An instrument which was previously played by Isaac Stern and before that by Eugène Ysaÿe. I had thought some Stern was included in my haul from the Oxfam shop at Tavistock, but inspection today suggests that I don't actually own any vinyl featuring either of them. Several violinists of the same sort of Ukrainian or Russian background as Stern, but not the man himself.
So Renaud Capuçon on the violin and David Fray on the piano, giving us Bach No.5, Beethoven Op.24, Bachish in C minor and Beethoven Op.30 No.2. Where by Bachish I mean a sonata once attributed to Bach, but now there just seems to be ignorance. We just don't know. While it seems that we have heard Capuçon just the once, just about three years ago. Fray never. See reference 2.
Unlike on Sunday mornings, the Wigmore front of house team neglected to guard the back entrance to the hall, the one you get to from the Bechstein Room, so no inspection of tickets. Further slippage in that the fine flower arrangements which usually flank the stage were missing, we think a first. We then showed how carelessly we look at things by having thought that the large flower vases were usually mounted on wall brackets set into the brown marble. But the vases were not there and there were neither brackets nor fixings for brackets, so it must have been pedestals. Not clear whether it is Helen Aristidou or Helen Aristidov who does the flowers, but either way it is probably the people at reference 3, and the arrangements are usually very good. We were not able to find out why they were missing on this occasion.
Further puzzlement in the bar, where we found that the miniature aloes in little pots on the tables there appeared to have little in the way of roots, and what there was did not penetrate into the pots. Maybe aloes, being succulents, can manage without regular rooting arrangements.
The sonatas were very good; we were reminded why we like such things. With Capuçon and Fray making a good team. The Beethoven was very much what we have come to expect, but neither Bach nor Bachish sounded much like the Bach we are used to. Good, but new. We got one encore, which did not sound quite like what had gone before either, so we did not know, and no-one near us knew, what it was.
Unusually, the pianist did not play from a piano stool, sitting upright, choosing to play instead from a common or garden tubular steel chair, into which he sat well back. Perhaps he has more respect for his back than your average pianist. His page turner was a very serious looking young man, but not so serious that he did not allow himself a certain amount of head movement, in time to the music. Given that he was quite possibly a student of music of some sort, I wondered whether he was running an inner commentary; how this fingering was good, that bad and that a mistake. Maybe there was such a tendency and he was really having to concentrate to keep his mind on the more mundane business of keeping the pages turned.
On to the train home to find ourselves sitting next to three very exuberant young ladies, disporting themselves around their three seats. Perhaps just a touch of épater la bourgeoisie about it all. So much so that another young lady, we thought on her way home from Edinburgh University to her parents in Leatherhead, perhaps after her first term away from home, thought to ask us if that was the way that we behaved when we were young. Speaking for myself, at that age I dare say I was loud enough in my cups, but BH was firm that she would never have been so publically exuberant. Either way, it all seemed a very long time ago,
Reference 1: https://tarisio.com/.
Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/two-out-of-three.html.
Reference 3: http://www.flowershopdocklands.co.uk/aboutus.
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