COD definitely goes to 1dn, for the sweet “relative of a shrew” laugh-out-loud penny-drop moment. Thank you very much to the setter for that one!
ACROSS
1 Shot current news report (8)
BULLETIN – BULLET [shot] + IN [current, as in fashion]
5 Wine left to breathe in protective cover (6)
MALBEC – L(eft) + BE [to breathe, as in exist] in MAC [protective cover]
9 Unorthodox head’s key refusal to accept point (8)
ANTIPOPE – A NOPE [key | refusal] “accepting” TIP [point]
10 Northern labourer caught creature eating fish (6)
COTTER – C(aught) + OTTER [fish-eating creature]. I would’ve spelled this “cottar”, but fortunately there is only one way to spell “otter”.
12 Belief in some sacred order (5)
CREDO – hidden in {sa}CRED O{rder}. FOI
13 Manage US city with medical service, ultimately in place of political agreement (9)
RUNNYMEDE – RUN N.Y. with MED {servic}E. Magna Carta location
14 Appropriate discussion groups outing cheat (4,3,1,4)
TAKE FOR A RIDE – TAKE FORA RIDE [appropriate | discussion groups | outing]
18 Key at one point right with far from moving piece (12)
CONCERTSTUCK – C ONCE RT + STUCK [key | at one point | right | far from moving]
21 Dance having to ban girl (9)
BARCAROLE – or to BAR CAROLE. I think of a barcarole as a song rather than a dance?
23 Item often illegally exported from country without coast (5)
IVORY – or Ivory Coast minus the coast part
24 Attractiveness of dapper male stripped (6)
APPEAL – {d}APPE{r} {m}AL{e}
25 Pasta to supply a boost, mainly (8)
RIGATONI – RIG A TONI{c}
26 Be indecisive, beginning to discuss the matter with her (6)
DITHER – D{iscuss} IT with HER
27 Girl’s run off after writer (8)
PENELOPE – ELOPE after PEN
DOWN
1 Shrew’s close relative destroyed a cabin (6)
BIANCA – (A CABIN*). Kate’s sister in The Taming of the Shrew
2 What might be Beth’s landlord? (6)
LETTER – double def. Beth is the second letter in the Syriac alphabet
3 Age ponies developed intelligence (9)
ESPIONAGE – (AGE PONIES*)
4 Flaw in paragon’s claim? (12)
IMPERFECTION – A paragon might claim “I’M PERFECTION!”
6 Suffering some to be blocked by progress (5)
AGONY – ANY “blocked by” GO
7 British like sportsmen losing large and being a real letdown (8)
BATHETIC – B(ritish) ATH{l}ETIC
8 Enclosed crop before the beginning of December (8)
CORNERED – CORN ERE D{ecember}
11 El, perhaps — and where it terminates? (3,2,3,4)
END OF THE LINE – semi-&lit reverse cryptic, end of {th}E + L(ine)
15 Wizard has primate nearly in a fury (9)
ARCHIMAGE – CHIM{p} in A RAGE
16 Cover small taxi off across river (8)
SCABBARD – S(mall) CAB BAD “across” R(iver)
17 Port drinker gets up after ten drunk (8)
ENTREPÔT – TOPER reversed after (TEN*)
19 Voice disapproval about wealthy man, a relative of ours (6)
BONOBO – BOO about NOB
20 Mineral unknown, right in mine — end of mine (6)
PYRITE – Y R in PIT + {min}E
22 Middle of plant yielded sisal, say (5)
AGAVE – {pl}A{nt} + GAVE [yielded]
In which today’s grid spoke to me
It said “My chief APPEAL
Is my vocab’s unreal
I’M PERFECT and not AGONY”
Thine ear, and find thy gentle heart
After 30 mins I was left with Concert-something and the Wizard.
Mostly I liked Take Fora Ride.
Thanks setter and V.
I finished with ARCHIMAGE, CONCERTSTUCK and crossed fingers. For the former the clue very much suggested an anagram of HAS + PRIMAT until the E appeared at the end. Having eventually parsed the correct answer I wasn’t convinced until I remembered “mage” for wizard which gave me some degree of confidence. CONCERTSTUCK looked very unlikely and is not in my Chambers app. I relied on my GCSE German, remembering “stuck” means piece to get me home.
A BARCAROLE is specifically a Venetian gondola song or piece of music in that style. Chopin and Offenbach wrote famous ones and Mendelssohn wrote three for his ‘Songs Without Words’ collection for solo piano. I’ve never heard it described as a dance although I dare say its gentle lilting rhythm would lend itself nicely to choreography.
Edited at 2021-05-07 06:32 am (UTC)
FOI 12ac CREDO
LOI 23ac IVORY and my COD
WOD 25ac RIGATONE – straight Macaroni!
Time N/A
Edited at 2021-05-07 07:47 am (UTC)
Edited at 2021-05-07 07:54 am (UTC)
FOI: 17D ENTREPOT I took an age to break in and worked on each corner for a while before slowly cracking three of the four 12 letter clues. I have to admit that I misread the 11D clue as starting with EI rather than El and therefore took the upper case ‘I’ simply to be a line. Finished at 47m with POTTER rather than COTTER (which I should have solved with more patience) and despite seeing that CONCERTSTUCK parsed, I had never heard of it. I should have stuck with the wordplay.
