Festival of Rattle

Last Friday to a side-show of the Festival of Rattle, that is to say a concert from the Philharmonic Octet of Berlin, an outgrowth of the Berlin Philharmoniker of which Sir Simon Denis Rattle, OM CBE is presently the artistic director and which has just finished a short stint in London.

Got off to a bad start with it being Friday 13th and things were not improved by our pushing through the busy street food market in the rain outside to arrive in the QEH to find the foyer full of noise and bustle as some freebie jazz concert was just winding up. Not a proper way to start a concert at all. And then there was the irritating powerpoint slide projected above the stage in the auditorium itself. All in all, the QEH, basically a fine concert hall, is getting a bit tired. It has been mucked about with too much and it is getting a bit long in the tooth. Programme slightly irritating too, being one of those compendium jobs for the festival as a whole. So a fiver for just a couple of pages on our concert, which you have to poke about to find, and none of those glossy adverts that you usually get in a Wigmore programme.

But we did have very good seats in a full house and, for once, BH was able to see all the performers all the way through. Raking seats good.

The first half was made up of a very short piece and a short piece, both pleasant enough but of which I do not remember a great deal. No prior knowledge.

The second half was the Schubert Octet which worked its old magic, having been disappointed at some of its outings over the last few years (see reference 1). Row G did very well for us, close enough to hear what one wanted to hear but not so close that one heard all the puffing & blowing which comes with it. Close enough to get back the sense of too & fro between the clarinet on the right and the violin on the left, with the double bass & cello jointly acting as a hinge or pivot in the middle. Stage manners of the tall double bass were very good, adding a little something to the performance as a whole. Oddly, for a German outfit, not all in ties. I had thought that Germans were sticklers for such.

The bassoon player rather caught my eye with, for some reason, the thin spout of the bassoon seeming a much odder thing to have in one's mouth than a clarinet or a French horn. And I was close enough to hear some of the distinctive clank of the clarinet's keys - a clank which I remember from my days as a wannabee clarinetist. That is to say, the distinctive transition in the sound you get when a pad clamps down on its appointed hole. Nothing else quite like it.

Audience very enthusiastic, with quite a lot of them standing up to applaud at the end.

Back via Raynes Park where we inspected the library in the waiting room, which we learned from a poster has been going for getting on for 10 years. Fine selection of VHS tapes and of lurid paperbacks. BH picked out Kitty Kelley's biography of Nancy Reagan, who is turning out to be a very strange bird altogether.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/more-travel-variations.html.