[If you’re attending York S&B please see comments 32&33] - here
Financial Times Christmas Crossword Set by Gozo from the Weekend FT of December 19, 2015
In the past I have often skipped unconventional puzzles like this one and, when such puzzles showed up in this space, I asked someone else to do the blog. On this occasion however I surprised myself by diving into the puzzle and enjoying it.
The theme is classical composers and we find both well known ones and some that, at least for me, are obscure. I expect that most people needed to refer to a list of composers to find a number of answers; I used one on Wikipedia.
Here, to start with, are the clues and answers with the themed clue in each pair flagged with an asterisk. There is one clue, X1, whose wordplay I was initially unable to figure out. My thanks to mike04 for explaining it. I was surprised to see two German words among the answers (F2 and K2). Fortunately they were both words that I knew:
A1 Attend scene prepared for forefathers (11)
ANTECEDENTS – anagram of ATTEND SCENE
A2* Maurice loses me (5)
AURIC – [m]AURIC[e]. So Goldfinger was not the only person named Auric.
B1* Tailless diver comes back (4)
BERG – GREB[e] (tailless diver) reversed
B2 Expensive US high-powered Chrysler first blocked bicycle at junction (3-6)
BIG-TICKET – GTI (high-powered) and C[hrysler] separately in BIKE (bicycle) + T (junction)
C1 Location of musical steppes is reflected cryptically (7,4)
CENTRAL ASIA – reverse clue (for IS). This clue refers to Borodin’s composition “In the Steppes of Central Asia”. This is a clever clue but depends on knowledge that I did not have so was the toughest for me to solve.
C2* Car starts — jump aboard! (6)
CHOPIN – C[ar] + HOP IN (jump aboard)
D1 Aquanauts see differently (9)
DIVERSELY – DIVERS (aquanauts) + ELY (see)
D2* One dozen new races before one (9)
DONIZETTI – anagram of I (one) DOZEN + TT (races) + I (one)
E1* Man, say, embraced by HM (6)
EISLER – ISLE (man, say) in ER (HM)
E2 Book was once the same, rejected by you and me (6)
EXODUS – EX (once) + DO (the same, i.e. abbreviation of ditto) + US (you and me)
F1* Posh food outside (5)
FAURE – U (posh) in FARE (food)
F2 No charge in Germany for more than half the cargo (4)
FREI – FREI[ght]
G1* Lass eating cheese with last drop of Chianti (8)
GABRIELI – BRIE (cheese) in GAL (lass) + [chiant]I
G2 Artist goes bust with B1, sadly (6,6)
GEORGE STUBBS – anagram of GOES BUST BERG (B1)
H1* It can be made in the sun on the borders of Devon (5)
HAYDN – HAY (it can be made in the sun) + D[evo]N
H2 The padre has fashioned such signs of love (5-6)
HEART-SHAPED – anagram of THE PADRE HAS
I1 Nine GIs fashioned rare badge (7)
INSIGNE – anagram of NINE GIS
I2* Four points for Cockney beekeepers? (4)
IVES – IV (four) + ES (points) or [h]IVES (Cockney beekeepers)
J1* Plain girl holding account with knight . . . . (7)
JANACEK – AC (account) in JANE (plain girl) + K (knight)
J2 . . . . little girl and ruffian regularly at HIS opera (6)
JENUFA – JEN (little girl) + [r]U[f]F[i]A[n]. Jenufa is the name of an opera by Janacek.
K1* Beetle crushed in state (8)
KETELBEY – anagram of BEETLE in KY (state, i.e. Kentucky)
K2 King missing Queen at German monastery (7)
KLOSTER – K (king) + LOST (missing) + ER (Queen)
L1* The middle of the skiing race (4)
LALO – [s]LALO[m]. I immediately thought of Lalo Schiffrin then discovered that the reference must be to a more classical French composer, Édouard-Victoire-Antoine Lalo.
L2 Hang around two thirds of church walkway (6)
LOITER – [c]LOI[s]TER[s]
M1 Plain biscuit everyone sent back to girl (8)
MARIELLA – MARIE (plain biscuit) + ALL (everyone) backwards
M2* Drunken sergeant at arms discards tartan (8)
MESSAGER – anagram of SERGEA[nt at ar]MS
N1* Author Anais otherwise embraced (7)
NIELSEN – ELSE (otherwise) in NIN (author Anais)
N2 Donne upset this is in sight (2,3)
NO END – anagram of DONNE
O1 Primarily, observed aquatic source in Sahara (5)
OASIS – O[bserved] A[quatic] S[ource] I[n] S[ahara]
O2* Out for fifty, opening (4)
ORFF – anagram of FOR + F[ifty]
P1* Grand work E1 composed (9)
PERGOLESI – anagram of G (grand) OP (work) EISLER (E1)
P2 Like a true gent at river, cheerfully, we hear (8)
POLITELY – PO (river) + LITELY (homophone “lightly”)
Q1 Monarch at college, very much taking note (5,6)
QUEEN SALOTE – QUEENS (college) + A LOT (very much) + E (note). Queen Salote was the very rotund queen of Tonga until she died in 1965.
