On the way out, we check the nest of spiders which BH had disturbed that morning, a ball of newly hatched spiders, yellow and brown with bodies about a millimetre across, attached to the underside of a large leaf. Disturbed, the ball had partly broken up, with small spiders running and swinging about all over the place. But half a day later the ball had been reconstituted and the runners & swingers were either lost or re-incorporated into the ball.
On entry to the hall, we find three rows of seats arranged in the ticket area for people queuing up for returns. Never seen so many before.
On to the level 4 lounge to catch a few aeroplanes, making a couple of easy twos and, once again, just missing the odd three. Since then, we have found out that one of our postmen back in Epsom plays a different aeroplane game, possibly living rather nearer the flight path then we do. He shuts his eyes as the planes pass over and tries to guess the model from the noise made. He tells us that size is not everything; it does not follow at all that because an aeroplane is big that it makes a big noise.
Auditorium very full again, with us slightly further back at GG rather than DD: too far back I think, I should have coughed up for front stalls. A rather festive atmosphere with more ladies dressed up and at least one person near us who had been to the previous three concerts. Also a rather noisy audience, not in the sense of telephones, although at least two did go off, more in the sense of rustling and coughing, of which there seemed to be a great deal in the pauses between movements. Not to mention someone rustling a particularly irritating bit of plastic somewhere behind me. I hope that someone sitting nearer gave the culprit some stiff looks. Also noisy in that they couldn't wait to clap at the end, they couldn't leave a decent interval, not even time for the sounds of the piano to die away. On the other hand, there were five people in the Royal Box rather than two and, unlike on the last occasion, they stayed all the way through.
There was a sense that the hall has worn very well in its sixty or so years, much better than the Queen Elizabeth Hall, very much due for its refurbishment this autumn.
The first piece, D.845, seemed very new to me, rather cerebral for Schubert. Good, but something which I felt would probably improve with hearing. From which I associate to the Visser words in chapter 1 (page 10 in my copy) of her book about visiting a church about having an experience for the first time, a having which can never be repeated. This is true for me for music with more immediate emotional impact, say the Dvořák piano quintet. The impact wears off with successive hearings, although one can recapture something of the first experience by putting it away for a time, to come back to it refreshed. Not so true with other kinds of music, say some of the Beethoven piano sonatas, which can take me several hearings to get to grips with.
The second piece, D.960, perhaps in between. There is immediate impact but it also grows on one. Nevertheless, attention drifted at times, at one time to what appeared to be the slight throbbing of the twelve rightmost pipes of the organ. I thought a trick of the light in the moving air above the audience sat at the back of the stage rather than induced by my interval whisky. I also admired the arrangement of pipes as a whole, including what I assume are the fakes, the short fat box pipes middle front. All very satisfying from a visual point of view; quite right not to have drawn the shutters. The illustration, provided by the South Bank Centre, gives some idea, despite the lighting being all wrong.
For some reason, I also had a strong sense of transience in the D.960. That the music was rushing past me, never to be caught again. This despite the slow bits and the gaps.
Admired the full moon on the way home, pondering the while about the report from Jean-Luc Margot of UCLA that all that stuff about people being affected by full moons was, so as to say, moonshine. It seems that the absence of a lunar influence on human affairs has been demonstrated in all kinds of areas; childbirth, hospital admissions, car accidents and so on. But a report at odds with stories we have heard about the effects of the full moon of the inhabitants of mental hospitals, stories which we can no longer verify as we have abolished mental hospitals. Not to mention all those dogs baying at the full moon. Maybe I will find the time to read the full paper, for once not lurking behind a paywall. See for yourself by putting 'Jean-Luc Margot ucla lunar' to google.
Then yesterday evening, I thought to have another go at D.845 (from a CD recorded by William Kempff), which I had trouble recognising as the same piece at all. Which all goes to show both how much the experience is affected by the context and how feeble my musical memory is. Must try harder.
PS: oddly, I can find just one mention of D.960 in the two blogs, despite its familiarity. Probably down to not always putting in the numbers of things that we hear. Or perhaps down to blog search not being very forgiving about how exactly you enter the number in the search term. See reference 2.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/part-1-of-2.html.
Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/schubertiade.html.
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