I knew more or less nothing about either Berg or his Lyric Suite, but for some reason the item in the calendar attracted me. Perhaps there was a hole in my calendar or perhaps I was get muddled up with or associated to his fellow central European and contemporary Bartók.
The day itself started off badly, it being rather wet and, for once in a very long while, there being a blogger outage, with google's blogger software being offline for an hour or more. Perhaps the occasion of the same sort of massive kerfuffle in the google HQ as we used to go in for for what we used to call Sev.1 incidents. Sufficiently wet that I used the tube rather than pulling a Bullingdon. Rain is OK for the regular cyclist, but not for the hobbyist.
A little time in hand so I was able to pay a visit to the violin shop in Mortimer Street (see reference 2) to enquire about the odd cello stringing, with diagonal attachment of the strings to the tail. noticed at reference 3. The chap in the shop was entirely happy to talk about this, although he had no personal experience of such a thing. He explained that the sound of the string depended to an appreciable extent on the length of string between the anchorage point on the tail and the bridge and that it was entirely possibly that a cellist would prefer the tones obtained from such a diagonal arrangement. He pointed out that other musicians got excited by the precise way that the pegs at the other end were cut, or perhaps hollowed out, which also made a difference which was appreciable to the trained ear.
Thus informed I took my second breakfast in a sandwich bar, possibly Avella's, in the right place but not looking quite right in streetview, a place where they were quite full of themselves, their drinks and their sandwiches. I took a small and expensive creation including a brown roll, some chicken, some brie and some very familiar flavouring which I could not name. Which last was irritating - and I did not like to ask - but the sandwich was very good. Brown roll unusually good too, chewy but not too chewy and without the filling-smashing crust in the way of the stuff you get from Paul.
Onto the Wigmore for, unusually for me, the house only about half full. And while the suite turned out to be interesting - particularly with the last movement being sung as well as played - and the lecture could have been interesting, I did not care for the platform style of the lecturer, one Gavin Plumley. All a bit too full of himself, too smug, not to say plummy, for me.
It turns out that Berg was very into letterology, numerology and musical jokes with this piece being littered with elaborate letter and number games. To the point that one started seeing things which were perhaps not really there. I recalled that Bach, to name just one, was very into much the same sort of thing and it also struck me that it was entirely appropriate that the piece was roughly contemporary with Joyce's Ulysses, with Joyce being another chap fond of such games. I associate to the claim I once read that Leopold's big day out in Dublin traces a big question mark on the map - a claim I have never bothered to check. Another angle was that Berg went in for a complicated personal life so as to have something to bang on about in his music. He arranged his life so as to generate copy, rather as a diarist or a blogger might.
We went Persian for a good lunch at the galleria of reference 4. Including glasses of a drink said to involve lemon and sherbet, which was rather good, if tasting more like lemon barley water than lemon sherbets. I associated to the sherbets one comes across in novels and stories about the middle east, with my understanding being that sherbet drinks are all over the place, in the absence of alcohol. The restaurant, however, did do alcohol, so I had the best of both worlds. All in all, a much better meal than that noticed at reference 5, perhaps because I managed to avoid the dried limes, of which Persians are said to be fond but which I find far too sour. Managed to avoid without remembering what they were called - that took a quick google this morning.
PS: the day involved two time outs. One in Epsom, where I found that Wetherspoons first thing in the morning was a perfectly comfortable place in which to wait for quarter an hour or so - for the price of one of their fine selection of non-alcoholic drinks. Quite a sprinkling of people, either at breakfast or at the same game as myself. The other at Waterloo, where I went along to the upstairs bar, then closed, of the Festival Hall, where again I found quite a sprinkling of people. Some doing their homework on their laptops, some using the place for meetings. Some just with a bit of time to kill, like myself. One lady using it as neutral ground in which to try to make contact with someone - possibly more or less homeless - whom someone else was trying to trace and on whose behalf the lady was trying to mediate. It all sounded, from a distance, very careful & caring. Not a job that I would care for - or be any good at. I would not have the patience to grind the same old stuff over and over with the same person. And then the next person. And then the next.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/tuition.html.
Reference 2: http://guivier.com/.
Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/back-on-bullingdon.html.
Reference 4: http://www.galleriarestaurant.co.uk/.
Reference 5: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/the-end.html.
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