These days the pace is a bit more frantic and the musicians want to leverage their investment in rehearsal by doing the same thing in half a dozen venues around the world. So instead of comfortable spacing, Fischer and Levit chose to get through all the Beethoven violin sonatas in three concerts on three consecutive evenings, which meant that, what with one thing and another, I opted to go for just one of them, the first on the grounds that I was least familiar with the early sonatas.
The evening did not start off too well with three young people, two of them rather large young ladies, recounting, with great gusto and much laughter. the most embarrassing moments in their lives. Some of which I found rather gross for public consumption.
Calmed down by walking up through Berkeley Square (where the floral fish had vanished from the front of the sexy fish restaurant of reference 2) with a drop of white in the Cock & Lion. There I was able to remind myself that Dirty Dick's of Liverpool Street, having degenerated to an early form of pub grub by the time that I knew it, had done time as a wine bar around the end of the nineteenth century - and, according to wikipedia, a tourist attraction even then. See the elaborate web site at reference 3. I also learned about a butcher at Seymour Place which once had an impressive line of pigs hanging high up along both sides of this corner shop. Sadly while I think that there is, or at least was until recently, a butcher in that general area, this one no longer exists, at l;east as far as google knows. Presumably felled, along with the likes of once pervasive Dewhurst, by the mighty supermarkets - or perhaps, in this case, the mighty department stores, Selfridge's Food Hall not being far away.
The concert was excellent, with the early Beethoven starting pleasingly light and fresh, reminding me both of his Op.18 string quartets and the Mozart violin sonatas. It got a bit fiercer in the second half. And along the way I was struck by several bits of striking dissonance from the violin - at least that was what I thought it was.
The pianist kept his nose close to the music a lot of the time, looking as if he was actually reading it, at least some of the time. While the violinist managed without music at all. As with the complete Chopin at St. John's, I wondered what the chance of losing one's place in one's memory was, of playing the wrong movement at the wrong moment. Does it ever happen? Or would it be more likely that the player would start on the wrong movement but recover so quickly that it would take a careful listener to notice? The violinist had a flashy but reasonably sensible dress on: arms free, chest covered, although perhaps a little tight for comfortable breathing.
Enthusiastic audience in a near full house. A lot of east Asians, including one Japanese boy (with his mother) with the score on his telephone. I would have not been able to read it so small, but it did have the advantage of being a lot less intrusive for his neighbours than the sort of score that I could read would have been. Not something that one sees much of these days, not even the yellow miniatures from Eulenberg, popular among concert regulars when I was little.
On the way back, I noticed that the eighth floor seemed to be where the night time action was at MI6. But was the night time action a bunch of workers monitoring the air waves or a bunch of bosses burning the midnight oil? I wondered whether the fashion for open plan had reached the secret service. Unusually, no aeroplanes at all.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/beethoven-sonatas.html for the last occasion, some years ago now, when I last heard Levit.
Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/more-soprano.html.
Reference 3: http://www.dirtydicks.co.uk/.
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