Q2* Sewing fan who, in France, left note with redhead (7)
QUILTER – QUI (who in France) + L (left) + TE (note) + R[ed]
R1* Sheep taking Vichy water (6)
RAMEAU – RAM (sheep;) + EAU (Vichy water)
R2 Dramatically performs a battle on ten acres, ploughed (2-6)
RE-ENACTS – anagram of ON TEN ACRES
S1* Heart of Aesop’s tale (5)
SMYTH – [ae]S[op] + MYTH (tale)
S2 Guided horse, admitting sign of hesitation (7)
STEERED – ER (sign of hesitation) in STEED (horse)
T1* They left stealthily, in trouble (6)
TALLIS – anagram of S[TE]ALT[h]IL[y]
T2 Celestial guide for singer embracing husband. That’s right! That’s wrong! (3,5,4)
THE NORTH STAR – H (husband) in TENOR (singer) + anagram of THATS R (right)
U1 Top-class carriage loses roof at end of station (7)
ULLMANN – [p]ULLMAN (top-class carriage loses roof) + [statio]N
U2 Technique to determine liquid’s density on website, in conversation (1-4)
U-TUBE – homophone (“Youtube”)
V1* Disorganised, as ever (6)
VARESE – anagram of AS EVER. This was the first clue I solved — which gave me a good early guess as to the theme.
V2 Boat from the Maldives seldom seen (6)
VESSEL – hidden word
W1 Strike was over sports kit (5,4)
WATER SKIS – anagram of STRIKE WAS
W2* You and I with drink — single, not double (5)
WEBER – WE (you and I) + BE[e]R (drink – single not double)
X1 Separated themed boats (6)
XEBECS – “The Med boats”. Xebecs are small three-masted Mediterranean sailing ships with lateen and sometimes square sails.
X2 Skin broken with axe (7)
XENAKIS – anagram of SKIN AXE
Y1 There’s still one in the Himalayas (4)
YETI – YET (still) + I (one)
Y2* Youth leader has to talk to top educationist (5)
YSAYE – Y[outh] + SAY (to talk) + E[ducationist]
Z1* About nothing to me unknown. Heavens! (9)
ZEMLINKSY – anagram of NIL (nothing) ME (me) Z (unknown) SKY (heavens)
Z 2Instrument from borders of Zaire – twice (4)
ZEZE – Z[air]E Z[air]E
Now here are the answers again organized by clue length:
(4) – 7: B1 (BERG), F2 (FREI), I2 (IVES), L1 (LALO), O2 (ORFF), Y1 (YETI), Z2 (ZEZE)
(5) – 9: A2 (AURIC), F1 (FAURE), H1 (HAYDN), O1 (OASIS), S1 (SMYTH), W2 (WEBER), Y2 (YSAYE)
(6) – 9: C2 (CHOPIN), E1 (EISLER), J2 (JENUFA), L2 (LOITER), R1 (RAMEAU), T1 (TALLIS), V1 (VARESE), V2 (VESSEL), X1 (XEBECS?)
(7) – 8: I1 (INSIGNE), J1 (JANACEK), K1, N1 (NIELSEN), Q2 (QUILTER), S2 (STEERED), U1 (ULLMANN), X2 (XENAKIS)
(8) – 6: G1 (GABRIELI), K1 (KETELBEY), M1 (MARIELLA), M2 (MESSAGER), P2 (POLITELY), R2 (RE-ENACTS)
(9) – 6: B2 (BIG-TICKET), D1 (DIVERSELY), D2 (DONIZETTI), P1 (PERGOLESI), W1 (WATER SKIS), Z1 (ZEMLINSKY)
(11) – 4: A1 (ANTECEDENTS), C1 (CENTRAL ASIA), H2 (HEART-SHAPED), Q1 (QUEEN SALOTE)
(12) – 2: G2 (GEORGE STUBBS), T2 (THE NORTH STAR)
And here, courtesy of Sil van den Hoek, is the completed grid:
Note: I added the grid on January 8th, 2016. My great thanks to Sil for providing this.
To finish, I thank Gozo for a challenging puzzle that, I imagine, took a lot of work to compile.
Well done Pete, you’ve done a great job! Thanks for all the hard work.
I found this pretty tough – even with a dictionary of music to hand.
It was well worth persevering though.
XEBECS
According to Chambers, xebecs were much used by the former corsairs of Algiers,
so I thought the ‘Separated themed’ part of the clue could be read as ‘the + med’.
