Last Dorking

That is to say, last Sunday to the last of this year's string quartet concerts at the Dorking Halls with the Heath Quartet. First two referenced below.

As is now usual, we were in the Martineau Hall, which, according to the web site '... is ideal for a smaller business conference or staff training day. It can seat up to 176 delegates theatre style or can be arranged to create a more intimate function room for corporate dining or staff training'. It certainly does well enough for the quartets, for which the Grand Hall is a bit big. On this day, full of the Surrey Youth Orchestra, complete with friends, relatives and the odd harp. I associated to the time we came across a Dad outside a church somewhere near Exmoor who had three of them, one for each of his three daughters. He told us that it was rather an expensive business - not least because of the large car needed to move the things about.

Presumably a Mr. Martineau was a councillor or something at the time the Halls were built. The smallest hall is the Masonic Hall, presumably at least once used for masonic meetings, although my understanding of such things is that they would not want the theatre layout presently usual there. And what about all the church-pastiche furnishings that they seem to like?

For this last concert, the second violin was wearing the same moderately flashy dress as last time, but the three gents. were properly suited and booted, which they had not been. In the interval I wondered whether the cellist owned the little stage which he sat on - maybe four feet by two feet by one foot high - to get his head about level with those of his standing colleagues. A bit big to cart about, but could you rely on a venue having such a thing?

The concert consisted of Mozart's Adagio & Fugue, K.546. Very good. Bartók's string quartet No.5. Notable for its unusual palindromic structure and also very good. Then after the interval the third and last of Tchaikovsky's string quartets, Op.30, puffed for the funeral march of the third movement. Which was indeed very moving, but, to my mind, threw the quartet as a whole a bit out of balance. Furthermore, I thought that the march would not work at home: apart from sounding a bit silly in the privacy of my study, the equipment there could not cope with the dynamic range.

Coming away from this our first hearing of the Tchaikovsky's string quartets, I think the consensus in the car was that we were glad to have heard them, would happily hear them again, but would not go out of our way so to do. The fringe of the repertoire is where they belong.

Now because of reading the book which told me something of Buddhism noticed at reference 3, I have been working a bit on how I attend to things, things which might be either inside or outside of the head. On this occasion, the heightened attention resulted in hearing more of the music than is usual with me, but it was also more of a jumble and the four parts of the quartet sounded much more competitive than usual. Comparable in a way to what you get if you sit too close, with too much extraneous detail - like the sound of the bow scraping on the string, rather than the sound of the string itself - and with the sound not having been blended into a more manageable whole. We shall see how this side of things develops.

Unfortunately, I forget to check the cows on Box Hill on the way home. So I will probably never be sure now whether they were small cows or black sheep. See reference 1.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/heath-2.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/heath-quartet.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/buddha-rules.html.