No interval. A matter of mood and judgement, but on this occasion no interval worked for us. Would the bar have accepted an order for interval drinks?
The performers were both smartly dressed in what might have been period Schubertian costume. Both German despite their names.
The singer did not bother with a script, but the pianist did, having carefully arranged things so that each of the twenty four songs occupied one side of one spread or one side of one page. Some of the spreads looked quite wide, which may be why he opted for having the music stand on the piano at an acute angle to the horizontal, to the point where one might have thought that it was difficult to read from. As it turned out though, he spent most of the time with his eye on the singer rather than on his script.
I thought about scripts beforehand, having of late found that knowing what is being sung does add value, having managed without before. Now, following the German words as they are sung, keeping an eye on the English the while, seems to be the thing for home listening, so for Hall listening I went as far as printing one off the Internet, nicely arranged with German on the left hand column and English on the right, one page to the song. Nice big print which would be a bit easier to read with the wrong spectacles than the micro print you get in concert programmes and CD booklets. But there was also rather a lot of white space and rather a lot of pages, so I fiddled around with the photocopying functions on the printer and got it down to maybe a dozen pages. Sadly, a bit of practice soon revealed that it was very hard to turn the pages silently, even when one had plenty of space. Or at least to turn them silently in a reliable way. So I opted for reading the script in the train and not using it during the performance at all - with one result being that I completely missed the phrase 'eine reiche Braut' in the second song which had looked so bleak on the page. But amused that our brat and their bride seem to have the same root.
While to the right of us was a chap who fiddled with his CD booklet all the way through, which I found very irritating out of the corner of the eye. I think I would have poked him had he been a bit nearer, while BH, more charitable, thought he had some health issues, possibly asthma or some other kind of allergic reaction to something.
I also thought about the age of the singer, with this one rather older than Schubert was when he wrote the songs. Perhaps like Hamlet, you need to be old enough to understand the role but young enough to be in it. In any event, this singer was able to bring a physical passion - not to mention a very mobile face - to the work which I do not recall seeing before.
And then there was the Bostridge question. Given the reviews of his book about the Winterreise have just been the subject of heavy reviews, with the one in the NYRB by Brendal, did he show up on this occasion? Brendal made the point that he tried to avoid noticing fellow musicians in an audience and was full of admiration that Bostridge could not only do this without messing up his performance, he could also remember where they were sitting. Would Bostridge have put the Germans off their stroke?
On the way home, we came across dispatches 56, 75 and 76 from @goatoftruth, of which the last two are illustrated. Google not very clear on who this person might be, although there are myspace, facebook and twitter accounts with that name. I thought twitter did '#', but maybe the '@' has some other, special significance. In any event amusing to think of someone beavering away his (seems more likely than a her) commute by writing little messages of this sort and then sticking them on the inside walls of railway carriages.
And while there were still no aeroplanes on the way home, at either Vauxhall, Earlsfield or Wimbledon, we did ride in a ten coach train from Vauxhall to Wimbledon and we may well have ridden in one from Wimbledon to Epsom. They do exist.
Reference 1: http://www.pregardien.com/en.
Reference 2: http://www.michaelgees.de/.
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