Thanks for the fun, Gozo.
Thanks Pete and Gozo. I was also initially put off tackling this but glad I did as it proved to be highly enjoyable although I also needed electronic help with various lists of composers to solve/confirm the more obscure ones. I even had to create to create a spreadsheet to keep track of the answers/lengths as I filled them into the grid. I too was stumped by X1 and also thought it must be XEBECS but can’t explain why – I look forward to being enlightened soon!
My response crossed with mike04’s – thanks for the enlightenment!
Thanks Pete and Gozo.
Much more enjoyable than the Guardian offering.
I made a good start getting AURIC on my first look – so was this to do with Bond villains? (i.e. Goldfinger) – but then saw Berg and reverted to the Wikipedia alphabetical list of composers for the many I was not familiar with.
I couldn’t parse either C1 or X1 so thanks to you Pete and to Mike04 for the enlightenment.
Interestingly, QUILTER at Q2 is also the name of a composer.
By the way, did you hear that they exhumed Mozart’s body recently? They found lots of shredded sheet music in the coffin and concluded he had been de-composing!
Thanks as ever Pete. I surprised myself by getting the answers and only four of them were wrong! I also managed to fill in the grid which was very satisfactory. I have to admit to the aid of a book of composers, and a number of correct guesses when I could not work out why the answers were correct. The grid fell into place surprisingly easily, starting with George Stubbs and Berg. I enjoyed this far more than the previous year’s, when I could not get started on the grid at all.
I loved this (happily, I knew all the composers so was halfway there when I spotted Auric). Did you notice that the grid’s not symmetrical? — poor Gozo was stuck with Ysaye and Eisler, and could do nothing about it.
Thanks, Gozo, for a real tour de force. And well done, Pete.
As I said last week (in the Guardian blog, Maskarade), I do not really like double alphabeticals.
But this was one I really liked.
Composers are easier to detect than boy’s and girl’s names.
Putting the words into the grid was also much easier than in the Guardian puzzle.
Just like others, I could not parse XEBECS but I am convinced mike04 got it right.
Some relatively obscure composers (like Messager and Quilter), so hats off to you Hornbeam.
I agree wit Hamish about Quilter.
The clue contains a definition (‘Sewing fan’), so I thought the other Q would be the composer.
But fair enough, the preamble doesn’t actually say that there cannot be an additional definition.
The two German words (frei and kloster) were a bit strange.
I can see why Gozo included these – it’s all about grid filling.
However, changing ‘waterskis’ into ‘watershed’ could have given us ‘free’ instead of ‘frei’.
Not sure whether ‘kloster’ could have been avoided.
Messager becoming Massenet? But then we need a composer He???.
Henze, yes, but etc etc – not easy.
Of course, Gozo could not leave out his favourite composer (hence his Guardian pseudonym).
I liked this puzzle very much and could finish it without any form of external help.
Thanks Pete.
I got many of the answers before putting anything into the grid, but when I came to do so there were only seven of four-letters, so I thought that there had been a mistake and went no further. Silly not to notice that the fact that there were only seven is explained by the grid’s slight departure from the symmetrical. Pity, because it looks as if the puzzle was enjoyable.
Thanks Gozo and Pete
I first looked at this pre-Christmas, took it on holidays to have a full crack at it (and didn’t) and finally took it on in earnest this week. Loved it – I really believe that this guy is fast approaching the quality of the Araucaria puzzles that were his predecessors.
Started off with AURIC and YETI, then had to get more than half of the clues until I found THE NORTH STAR which was the first one that I could enter into the grid. Ended up working with two lists – one of the chronological order that I was working out the solutions of the clues and those words split up into the word length, similar to Pete, to give me the fodder for filling in the grid.
Finally finished with the unusual girl’s name MARIELLA, ULMANN and the hard German word for monastery in KLOSTER.
Had some tough work trying to parse quite a few of them … and never ever saw the second word play for IVES (the IV E S). Thought that the clue for XEBECS was a standout (the Oxford online gives the definition of Xebec as ‘a small three-masted Mediterranean vessel’ – it is an unusual word, but one that I have seen several times in this life of crosswords (funnily enough and only within crosswords).
Think that there is still a slight error with the blog parsing of BIG TICKET – there seems to be an I missing. Again the Oxford online has GTi (Grand Tourer injection) to mean ‘a high-performance car with a fuel-injected engine’ and there is the missing I.
This took up a good deal of my solving time across two days, so I am sadly fallen behind for this week already, but it was well worth the effort!
Bruce, Your experience of this puzzle was much like mine. Thanks for pointing out that missing I in BIG TICKET — I have corrected the explanation. There is one well known person named Mariella, well known on Britain anyway; that is Mariella Frostrup.