A spot of life enhancement

To make a change, we were attracted by the life enhancement & angelic beauty offered on the left, not having been put off by the rather ugly logo about noise on the right, a logo which is presently rather freely scattered about south bank timetables.

In the event I liked the violin concerto, although the violin part of the second half was a touch fancy to my mind. But I was struck, the violinist wearing a striking off the shoulder red dress, by how much stick violinists must give their right arm and shoulder. They are presumably prey to all kinds of unpleasant occupational hazards and the careful ones presumably spend much quality time with their personal physiotherapist.

The symphony, rather different, was a kind of musical bath in which one lay back and luxuriated in the wonderful music that Mahler can draw out of an orchestra, including in this last notable contributions from both harp and triangle. But, in the main, oddly inconsequential; wonderful music which was not going anywhere, at least not anywhere with me. But while I am not sure what angels might be expected to sound like - other than having choir boys rather than sopranos in mind - the hymn was indeed rather wonderful.

The programme for the event, a rather glossy affair at £3.50 and did for all the Philharmonia concerts for this season. Which was all very economical, but meant that the page allocated to this particular event did not have room for the text of the hymn, which I had to pull down from Wikipedia after the event. Slightly perturbed to find that it was taken from a rather cod but rather popular collection of folk songs published in the early nineteenth century and called 'Des Knaben Wunderhorn'. The song was called 'Das himmlische Leben' and was seemingly a child's view of a heaven involving things like St. Luke leading the ox away from the manger to provide meat for the heavenly feast. The programme does tell us that Mahler left instructions on the score that the song was to be done without parody, but I am left with the feeling that he is having a bit of sport at his customers' expense and I am not sure that I approve. He should show those who make his living more respect.

Perhaps he anticipates Prokofiev's nonsense Latin for his Teutonic Knights at Lake Peipus, which I now learn are actually jumbled up phrases from the Psalms, possibly a pop at his contemporary Stravinsky rather than the audience. For myself, while the words are not very important to me, I would nevertheless prefer them to be sober and respectful, like the poetry which I understand to provide the words for Schubert's songs.

But I carp. The hall was fairly full with maybe two and a half thousand people there in all, so quite an occasion. We got our money's worth.

PS: one further carp. The couple in front of us did not seem very comfortable. The gent. in front of BH fiddled with his ears with, and bit the nails of, his left hand through most of the performance. While his lady, in front of me, lurched from a near vertical position to leaning well over to the left, and then, after a pause of a few minutes, back again, also through most of the performance.