Thank you, verlaine and the setter.
On edit: Oops, this wasn’t intended as a reply to Keriothe, or indeed to anyone. I might add, though, that bonobos do a lot of sexual behavior –mutual genital rubbing by females, mock mounting by males, etc.–intended to ease tension, evidently. Compared to chimpanzees, who can be quite nasty, even murderous, bonobos are peaceniks. As horryd notes, they were also called pygmy chimpanzees, although they’re actually larger.
Edited at 2021-05-07 07:57 am (UTC)
Otherwise it was indeed a simple-ish solve for some interesting vocabulary. E.g. first one in was NHO (i.e. forgotten since last time) cotter, completely trusting the wordplay.
Edited at 2021-05-07 08:21 am (UTC)
I’m glad I knew BONOBO: ‘nob’ to me is a reference to social standing rather than wealth, so I’m not sure I’d have got there from ‘wealthy man’. Certainly not with confidence.
I constructed CONCERTSTUCK from wordplay and had a WTD?! moment before I realised it was a German word.
I was reading up on ANTIPOPEs (which I initially spelt with an E) a while back when we queried whether all Popes (and especially Leos) were beatified as a posthumous perk of the job. Quite a few of the middle number Leos were antipopes though some changed their status to pope depending on which infallible successor to the fisherman was in charge.
Jack is spot on about BARCAROLE. It’s not a dance. Try and imagine a gondolier “dancing” a barcarole and you’ll see why.
As far as I’m concerned, a COTTER is a pin.
And I wasn’t overly convinced by CORNERED as enclosed. It sort of works but it doesn’t feel quite right.
Chambers tells me ENTREPOT as “port ” is OK: I thought it was just a warehouse.
An odd puzzle which has raised fewer grumps than I thought it would.
COTTER is a Scottish variant according to wiktionary. I agree cotter=pin, cottar is normal. Northern=Scottish I suppose will do. Agree with your reserve about the others except Entrepot; Geography O-level came to my aid there as Bally Dan described Freemantle as an entrepot for Perth. Not sure the Fremos would like that!
Andyf
On blogging days, for a bit of fun I time how quickly I can type in the answers from the iPad (where I solve) to the laptop (where I blog) and I have NEVER managed it in that time.
AG.HAST!
Edited at 2021-05-07 07:49 am (UTC)
Like V, I loved 1d when the penny dropped.
I was surprised that CONCERTSTUCK, rather than KONZERTSTÜCK, was a word. I did wonder how we borrowed only half the word from German.
I understand that the London Mayoral election is now a straight fight between Count Binface and the man who used to be Inspector Lewis’s sergeant. Almost makes me homesick.
Thanks to Verlaine and the setter.
Thanks verlaine and setter.
I too would’ve spelt COTTER as COTTAR but followed the cryptic.
ARCHIMAGE — no problem, maybe as I had no point of reference at all, so again just followed the cryptic.
Thanks setter and V.
Edited at 2021-05-07 10:13 am (UTC)
(Spent a while trying to make something of FARANDOLE)
It’s been a dream of mine to perform the Schumann Konzertstück in G major, so I was happy to pull that one out and then finish with ARCHIMAGE.
No doubt someone will now reply and say that Schumann isn’t all that well-known.
(btw I reckon the setter made a mistake with BARCAROLE.)
Edited at 2021-05-07 12:26 pm (UTC)
Here’s the full entry for Barcarole and there’s no mention of ‘dance’:
Barcarolle, also spelled barcarole, (from Italian barcarola, “boatman” or “gondolier”), originally a Venetian gondolier’s song typified by gently rocking rhythms in 6/8 or 12/8 time. In the 18th and 19th centuries the barcarolle inspired a considerable number of vocal and instrumental compositions, ranging from opera arias to character pieces for piano. The term surfaced as early as 1710, when French composer André Campra included a “Fête des barquerolles” in a stage work (Les Fêtes vénitiennes, 1710). Subsequently, operas by Giovanni Paisiello, Carl Maria von Weber, Daniel-François-Esprit Auber, Gioachino Rossini, Giuseppe Verdi, and Johann Strauss, among others, featured barcarolles.
Without question, the most famous operatic specimen is the barcarolle from Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann. Frédéric Chopin’s Barcarolle, Opus 60, is possibly the best known of the 19th-century instrumental compositions, although other 19th-century composers from Felix Mendelssohn to Franz Liszt and Gabriel Fauré contributed a host of similar pieces. Barcarolles for various performance media were written by Franz Schubert (voice and piano), Johannes Brahms (women’s chorus), and Sir William Sterndale Bennett (piano and orchestra).
Edited at 2021-05-07 10:36 pm (UTC)
With barcarole I was not surprised to see it as a dance as if pushed I would have said that’s what it was (I thought it was one of the movements of a suite but I obviously got that wrong, I was probably thinking of sarabande or something like that). Quite clearly it is a song so I can add that to my accumulated grains of sand. Either way I certainly won’t make a song and dance out of it.