Having mastered the 87 bus running between Vauxhall Bus Station and Smith Square, we started the evening with wine and cake in the basement of St. John's, both rather good. The wine being a Chablis and the cake being a confection of polenta and raspberry jam. Entertainment provided by an old China hand, a specialist in equipment for the disabled and, I think, the chief executive of snap dragon guitars, a manufacturer of folding guitars with which business men who travel can while away the long hours in hotels. See reference 2.
Having been sensitised to pillars and their capitals (see reference 3), we took a good look at those in the nave. The big masonry pillars & pilasters were too tall to be able to make out all the intricacies of their capitals, but as far as I could tell, they were made in one, not several pieces. However, I did notice that the wooden gallery had been rather badly cut into the masonry pillars. Poor supervision, even in the sixties (when the church was rebuilt) when one still had craft trained foremen on building projects. On the other hand, I thought that the design decision to have Ionic pillars to the short wooden pillars to the gallery was right: Corinthian to match the big pillars would have looked rather fussy.
Fliter turned out to have terrific stage presence, even if she was more soberly dressed than her publicity shots might have led one to believe, one of which is included above. She mostly played without music, certainly without page turner, but for the preludes she did have the music flat on the piano, which must have been hard for her to see. She did turn the pages, but I suspect they were there more as a prop than for serious use. There is, I suppose, the possibility in her mind that she might freeze up, something I was recently told can happen to actors from time to time, in which event the score, even a hard to see one, would be handy.
The music was uniformly good, and I think the preludes were as good as I have ever heard them. She had an nicely unobtrusive way of playing, without the tossings and flourishes favoured by some pianists, but she still managed to do loud, when loud was needed. She also made a fair amount of noise with the pedals, which was slightly distracting. But more on that in due course. No mobile phones went off, but there were a couple of clappings in the wrong places - at which she smiled rather nicely as she played on, almost as if she was pleased at the trick she had played on us.
In the interval I wondered about the merits of having a small display somewhere unobtrusive which told us what prelude we were on, for the improvement of conversation afterwards - with not all of us having the musical skills which are needed otherwise. Maybe a very small screen built into the back of the seat in front would be the way ahead in a new-build concert hall.
Fliter hailed from Argentina and gave us an Argentian dance by way of an encore, which was very energetic and far too fast for me to dance to, even when I was very young. But I learned along the way that one of the prices you pay for being a top-flight concert pianist is that, should you happen to come from the southern hemisphere, you have to live and mainly work in the northern hemisphere, far from family and friends.
The evening's good run continued at Earlsfield where I scored an instant three at the aeroplane game. Two subsequent fours, the first for a while, and the score did not drop below two during our 10 minute wait there. But I was mistaken about the length of the approach path, which I had thought to be thirty miles or more, as one plane swung onto the approach from the north, more like fifteen miles out from Heathrow.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/preludes.html.
Reference 2: http://www.snap-dragon-guitars.co.uk/.
Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/corinthian.html.
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