Pied Piper

To the Wigmore Monday lunchtime to hear Marc-André Hamelin (formerly of Montreal) do the four D935 impromtus from Schubert followed by a batch of Chopin flavoured studies from one Leopold Godowsky, whom Wikipedia informs me was a famous pianist from Lithuania who settled in the US in the 1880s. Hamelin, in seems, not heard by us since around May 2009 (see http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=hamelin).

We started off the proceedings with wine & coffee in the bar at the Langham Hotel, the first time we have ever been inside the place. Plenty of pleasant flunkies and a quiet, high ceilinged bar with what looked like a good range of spirits. Refreshments, excluding spirits as it was a touch early, at about twice what we might otherwise paid at All Bar One, seemed good value.

Impromptus as good as ever while the studies while impressive, were what I called show-off music, mostly concerned to show-case the talent of the performer. Particularly impressive in that most of them were played with the left hand alone, thus demonstrating the gross enlargement of the left hand part of the brain of the better pianists. Proceedings only slightly disturbed by a middle aged male fidgeter to my immediate right, one phone going off (quietly) at the back of the hall somewhere and some odd high pitched feedback from either the microphones (this being a BBC live job) or someone's hearing aid.

Lunch at the Benugo's in the sky at Brown Hart Gardens, where we were amused by two very flashily dressed young men with trailers, that is to say small suitcases with two wheels and a long handle, the sort of thing just about allowed as carry-on on an aeroplane. We thought they might have escaped from London Fashion Week.

Back through Berkeley Square to be further amused by the erection of large tents there to house some antique fair. Why are we so keen on tents when I would have thought London had plenty of permanent venues capable of housing such an event? Why make such a mess of the square? Do tents offer a large, clean space not actually to be found in many central London hotels?

Closed the outing with the fortuitously appropriate purchase of a set of caprices by Paganini from the Tadworth Children's Home charity shop in Epsom. A chap of whom I had previously only heard of, but whom I now know to be to the violin what Godowsky is to the piano. Performed by another violinist-composer, this one of whom I had not previously heard of at all, one Desmond Bradley, from the Antipodes. The programme notes to the caprices explained that most of the power of the music resided in the tension between the music and the constraints of the instrument, something I commented on, albeit in the context of a different medium, at http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/the-bridge-of-san-luis-rey.html. So far, provided I do not attempt to do anything else at the same time, the caprices are good. But in the case of the piano studies performed at this concert, I think I was too little aware of the difficulty of what was being done for them to work, so for my money they would be better appreciated by someone who played the piano well enough to know.