And a complete cycle does at least mean that we can hear such rareties

And a complete cycle does at least mean that we can hear such rareties as Bruckner’s Second Symphony, Sibelius’s Third, Nielsen’s Sixth or Vaughan Williams’s Antartica in concert. One company has just announced the complete set to end all complete sets: all the concertos of Vivaldi – so now the very patient (and very rich) will be able to discover whether the creator of the hardy perennial Four Seasons really did write “the same concerto 600 times”. A recent New Yorker cartoon summed it all up rather neatly – just a billboard, with the words “All the Telemann you can stand”.
Well, who’s complaining? After all, you don’t have to go to all the concerts, or buy all the CDs. But more recently other composers have begun to enjoy (if that’s the word) the same treatment – Sibelius, Nielsen, Vaughan Williams, Bruckner… And these concert hall marathons are nothing compared to what’s been happening in the record shops: CD cycles just finished or still in progress include Schubert Lieder and sonatas, Purcell church music, Britten folksong settings, Haydn symphonies and quartets, Shostakovich film scores, the piano works of Grieg (in 13 volumes) and Liszt (in 70), the 32 symphonies of Havergal Brian…

But “Ode to Billie Joe” was dark and deadly, with funk and swamp-rock trappings. Time to throw your preconceptions off the Talahassee Bridge.. Has the musical world gone cycle mad? Look at concert schedules and record company release sheets for the last couple of years and you might well think so. Granted, complete series of the Beethoven symphonies are nothing new, and international star conductors had been peddling “live” Mahler cycles long before the Daily Telegraph started grumbling at Sir John Drummond for including all 10 in last year’s Proms. The guitarist Jennifer Turner was finger- picking good, with a knack for long and winding guitar solos that should earn her an 18-night residency at the Royal Albert Hall. The covers – “Son of a Preacher Man”, a tepid “Fever”, and a Joni Mitchell mini-medley abandoned “because her melodies are impossible” – were perfunctory. Even Peter Yanowitz had loosened up, so that by the end you liked his vigorous drumming as much as you liked his face At two hours, it was all too loose.

You haven’t absorbed its full despair until you’ve seen Merchant thump at her belly with balled- up fists as the line “My folly grows inside of me” leaves her lips like a dying breath It’s the blues all right – the baby blues. “These are the Days” travelled in the opposite direction, toward calypso and jazz, while Merchant travelled around the auditorium on a little jog.The band had picked up speed too. And her new-found solo status has done her back catalogue no harm: she treats the songs from the old days (“That other band I was in,” she goofs, “I can’t remember their name”) with a fury that at last deserves the description “maniacal” after all these years. “Eat for Two” is slowed down, chant-like in its haunted melancholia. She even makes the “ooo-ooh” bit sound profound.I think Merchant has been obscured by the awful mediocrity of 10,000 Maniacs.

They were the sort of band you used as a barometer for picking your pals; you know the sort of thing – you wouldn’t want to give your home phone number to anyone who likes kd lang, Red Dwarf or 10,000 Maniacs.But her solo album, Tigerlily, is the most desperately moving work of her career. The new single, “Wonder”, is essentially a pleasant, airy dollop of Angel Delight. But Merchant’s total conviction, the way she hurls her body, heart, lungs and all other major organs into the music, lifts the song high above the rooftops. And she has a line in banter that’s as thrilling as her fans “This is a nice place to play Do you agree?” Pause “We were in France a coupla days ago We played this song there too.” Pause “I’m low on patter tonight.” Snooze.And she’s got her voice That voice. It’s a pity that Kellogg’s Corn Flakes beat her to the tag-line – “Have you forgotten how good she is?” – because it would have been perfect for her. The longer those albums by her former band, 10,000 Maniacs, rest at the back of your memory like guests that you wish you hadn’t invited to the party, the more you forget the devastating, rejuvenating, white-hot power of that voice, with its twang and sustain, and its terrific density – it’s a voice that you could wade through, or sleep in.It can work miracles. They would chomp the heads off live wildebeests rather than heave themselves up and dance.