On this occasion we got Mozart's K.458 quartet and Fauré's quintet No.1 in support, with the latter being new to both of us, beyond a quick peek at YouTube.
A cold & wet evening, so well wrapped up and double umbrella, our days for cosy sheltering under the one umbrella being long gone. No.87 bus from Vauxhall, more or less to Smith Square, but fearing to be baulked at Lambeth Bridge by the northern stretch of Millbank being blocked off for some reason, we got off just short of the Security Service, thinking to pop into the Marquis on Horseferry Road.
Marquis full of after-work people so we pushed onto the crypt of St. Johns, which was very quiet. We pondered on the function of crypts, with my offering being that the main thing was to get the foundations well below ground level, on good solid ground. Getting a bit of usable space was a bonus.
The church upstairs turned out to be very quiet too, with maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty of us, not many at all for a Premier League concert transferred from QEH. We had not previously heard of Martino Tirimu (see reference1), but but both he and the Carducci Quartet are entirely respectable people. A pianist whose stage manners rather reminded me of Pollini, who sat with very straight arms and who actually used the score - while most pianists whom we see seem only to use the score as a prop. While the Carducci Quartet fielded, inter alia, a very enthusiastic & engaging cello, with her dress off the bow shoulder, giving her plenty of freedom of movement - something which I remember Rosen saying in his book was not what you got from the penguin suits which used to be expected of concert pianists. See, for example, reference 4.
The programme was in the right order, with the Mozart very good, followed by the intriguing Fauré, which, at the time, seemed to me to point forward to the Dvořák. But the timing (in years) does not work and, by the time that we got to the Dvořák, the pointers seemed to have vanished. All very odd.
On the other hand, following my remarks about my mother yesterday (see reference 3), I was very much into hearing the separate lines of music, so much so that at times they seemed to fall apart, to fail to come together into a whole. This may have been something to do with our sitting in row G, further forward than we often are.
The net result though was that the Dvořák was very good. Not the magic of the first hearing, but perhaps something more enduring.
Out to find Millbank still blocked off with plenty of blue lights there and roundabout, but we got picked up by a cheerful taxi who took us over to Vauxhall, where we were pleased to find that Epsom trains were still running at 15 minute intervals, so not much of a break, and what there was broken at Raynes Park, where I was pleased to pick up a text book for those studying for an ONC in physics, once a good qualification, but one which may no longer be current. I was also pleased to learn about valves, something about which I probably knew something many years ago. To be reminded that an electrical, red-glowing, glass valve could be used to control the flow of electricity in rather the way that a valve on an oil pipeline was used to control the flow of oil. From where I branched to the valves of shelly animals in the sea.
While OED starts with pairs of doors in ancient Rome, perhaps folding doors. Then a door in a sluice. Then the hinged shells of the shelly animals, the bivalves. Then a sort of one-way trap door in a pipe in an animal, including here the well known valves of the heart. With another column of a two column entry to go... All good stuff.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/dvorak.html.
Reference 2: http://www.martinotirimo.com/homepage.asp.
Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/an-assembly-for-consciousness.html.
Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/cuarteto-casals.html.
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