Almost lost each other at Vauxhall, with me on the tube and BH on the platform, my having misjudged her velocity. But my getting off at a quiet Pimlico resolved the problem.
Got to our seats in row G, to find a foreign couple in front of us in row E, clearly much more interested in each other than in the music. Luckily, they left after the first half. Then a very odd looking gentleman in seat A4, right at the front, not a seat I would care for at all. He stayed the distance, but he was very thin and BH thought he might have been quite ill. While immediately in front of us we had another foreign couple, I think from New York. The lady started to explain that sitting down too much was the latest health fad in her part of the US, taking up the niche that had once been occupied by smoking. I told her about the chap up north taken to court by some officious person or other for dropping a cigarette butt down a drain, and she told me that such a thing might well happen in New York. We speculated about residents' committees in blocks of flats getting difficult about smoking in one's own flat. Also about whether Canadians were proposing to allow the smoking of cannabis in public houses, provided only that the smoking did not involve tobacco. Presumably the relatively healthy herbal cannabis - aka weed - contains a measurable amount of nicotine and consuming it involves burning vegetable material in an enclosed space, so perhaps that one will depend on exactly how the smoking laws have been written. A point to be thought about by the legalisers over here - amongst whom I am very much to be counted - with it being a complete mystery to me why we are clinging onto the disastrous criminalisation of recreational drugs. A policy which is years and years after its sell-by date.
Finghin Collins gave us Janáček's piano sonata 1.X.1905 and Rachmaninov's first seven preludes from his Op.23. Both good, although, certainly in parts, rather loud and fast for my taste. Schubert's piano sonata D.960 much more the thing.
During this last I was very impressed with the range, from very quiet to fairly loud, that you could get with our sitting quite close to the piano. Sound very good, much better, I think, than it could possibly have been in a big hall like the RFH or the QEH.
Slightly disturbed by some church bells at some point and some microphone feedback (or something of that sort) at another.
Chopin's Op.32 No.1 nocturne by way of an encore. Which worked well enough, but was not really necessary. Perhaps Collins needed something to wind down with. We would have been content enough to wander out into the night to wonder about how, after such a Schubert, one could want or manage three of them in a sitting. Checking I find it was only two years ago that we did manage three in a sitting, finding it very good, as noticed at reference 2. Could we pull off the same trick now? I am also fairly sure that we heard a Russian pianist do all three at the Wigmore Hall, a little too much for us on that occasion, but with the pianist going on to play all three again that very same night, after an hour or so's break. But I have failed to find any notice of such, with the nearest I can come being Imogen Cooper doing all three in 2013, noticed at reference 3.
Apart from managing to set the car alarm off, not being able to see the ignition key hole in the dark, our return through Stoneleigh was otherwise uneventful. We continue to wonder how the huge pub at Stoneleigh station survives, yet another Greene King house. Have they let off the upstairs as flats? They used to run famous discos in the basement, but that was a long time ago and it is hard to see what other use one might make of that sort of space. Not many people are going to want to live in a basement - although saying that, there are plenty of people out there moaning about the lack of rented accommodation at a sensible price. Is it yet another listed building, with the council not allowing a change of use, let alone demolition?
I dare say the residents of Stoneleigh would be sorry enough to see it go, there not being another within easy walking distance. But do enough of them use the place to pay the rent, as it were? Not a place I should think that I have used above half a dozen times in thirty years, Ewell West or Epsom having been a lot more convenient in the days when I might have stopped off on the way home.
PS: reasonably sure that we have not heard this Collins before. The blog archive finds nothing for Finghin which is reasonably conclusive. Not completely as it finds far too much to check for Collins and piano. Can't all be the clarinet chap, so I don't know who they can all be.
Reference 1: https://www.greeneking-pubs.co.uk/pubs/surrey/station/.
Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/05/boxed-set.html.
Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/10/schubertiade.html.
No comments:
Post a Comment