Started out on Epsom platform by the sight of an advertising hoarding showing off bad behaviour by a male model, that is to say standing outside, grinning at us with a large and expensive radio sitting on his shoulder. Just the sort of thing that FIL tried to bear down on beaches in the west country - with rather mixed success. No idea what the hoarding was supposed to be advertising, apart from bad behaviour.
We then find that the trains are in disarray for a variety of reasons and elect to take a Southern train to Victoria, which involved standing until Sutton, but it did get us there, taking only a few more minutes that the proper train would have done.
Onto Wigmore Hall to find that we were at a gala occasion, probably the reason why we had been consigned to row M. The artists had donated their fees to the Wigmore Hall, there were various posh looking people in the bar and we were to be addressed by the director. An address which mainly consisted of telling us that he had just got back from Vienna where it was rather cold. Perhaps he had been to some concert hall directors' conference there, where, in between their wienerschnitzels, they told each other what they were doing about the loss of government grants and exchanged views about the best people to get to refurbish one's seats.
The hall was full, but luckily for us the two seats in front of us were empty, perhaps caught up in the trains, which meant we both had excellent, full body views.
Uchida marked the occasion by being rather more smartly turned out than she had been for the RFH the week before (see reference 2), to the extent of wearing a white sash. I had worried that as a premier league piano player, she would attempt to steal the occasion, but in the event she did not. In fact, she did very well indeed, bringing out a lot of bits of the piano parts that I had not really heard before. Only occasionally did I feel she was a little too loud.
Padmore also excellent, with great power and range, neatly but not flashily turned out and with stage manners to match. Contrary to the paternal line that one should end loud, he ended rather quiet - but managed to pack a lot of punch into his quiet.
Regarding the words, the same form as last time. I watched the stage while BH watched the words. I am clearly losing out, but on this occasion I wondered how many of the words a German speaker would actually catch, assuming that he (or she) did not know them by heart - with my finding quite a lot of singing in English quite difficult from that point of view.
Back at Vauxhall the trains were still in disarray with a rather disconsolate small crowd by the gates listening to the words of wisdom of a station attendant. Some talk, inter alia, of a track side fire at Waterloo. Pushed through them and onto an empty platform. We had just started to think that maybe we should have gone to Victoria after all, when a near empty train pulled in. We had waited less than five minutes as it turned out.
Disarray continued in that the usually well filled taxi rank outside Epsom station was empty, a consequence we learned of trains beyond Epsom being out of action and all the Epsom taxis having been taken by all the people who lived beyond Epsom, out in the country. Another wait of less than five minutes.
Home to turn out Bostridge again. Where, I had read beforehand, that the key transitions between the songs of the cycle were sometimes important, key transitions which could be disturbed by transposition, perhaps for a bass singer rather than a tenor - which might explain why Coote was not as good at 'Auf dem Wasser zu singen' as I had expected (see reference 4). Unfortunately, as I had thought that changing key just meant multiplying everything by 1.234 or whatever, leaving the relationships between the transposed notes unchanged, my music theory is clearly not good enough to understand how this could be so. Maybe one day I will come across someone who can put me right.
PS: we could not manage snow for the illustration but we could manage a segment of the John Lewis Christmas monster display in Oxford Street. Said to be tied in with a whole raft of expensive advertising on television and elsewhere. Very expensive looking it was too.
Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/back-at-court.html.
Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/sonatas.html.
Reference 3: Schubert's Winter Journey - Ian Bostridge - 2015.
Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/trouser-roles.html.
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