Last stand at the wiggers

On Thursday to our last concert at Wigmore Hall for this year, with the main course being, slightly appropriately, Schubert's publisher's Schwanengesang. D957. It was paired with Beethoven's 'An die ferne Gelliebte', Op.98, to start with. John Mark Ainsley tenor and Malcolm Martineau piano.

I had not heard the Beethoven before so I took a peek on YouTube and downloaded the words. I don't know whether that helped, but it went down very well. A lighter, more controlled thing before the chiaroscuro of Schubert which followed. And the Schwanengesang was superb, helped along by being sat just right, about nine rows back at 'I'. Further helped along by the stage presence & manners of the two performers which nicely, for me, evoked the sense of something intimate and drawing-room.

Two part page turning, in that for the first half, that is to say the Beethoven and half the Schubert, the piano music was in loose sheets, so the page was turned, as it were, by moving the sheet on the top of the pile on the right to the top of the pile on the left. A proceeding which means that there is more page turning and so more eye movement, but, on the other hand, one can always be playing in the middle, with the brain being able to keep an eye on what is to come. In the second half we were back with conventional page turning and I associate this morning to the contraptions noticed at reference 1, which I believe work in terms of page turning - while they could, it now occurs to me, simply scroll down a continuous score, with the bit being played being always more or less in the middle. I wonder if any of the contraptions now available - and google suggests there are plenty - would do this. A further twiddle might be that modern software could take over the page turning and not need human intervention at all. A catch might be that you cannot use the same source for both computer and printed image, which might amount to a blocking expense.

We had 'Taubenpost' as the encore, the last song that Schubert wrote and most definitely not part of the Schwanengesang canon, despite what others might think, or at least this was what Ainsley took the trouble to explain to us. Very good it was too, although I had no idea at the time that its title meant pigeon post. Indeed, although I had a general idea what the rest of the evening's songs were about, not knowing the words in any detail did not seem to matter on this occasion. But listening to a version of 'Taubenpost' on YouTube by one Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau this morning, it does seem to matter. Having the words added quite a lot (with thanks to reference 2). Extraordinary that Schubert could pump out something of this quality and with this hauntingly light tone (an odd phrase, but the best I can do), in extremis.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/things-swedish.html.

Reference 2: http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=14766.