Inspection of both blogs reveals just one previous Barenboim outing, back in February 2008, a rather casual mention at reference 1. Luckily, the South Bank centre keep back numbers of their press releases and google was able to come up with that illustrated. It seems that while now he is doing a complete Schubert, then he was doing a complete Beethoven and I suspect that I got there on the basis of someone else queuing up for returns. In any event, a rather casual notice of a rather important event, but I am warned that at part 2, the last of the present series, there may be an unfortunate amount of clapping and cheering.
Since then the closest we have got to the man is his first assistant who turned up at Dorking and who is noticed at reference 2. Plus various mentions of various vinyl recorded by him and bought, second hand, by me.
On the present occasion, we had a warm up act in the form of a young lady in a bright blue evening dress, that is to say with no back, on the train. Full war paint, apart from her fancy shoes which she had in a plastic from a supermarket for the journey. Not for the first time, we wondered why she had no kind of a coat, wrap or shawl to cover herself up with. We could only think that she planned to be accompanied by someone who could provide something other than public transport later on.
Followed by a quick game of aeroplanes in the level 4 lounge of the RFH, which comes with large windows providing quite a good view of the approach to Heathrow. I was quite close to scoring several twos and might have scored a two could I have found a ladder to give me the height needed to get the viewing angle down a bit.
Full house, rather dowdy, hardly dressed up at all. But at least no powerpoint over the stage in the way of the QEH. I liked Barenboim's quiet stage and keyboard manners which were properly self effacing. Clapping at the end of the concert was far too quick off the mark for my liking, and rapidly swelled into a standing ovation. But we were pleased that there was no encore, not wanted (by us) after a programme of this sort. No. 9, D.575. No.18, D.894. And after the interval, No. 19, D.958. The blogs reveal nothing about any of them, although we knew all of them reasonably well. And I did some revision of 575.
All good stuff, and as on the last occasion very aware of the contrast between loud and quiet, although not on this occasion to do with audience management. I had forgotten how much quiet and space there is in Schubert, with the space seeming almost as important at times as what fills the space up. Good range of tone from the piano, perhaps softened a bit by distance, with us being in row DD. I think I may have baulked at stumping up the £50 plus needed for front stalls.
We found out afterwards from the DT that the first concert of the series had been towering, with a new piano being one of the ingredients, a Barenboim-Maene Concert Grand, something of a throwback to an earlier style of piano, and unveiled for these concerts. The biggest change seems to be parallel stringing rather than cross stringing, which must make a lot of difference to the way that one string affects another - enough difference that even my tin ear might notice if you played the same (suitable) bit on one piano and then on another. Not being content with the DT, I shall read all about it at reference 3. Did M. Maene turn out for the occasion? One likes to think that he would have.
Oddly, the programme supplied by the RFH said nothing at all about pianos, at least nothing that I could find, beyond an advertisement for Steinway - who did, I suppose I should say, supply some of the parts for this one.
Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=sequence+things+late+evening+at+Waterloo.
Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/dorking-time-again.html.
Reference 3: http://www.maene.be/en/content/home/.aspx.
No comments:
Post a Comment