As we were a little early, we started the proceedings with refreshments at the Regent Street All-Bar-One, a pleasant, high ceilinged place, nicely got up with a handsome wine rack behind the bar. Tea included two small shot glasses full of smarties and we thought that the staff probably passed the time, when it was quiet, making bets on which customers would eat the smarties. We learned on the way out that the place was once the first of Forte's milk bars, being opened as the 'Strand Milk Bar Ltd' in 1935. We also noticed that this part of Regent Street was mainly food and drink, with only a sprinkling of shops, but with the whole given a bit of tone and coherence by the rather pompous, stone fronted buildings which housed the retail on their ground floors, tone and coherence which most of Oxford Street has lost.
The Brahms and the Ravel were also new-to-us but went down well enough and the Beethoven was its usual excellent stuff. There was also the usual hot chocolate in the form of a short encore which was something transcribed for violin and piano by someone, the violin being too overcome at that point to articulate very clearly. Audience fairly worked up too.
My only comment on the playing would be that in some passages of the Brahms and the odd passage of the first movement of the Beethoven, when the violin and piano should have been more or less in balance, the piano rather swamped the violin. There was also an incident which bears on my wondering why it is that string players do not seem to play from memory as much as piano players. At one point in the Beethoven Leonard turned her page but a stray bit of wind turned it back, not leaving her enough time to turn it again. She recovered herself, then played from memory until there was enough of a gap for her to turn again. She may have missed the odd note in so doing.
To lunch in the downstairs bistro at Debenhams, first visited on 20th May, pretty much up to my high expectations, letting us down slightly by not being able to do Lebanese chicken and the alternative Caesar chicken (salad) not being quite up to the usual (Wetherspoon's) specification, although perfectly acceptable in its way. Another nicely got up place, which seemed to have been recently refurbished, a refurbishment which involved, inter alia, a lot of white paint. Using what was just the light well to hold the escalators worked well.
On the way back down Davies Street to Green Park tube station, we were rather shocked to notice the the Sunseeker showroom had shut up shop. Where on earth were the Russian gangsters going to go now to buy the toys to put in their baths? See 25th June and http://www.sunseeker.com/en. On the other hand, Hedonism (owned by a Russian tycoon rather than a gangster) was open and while the ever friendly staff were still not able to offer us a Greco di Tufo, we were able to take a gewürztraminer from the part of Italy which used to be part of Austria, until it was given to Italy as a prize for their guessing (in time) the winning side in the first world war. Aka Alto Adige. I am fairly sure that we had had it before and found it good, but I did not ask them to check their records. They also tried to sell us a wine for someone's birth year as a birth day present, but it was a bit too strongly priced for both us and the occasion in question; maybe another time.
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