Yesterday back to the Festival Hall for a pop concert, that is to say Yundi (doesn't seem to use two names like most of us, like Morse, but probably for different reasons. See http://www.yundimusic.com/) playing the piano. On the way, journey entertainment in the form of a young lady telling her telephone about her tangled love life. We started to think that she was just talking to her telephone, that there was no-one at the other end, but at Raynes Park she drew breath for a few tens of seconds to let her interlocutor get a few locutions in.
Yundi is clearly a well known and popular person among the Chinese community, with maybe half the nearly full Festival Hall being mainly young and mainly female Chinese, some of them quite dressed up for the occasion. Popular programme of Chopin's two Opus 9 Nocturnes, followed by Beethoven's Appassionata, Pathétique and Moonlight sonatas. With an encore of something modern and French sounding. All sounded very well, his playing having a new to me flavour and/or touch, for some reason associating to plangent. Checking the trusty OED which accords the word a mere two column inches, I read a meaning two 'loud sounding, striking the ear powerfully; applied sometimes to a metallic; sometimes to a loud, thrilling or plaintive sound'. So, for once, the association was pretty much spot on. Except perhaps plaintive is not quite right; the quiet bits didn't really plain.
Much louder hum of chatter while we waited than was usual, which was OK, but the audience was not terribly well behaved otherwise with a lot of camera clicking, some of the cameras being very large and some of the clicking persisting into the performance. Clapping after the first movements of two of the sonatas, which Yundi tried to suppress by moving rather more quickly than I like between movements. Why on earth don't they just say, along with the turn off your telephone announcements: see 8th February for a similar complaint at the Wigmore Hall.
Prize for the best dressed lady went to a young lady, blonde and probably foreign but not Chinese at all, sitting just in front of me. Professional standard, flashy white coat, flashy white woolly dress underneath with natty lacy things sticking out from the short arms of the dress, over the forearms of the young lady. As it happens, one of the offending camera clickers, but there were so many others doing it that a poke in the back seemed a bit OTT.
Nipped out after the encore to be almost run down by a wave of young Chinese girls rushing down the stairs to get into line for an autograph.
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