Second half

Back to the Wigmore Hall yesterday to hear the second half of Shostakovitch's preludes and fugues, having heard the first half from the same pianist, Alexander Melnikov, on or about 28th April 2011, and having in the meantime been able to brush up with a discounted CD set from HMV Guildford (now presumably no more) with Melnikov and harmonia mundi doing the whole lot. Plus an interview which I have yet to investigate.

Started the outing with two compromises. Compromise one concerned the weather which was a bit iffy, but still being a bit difficult about use of cloakrooms, I settled for jacket, gloves and scarf, which can be accommodated in one's seat, rather than duffle coat, scarf and umbrella which can't be. Compromise two concerned the tube strike, mitigation of which would have been to carry full Bullingdon gear, that is to say including helmet, which would also force a visit to the cloakroom. So settled for just taking the key and my bicycle clips which could be carried in a pocket. As it turned out, compromise one was more or less OK, the only catch being that I had to get a taxi home from Epsom Station. Compromise two was fine as I had, in the event, no trouble getting tubes from and then to Vauxhall, despite various warnings on tannoys and posters.

So got to the hall in fine form, to find that my neighbour was a cello PhD from the Royal Academy. I did not find out what one has to do to get such a PhD, beyond the dissertation being about 400 pages long, but I did find out that some wag at his first post-doctoral teaching post thought it would be a lark to make him first aid officer since he was a doctor. He also told me about it being important to stick one's violins and what-have-yous back together with animal glue, rather than with some superior modern glue. Animal glue could easily be un-glued by warming or solvent and one was able to take the instrument apart to be mended, which would not be possible with a real glue. Which was interesting to me both from a chippy's glue point of view and in that one did, on a regular basis, take instruments apart: they don't, it seems, last 300 years and more without some serious TLC. Unfortunately, the cellist found the evening's music a bit intellectual, and given that he was only using an absent friend's ticket, I don't suppose he will be signing up for the first half, should it come around again.

Melnikov opted to have a page turner, a young lady whose face was oddly reminiscent of those you get on madonnas of the Italian renaissance. So at regular intervals she stood up, carefully bent over the keyboard and carefully got hold of the top corner of the right hand page. When she had got a good grip on it, her gaze turned reverentially down onto the pate of the master while she waited for its small nod, after which she turned the page and sat down again. I would have thought that having to bother about page turning would be a bit of a distraction for the pianist, but I suppose their brains learn to delegate that task to some otherwise idle part of the brain, which delegation does not disturb the active parts.

That aside he turned in a good performance on the '75 Steinway provided, with, for example, the 14th prelude gripping as strongly as it did on the first hearing on his CD. This second twelve were rather longer than the first twelve, but it is still a bit of a mystery how he managed that, the Wanderer Fantasia (see 31st January) and some Brahms in the same sitting. There was also evidence of the tension noticed on the last occasion when he stood up to adjust the height of his piano chair (rather than the more usual stool). But he did not repeat his wonderful throwaway line when thinking about an encore 'well maybe the other twelve', indeed we did not get an encore at all on this occasion. Odd that the first occasion was not mentioned in the programme, the programme writer seemingly being more interested in the appearances of one Tatiana Nikolayeva in 1991 and 1993, a one time colleague of the man himself.

Back to Vauxhall to be irritated by a beggar, a scrawny 40ish white male accompanied by two large bull terriers. Or perhaps they were bull mastiffs. Either way, not breeds of dog I much care for at the best of times, never mind their owners, but I really do object to their getting their living from the public purse.

Pondered on the train about the performance of the crow, part of which I imagine is playing to his members rather than to the rest us, some of whom are only too happy to see their leader, one of their own, having a pop at the stupid ponces in charge. But I think he is riding to a scargill. The economics are shifting under him and said ponces in charge will devote serious brain power to crushing the train drivers for good, probably by abolition. And as with the miners, once all the dust has settled, it might become apparent to all the former train drivers that they might have done better to spin things out by not being greedy and keeping their heads down.