I had originally been attracted to the concert by the inclusion of the Dvořák piano quintet in the programme. However, as it turned out, most of the players got themselves lost since the advertising programme was printed and we were offered a selection of works for piano and cello instead. I persisted, thinking that it would be good for us to stray a little outside of our comfort zone for once. And anyway, despite the poverty of works for piano and cello in the repertoire, maybe the combination would work. Maybe the cello with its stronger sound would be a better match for the piano than the violin - and there are plenty of works for piano and violin in the repertoire.
So we had a Debussy sonata, a Prokofiev sonata (Op. 119), Bach Sonata No. 1 (with mention of gamba) and a Rachmaninov sonata (Op. 10). Leaving the Bach aside, the works included strong passages but failed to cohere as a whole and I was not that keen on the Debussy. Bach was much better - at least for me - and would have been even better had the pianist played a little quieter. Now, despite the lengthy & informative article about the viol (aka viola de gamba) in Wikipedia, I remain a touch confused by the gamba bit: we had what looked to me like a perfectly ordinary, if rather old, cello. Perhaps the piece would originally have been played with harpsicord and viol, rather than piano(forte) and cello, this perhaps accounting for the seeming loudness of the piano.
The pianist and cellist are brothers from what Google describes as the Boyd painting dynasty of Australia, with the cellist doubling as a painter when not celling and the illustration of one of his paintings is pinched from http://www.artchat.com.au. Very young audience for a classical concert, perhaps reflecting the fact that the pianist teaches at the Guildhall School of Music and had brought lots of his students with him.
Then yesterday to the Epsom Odeon for a performance of 'Lincoln' which turned out to be a long, gripping and stirring film: Spielberg certainly knows his business. But as the review in the TLS pointed out (January 25th) the film is not much about slaves, is not much about the civil war and is not even very much about Lincoln. It is more about the rather dirty game of politics, as played in the US. Indeed, I wonder whether Spielberg did not intend the film more as a commentary on the present impasse between the President and Congress than anything else.
Home to find, after some searching, that the memory for once had served and that I had not ditched our charity shop biography of Lincoln, unread, in one of our recent culls, a biography by Ronald C. White JR (see http://ronaldcwhitejr.com/) presented by Random House in one of those slightly arty productions common in the US. Half tone illustrations, cutting of the book done so as to make the pages look hand cut and so on. So far I have found that the 2.5 hours film occupies maybe 2.5 pages in this 790 page book and that the book hardly mentions the linkage between peace and constitutional amendment made so much of in the film.
One thought from the film concerns the security of telegraphic communications. It seems that Lincoln, as the first modern commander in chief, was in the habit of sending operational orders by telegraph. But how did one secure such communications? How did one stop eavesdropping, interference or spoofing?
And I close with one factlet from the book. It seems that in the pioneering days of Lincoln's youth one of the most important - and most expensive - homestead items was the long handled axe, the sort of axe we called a felling axe in the Boy Scouts, a name entirely fitting for a pioneer in the virgin forests of Indiana. Pioneers often just bought the axe head, preferring to make their own haft. With the head being the point of interest: it seems that the head was made of both iron and steel, with the steel part being renewed from time to time. I suppose the body & bulk of the axe head was made of cheap iron with the cheeks and edge faced with expensive steel.
PS: home also to Christen the largest of the new saucepans (see January 31st) with a rendering of our famous pork soup.
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