Frang & Lifits

To St. Luke's earlier in the week to hear Vilde Frang (violin) and Michail Lifits (piano) do three Mozart violin sonatas: K376, K379 and K481. Ms. Frang very smartly turned out in a dress which perhaps cost her a fair proportion of her fee, her sensitive playing only let down by being sometimes in the shadow of the piano - a complaint I see I made the last time I heard any of these sonatas (see October 2nd 2012 in the other place), with the excuse there being that at the time of writing these sonatas violinists did not have the standing they do now and would not expect to lead. Still not convinced.

I liked them in the order I knew them: that is to say I knew K379 best and liked it the best (the first movement had also served well at FIL's funeral), K376 not at all and liked it the least. But that is only relative; all good stuff.

Having neglected bacon sandwich at the Market Café beforehand, went for a ham roll at the café at the north eastern corner of the A1 and Old Street, and a very good ham roll it was too, very like the ham rolls which were sold from a myriad of sandwich bars at the time I started regular work in the early 1970's, well before pesto was invented.

Thus fortified, headed south to the Museum of London to inspect the recently unearthed eagle, which I, in my innocence, had assumed was the sort of eagle which Romans (and Napoleon) stuck on the end of a pole and the loss of which caused much anguish, to the point of spawning of the stories by Rosemary Sutcliff which I read when small. But it turned out to be a funerary eagle, only very recently unearthed from under what is to be a hotel (with thanks to the Daily Mail web site for the picture). It was, I think the first time that I had visited the museum, which was much busier that I was expecting. Lots of tourists as well as school children, which last I gathered were responsible, via their curating panel, for some of the noisier and more tiresome exhibits. We only took a quick peek at the Roman section where I liked the various models of how London's municipal buildings might have been. I also put my head in the section devoted to London before people, a variant on the theme first seen earlier in the year at Exeter (see 12th March). The bit that sticks in the mind just now is the large graph showing what looked like a very regular temperature cycle over the last half million years, with a period of 100,000 years, all, it seems, mixed up with a succession of ice ages. Presently near the top of a wave - which would suggest that the future is down rather than up. All very confusing. We shall be back to see it all properly.

Wound up with a very decent tea and cake in the spacious ground floor café operated by benugo (see http://www.benugo.com/), an outfit of which I was previously only dimly aware but which I shall now keep an eye out for.

Back home, I pondered about the A1 and found that it appeared to enter London proper by way of Aldersgate, which all seemed very proper. The old trunk roads - say from A1 to A6 inclusive - should all enter London by one of the old city gates. But then it turns out that Aldersgate was not quite a city gate, being some kind of a fort just to the north of the wall proper. And the road for this gate was Watling Street or the A5 rather than the A1. Furthermore, the A1 heads all the way south from Scotland to get muddled up with the source of the M1 some where around Edware, from where it cuts south east to London proper. All in all, rather unsatisfactory. Not very proper at all.