Helmchen two

Quite by chance, a few days after hearing Helmchen at the Diabelli event noticed at reference 1, we heard him again as part of an ensemble putting on a concert at the Wigmore Hall: Tetzlaff, his friends and relations giving us Schubert's Schwanengesang and his C major string quintet.

Friends and relations to the extent that Tetzlaff fielded both his sister and Helmchen's wife on the cellos. The fourth time that I have heard Tetzlaff, with the first being something over three years ago and noticed at reference 5.

Started our journey at Epsom where some smart green ('Emerald') buses from Reading were providing some of the replacement bus service to Sutton. One supposes that the Southwestern Trains people shop around a bit, and the Emerald people offered the best price, distance notwithstanding. Luckily the Waterloo service was not on the buses.

Onto Oxford Circus and Wigmore Steet, where we were very impressed by the enormous plastic barriers erected around at least one of the cross roads on Wigmore Street. We did not see any accompanying road works, but one supposes that there must have been some somewhere. Rather than an elaborate joke at concertgoers' expense.

Helmchen and Prégardien on first. Helmchen playing on a Yamaha piano, rather than the Steinway he had used at St. John's earlier in the week and Prégardien singing in an open necked white shirt. All very informal. But he had a very good voice, bags of power and flexibility. Enough power to balance the piano, except for the first couple of songs or so, which I thought Helmchen took a bit loud. The only real downside being that the closing song 'Der Taubenpost' was a bit of a let down, a bit tagged onto the main business. Usually a song with which I get on very well. Furthermore, it must be a few months since I last heard it, so not just a question of overstimulation. According to the blog record, nine months.

Quintet also very good, although at the end I had the sense of having had two main meals. Rather a lot for one sitting. Perhaps in the future I will go for a B film then an A film, as it were, rather than a double bill.

Some discussion of the way home of the well worn subject of the extent to which one's mood or state of health affected the music that one wrote, with me in the not much corner and BH in the lots corner. Cortana told us that Schubert suffered from something called cyclothymia, apparently a milder version of the presently fashionable bipolar disorder. While part of my argument was that the quintet had not come across as particularly sad or tragic, despite the programme notes. Despite 'an ominous D flat haunt[ing] the final cadence'.

PS: trying 'Der Taubenpost' on YouTube this afternoon, with the words in parallel in front of me, I wonder yet again whether I am getting the best of it by watching the stage rather than the programme.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/st-johns.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/repeats.html.

Reference 3: https://www.pregardien.com/en/.

Reference 4: Bing does not offer a regular website for Teztlaff, but does turn up: https://www.houseofnames.com/tetzlaff-family-crest. So clearly from a part of Germany, that is to say Pomerania, which had once been part of Sweden and is now mostly part of Poland. All very mixed up.

Reference 5: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/big-tent.html.