Bach not Brahms

We were to have opened the Wigmore Year with Mozart and Brahms violin sonatas (K454 and Op.108 respectively) on Monday, but in the event the pianist was ill and we had two of the Bach partitas instead, No.3 then No.2, with a largo from a sonata by way of an encore. Transmitted live by BBC.

Started off cross that we were not getting the advertised programme, but ended very impressed with the partitas, which I do not remember hearing live, both for themselves and for the fact that the violinist - James Ehnes - could play them from memory at short notice - maybe 24 hours or so. Were they were something that he had worked up recently for some other concert or were they just part of his repertoire? Wikipedia very keen on No. 2, describing the closing chaconne as  'not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It's a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect'. As it happens, YouTube offers another version recorded by BBC, this one at St. John's Smith Square and played by Itzhak Perlman, sitting down without music as opposed to standing up without music. My own version, played by Henryk Szeryng on Deutsche Grammophon vinyl, is also available there. One of my three discs - ex Oxfam at Tavistock, ex some serious collector down there - is missing, but, luckily for today, not No. 2.

Ehnes hailed from the middle of Canada, Brandon in Manitoba (illustrated), at minus 19C this morning, so not as bad as it has been in the US. He played on a 1715 Stradivarius, sadly not listed in my pick-me-up by Hill, Hill & Hill (see 6th October last). Pleasantly modest stage manners.

The music, which sometimes sounded as if one had two violinists playing at once rather than one, reminded me of a maestro of the mouth organ whom I once heard in a pub somewhere up north, who could pull off the same trick, seeming to pull two threads of music out of a single threaded instrument.

Lunch, good as ever, at Ponti's in John Princes Street (http://www.pontisitaliankitchen.co.uk/) with my main being a new to me version of lasagne, with a small brick of the lasagne served in a bowl of a savoury red sauce. Also very hot, presumably micro-waved. Desert, also new to me, was an artisanale version of doughnuts, being small lumps of deep fried (pizza) dough rather than the sugared tori one usually gets. Served with ice cream and two spoons, which last was just as well as I could not have managed the entire portion single handed.

PS: I would think that Brandon on the Manitoban prairie traces its name back to Brandon on the East Anglian heath. But so far, I go from Manitoba, to Brandon Hill in St. James' Bay in eastern Canada, to Brandon Hill in St. James' in Montego Bay in western Jamaica where the trail goes cold. But it seems entirely plausible that there was once a planter from Brandon, UK in western Jamaica. And BH alleges that the originator of them all is St. Brendan the Navigator, famous for his circumnavigation of the many islands off Ireland.