binder enthusiasts.

What the note revealed was the true identity of Glinka. This was not the Russian composer, but an affectionate nickname given to the landlady of the dilapidated seaside boarding house where Binder lived during a particularly wretched decade. Glinka was rakishly thin and angular and had a certain corvine air, and she whistled while she worked. One of her whistlings enchanted the impecunious composer. He may even have intended the tribute of a piano concerto to mollify Glinka and stop her bashing relentlessly on his door every day demanding the rent, which Binder always had great difficulty cobbling together. He was making a living at the time as a seaside resort piano tuner, in a seaside resort with few pianos.

Glinka’s whistle must have been something to hear. The Piano Concerto certainly is, though you will probably want to wear ear-muffs. It’s that kind of concerto.

Binder’s second piano concerto, the Piano Concerto In B Flat On A Theme Of Glinka Again, is a very different work. One critic, whose ears were pretty fantastic as critical ears go, said that it was hard to believe it was the work of the same composer. Where the first concerto is redolent of marshland and biscuits, the second has a sort of guttersnipe snippiness. Where the first is piquant, the second chunters. The theme itself is rendered by the sizzling of sausages in a frying pan, which was possibly an allusion by the composer to Glinka’s impossibly greasy breakfasts. At the première of the work, in Pointy Town’s pointy town hall, the overenthusiastic sausage sizzler allowed spitting fat to set fire to the trousers of the brass section, next to which he was stationed with his Calor Gaz picnic hob. The performance ended in disarray and the insistent ringing of alarms and the arrival of fire engines, elements which Binder planned to incorporate into a third piano concerto. He never completed this work. Actually, he never even started it. He fell hopelessly in love with the flapper Poopsie Clutterbuck who was allergic to pianos, and who convinced Binder to concentrate on his symphonies, bagatelles, and threnodies.

Glinka’s dilapidated seaside boarding house fell into further dilapidation. The landlady sold it to a simple-minded fool, and retired to a different seaside resort, further along the coast, where she was often to be seen tottering along the pier, supported on sticks, her whistling drowned out by the ferocious shrieking of gulls and gales.

My very first assignment as a junior reporter on the Daily Spongecake was to interview a seaside resort wrestler. It was one of those short February years, the ones I am so fond of, when there is no danger of receiving a marriage proposal. I was young and wet behind the ears and my limbs flailed about, independently of each other, in those days. I had my brand new reporter’s notepad and brand new reporter’s pencil. The latter was much the same as a butcher’s pencil, without of course the caking of dried blood on it. An old hand in the office winked at me and said if I did my job properly I would soon have blood on my pencil.

So off I went to the seaside resort, by train. It was easy enough to locate the wrestler, as he was tethered by a chain to a stout post in the square. My editor had suggested a few questions I might begin with, to break the ice. I had not bothered to write them down in my notepad, thinking that I could retain them in my head for the duration of the railway journey. That was my first mistake. We spent at least four hours stuck in some sidings, due to “birds above the line”, and I passed the time by reading a paperback spy thriller, a tale so full of thrills and spills and excitement and adventure and mystery and intrigue and sudden, inexplicable violence that I was whisked away from the so-called “real world” and had great difficulty returning to it when at last the birds were scarified and the train chugged back on to the main track. I reminded myself where I was, and where I was going, and more or less why, but that was as much as I could remember.

As things turned out, my prepared questions would have proved useless, because before I had a chance to speak, the wrestler grappled with me and placed me in a half-nelson. Now at that time, so long, long ago, I was perfectly ignorant of the standard wrestling holds. As, indeed, I remain, for I have learned nothing, nothing.

By dint of youth and stupidity, I thought the wrestler was attacking me, rather than – as would have been obvious had I not been so young, so stupid – demonstrating to me, as a visitor to his seaside resort, the art and craft of his profession. I panicked, reached as best I could into my pocket for my reporter’s pencil, brand new and freshly sharpened, and stabbed the wrestler in the eye. He immediately relaxed his grip, already in his death-throes, and released me from what I learned later, during the court case, was a half-nelson. Sooner than I had expected, much sooner, there was blood on my pencil.

Sentencing me to life in prison for the heinous crime of murder, the seaside resort judge painted my character in gaudy terms. I was, as I recall, vile and pernicious and my soul was besmirched with sin. My youth and stupidity were not considered to be mitigating factors. If anything, they counted against me.

It was all so long ago, that short February year. I still think of the wrestler, chained to his post in the square, happy as a lark until the day I disembarked from the train and, in my eagerness, came charging towards him, my limbs flailing, bright eyes gleaming. Tomorrow I will, as usual, pluck a peony from the flowerbed in the prison garden, and pin it over my heart on my rough prison tunic, and wear it with both sorrow and remorse as I toil on the treadmill.