Tuition

In my last post I had a bit of a pop at reading around things, rather than just doing whatever the thing was. Reading the book - or listening to the piece of music.

As it happens, earlier this week I went to the Wigmore Hall to hear the Takács String Quartet do Beethoven's Op.59 No.1, known as Razumovsky. The doing took the form of a lecture about the quartet by the first violin, with musical examples, in the first half, followed by a performance of the quartet in the second half. Not the sort of thing that I usually go to, but it turned out to be a successful evening.

Started off not so well with the guard on the train getting himself tied up in knots as he explained at every stop how the occupants of carriage 7 were to get around the fact that none of the doors of that carriage were working, apart, that is, from the connecting doors to the 2 adjacent carriages. But I got through to Green Park and headed north to find that the jolly bit of public art in Berkeley Square has gone missing (see reference 2) and that there were engineering works on the escalators at Debenhams. Engineering works are not, it seems, the monopoly of Network Rail. Happily, all was well at the Cock & Lion - where I learned that there was a lot of football news that day, with a lot of the footballers mentioned, presumably UK premier league players all, having what looked like North African or Muslim names.

The first violinist turned out to be much better at giving talks than I expected. Nicely pitched, at least as far as I was concerned, with hardly any serious music speak, rather a series of biographical anecdotes loosely keyed to the four movements of the quartet, with the examples serving to whet one's appetite for more.

Beethoven made his money we were told, at one point, by playing in improvisation on the piano competitions. The crowd loved this, but took a while to get the hang of what they saw as his improvisations in the matter of string quartets.

I was rather struck by the Russian Ambassador at Vienna, Razumovsky, being a good enough violin player to be able to participate in a performance of the quartet bearing his name. I remember the head of the Government Statistical Service at the time I joined it, a person of vaguely equivalent rank, being a noted piano player. I wonder how many permanent secretaries can claim so to be these days - with our late Prime Minister being better known for his forays with his Fender.

I was reminded what a complex thing this quartet was. with plenty going on for those with an interest in delving into the musical detail. Down to musical jokes, with our being told Beethoven that deliberately included, in one place in particular, such a welter of notes that players have ever since wondered whether he had made some mistakes. It also struck me, not for the first time, that works which we now regard as monuments of western civilisation, standing apart in their hall of fame, were once just one part of a lively cultural milieu. A high hill perhaps, but not the only hill. One hill among others, unlike the odd hill in Burma called Mount Popa (gmaps 20.923663, 95.236849), which we happen to have heard about recently and which does just stand, all by itself, in the central plain,

A good appetiser, which closed with the first violinist wondering how pleased Beethoven would be to know that what he knew as revolutionary, that is to say this quartet, was now used as a crowd pleaser to give a bit of substance & bottom to an otherwise more avant-garde programme.

Excellent performance followed, even if I connected more or less nothing with the talk that had preceded it. But the accoustics of the Wigmore were spot on from seat I6 and one got a fine sense of the instruments managing to have both their own voice and to be part of the team. Maybe football is sometimes like that. And close enough to feel the distinctive resonance of the so carefully shaped wooden boxes.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/takacs-quartet.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/razumovsky.html. Oddly, another Razumovsky occasion, But irritatingly, we have seen other public art by the same artist somewhere else, but I cannot for the moment think where.