This post is one in a sequence which lists (mostly) live music I have heard, as best as memory allows. I write to have a record of my musical experiences and these entries are intended as postcards from me to my future self. All opinions are personal. Other posts in this collection can be found here. The most recent prior post in this sequence is here.
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Krius String Quartet to an afternoon audience of about 70 people in St Marylebone Parish Church, Marylebone, London on Friday 4 October 2024. The quartet comprises Alfie Weinberg (v), Louis Solon (v), Theo Hayward (va), and Frederick Carter (c), all students at the Royal Academy across the road. The programme was:
- Haydn: String Quartet, Op. 54 No. 2
- Puccini: Crisantemi
- Cohen: Hallelujah
- Electric Light Orchestra: Mr Blue Sky
This Church has a very high ceiling, and I thought the sound tended to become lost in the vast space. The concert was billed as informal, and some audience members were moved by what they heard to react, in words or in bodily motions. The audience applauded with enthusiasm after every movement and seemed to appreciate most the last two numbers, perhaps because they recognized the theme tunes. The audience reactions were invariably warm and positive, and I found this very charming.
The musical performance by Krius was excellent and I enjoyed the concert immensely. The Haydn quartet was new to me, and I was particularly touched by the slow movement and its melancholic chords and descant melodic line. The precision of intonation and co-ordination of Krius as an ensemble were excellent throughout, and they are a string quartet to watch out for!
After I left the concert, immediately outside the church I crossed at the green walk signal, and came within inches of being killed by a car running a red light. If I had died then, this concert would have been the last I heard (at least in this life). I have since been thinking a great deal about this.
- Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy in a two-piano recital to a sold-out Wigmore Hall on Friday 4 October 2024. This was an outstanding and very moving lunchtime recital consisting of preludes and fugues of JS Bach and of Dmitri Shostakovich, interleaved with one another.
Most of us westerners have a linear model of time, with people and events in the past able to influence those in the present and future, but not the reverse. We would therefore, most of us, think of Bach influencing Shostakovich, and Shostakovich choosing Bach as an influence, or at least not resisting this influence. Bach is essentially passive in this exchange.
Cultures with a different model of time, however, such as indigenous Australian cultures, who think of different eras or generations being overlayed, or stacked, over the same geographic location to which they are linked, allow for influences to travel in all directions – forwards, backwards and diagonally. In this view, Bach has actively chosen who will be influenced by him, through the particular music he has written.
This may seem a strange notion, but since the WWW, we are actually quite familiar with it. Web 2.0 not only allowed people with similar interests to find each other, it helped create these groups of like-minded people, no matter where they were. If someone starts a weblog about language, such as Language Log, people interested in that topic will read and, many of them, comment on the posts. In time, this will create a community of people interested in, and increasingly expert on, the topic of the blog. The community will develop its own norms of behavior, its own assumptions and common forms of reasoning, and its own shibboleths and sometimes enemies. They will do this without being in the one place, or being online at the same time, or even being alive at the same time. As an example of such assumptions, the focus of Language Log, for instance, is almost entirely on the forms and syntax of human language, and only rarely on its semantics or pragmatics.
Similarly, Bach’s music has created, through the centuries, a community of people who it communicates to, people who appreciate its musical sounds and its musical forms, who understand its meanings (or wish to), and who respond, in different ways, to it. This community is spread over geography, over time, and over musical abilities. Bach has, by writing his music in the ways he did, actively selected the people who will be influenced by it. They are not, usually, people who like the waltzes of Johann Strauss Jr, for example.
So Bach is not, in fact, passive in this exchange. Has his music also been influenced by later composers? Certainly, as I have pointed out before, the music of later composers can change how we listen to the music of earlier composers, so that, for example, depending on the context and the interpretation, Bach can sound like Ligeti. Something similar happened in this concert – hearing Bach interleaved with Shostakovich allowed us to hear the influences between the two composers in both directions. For me, this was a profoundly moving experience, and it will take some time to absorb its full intellectual and emotional consequences.
- The Somerset Piano Trio (Warren Mailley Smith, p, Jenny Sacha, v, and Kirsten Jenson, c) playing to about 50 people at St Mary-Le-Strand Church, London on Thursday 26 September 2024. This was a masterful performance through the darkening gloom of the church, of two fine piano trios:
- Beethoven: Piano Trio Op. 1 No. 1 in E flat
- Schubert: Piano Trio in B flat
- London Firebird Orchestra with violinist Charlotte Saluste-Bridoux under George Jackson at St George’s Church, Hanover Square, London on Tuesday 24 September 2024. The program comprised just two works:
- Beethoven: Violin Concerto
- Mozart: Symphony No. 41 (Jupiter)
A great concert, with superb, polished performances by Ms Saluste-Bridoux and the Firebird orchestra to a full church. The wonderful acoustics of the church compensate for the extreme discomfort of sitting on the hard, wooden pews.
The cadenzas for the Beethoven were ones which I had not heard before, and they had a distinct twentieth-century feel. I understand they were written by Alfred Schnittke (Movements 1 and 3) and Gidon Kremer (Movement 2). The (novel) entry of the strings near the end of Schnittke’s third movement cadenza was magical – a sequence of shimmering discords that ascended, ratcheting up the tension as they rose in pitch. The choice of these particular cadenzas was inspired, and added immensely to the performance. (HT: CSB)
As often with the Jupiter, the contrapuntal exuberance of the final movement energized me immensely, to the point where I felt capable of running after strangers on St George Street to tell them how superb this performance had been, and how much I wished I’d been a musician!