Some of them, as might be deduced by their low numbers, were written when Mozart was very young, with some of the material, if not the publication, dating from his sixth year. All rather scary, even if one was talking juvenelia.
Rather to my surprise, I found I did not know any of the pieces, or at least not well enough to remember them. But they worked well enough, even if not as well as the ones that I do remember. Mozart is the man, even if a scary one. And I do like the violin sonata as a form.
Ibragimova was in black trousers & high heels rather than the evening dress favoured by some lady solists and had a rather active stance, moving backwards and forwards, ducking and diving in front of her stand, usually with one foot well ahead of the other. All of which combined to give her a splendid stage presence.
The page turner was considerably older than the pianist for whom he was turning pages; presumably something of a pianist himself - and hopefully happy enough to watch someone rather better than himself at close quarters. I wonder if I would be jealous in such a situation, rather than just be pleased to be able to watch a master at work? I remember talking to a chap in TB who used, when younger, to do rally driving and who had once won a prize which consisted of being taken for a drive by Jackie Stewart. He, the chap in TB that is, was still full of what a great experience it was to sit there and watch the great man do his magic.
The only weakness of the performance to my mind was that sometimes the piano seemed a bit loud, with the result that some of the violin entries were lost. But maybe this was more a result of some of the music starting life as piano music, rather than any weakness in its performance.
The concert was sponsored, in part anyway, by the private banking part of Lloyds Bank, that well known if semi-detached bit of the public sector. We failed to spot any obviously private bankers, or any of their customers, and deduced that they must look much the same as the rest of us. In the interval we pondered on whether we qualified under either the £250,00 capital or the £100,000 income rules, deciding that whether or no, the fees that they were likely to charge us probably outweighed the benefits. Would we do significantly better than if we just read the personal finance page in the DT from time to time? No action.
PS 1: oddly, if I put 'personal finance' into google, Lloyds Bank comes out at top of the list. Maybe google knows something that we missed.
PS 2: records suggest that we had never heard Ibragimova before and that we last heard Tiberghien back in June 2012 at St. Luke's, having just failed to hear him in June 2013 at the Wigmore.
PS 3: back home and wondering whether the juvenilia were really part of the canon, I turned up my score of the sonatas. Which came to me from Leipzig via Eton College and which then only contained 18 sonatas altogether, indexing them by subject (in musical notation that is) rather than by the keys or K numbers that us lesser mortals use. So I am none the wiser.
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