Strictly 1

Some members of the household have been known to watch the dancing program of this name. FIL, having disapproved of such things for most of his life, in his old age went so far as to maintain a spreadsheet about it all on a piece of cardboard recycled from a breakfast cereal packet. (Despite his and our efforts, he never got the hang of the electrical version of spreadsheets).

So we thought, for a change, we would go to a competition at the Wigmore Hall. As it turned out we could only manage the more or less sold out final, here reported.

The day started with an illustration of the difficulties of being decent. A large young blind lady was waiting at a crossing at the Upper High Street end of Epsom. A small old lady stopped her car short of the crossing and waited for the first lady to cross. First lady did not know that she could cross. People behind the second lady start honking. Second lady gets out of her car to help, forstalled by yours truly who gets first lady across the crossing. People behind stop honking and sit with their right feet posed over their accelerators, waiting for the off.

Then there were the travellers who have arrived on Epsom's Fair Green, a bit of green space which used to be used for fairs, the most recent of which, perhaps twenty years ago, resulted in a lot of unpleasant rubbish being left behind. The travellers are said to hail from Cornwall, have come here for a funeral and are accompanied by sundry horses (various sizes and shapes), dogs and chickens. No ducks, goats or sheep as far as I can tell. There is talk that some of the nearer licensed premises will have developed mysterious problems with their electricity supplies in time for the funeral. There is also much talk about the whole business, both viva voce and in the media, on our behalf. A wheeze to encourage respectable pedestrians on that part of West Hill to talk to each other.

Eventually emerged at Oxford Circus, rather crowded at 1730, and worked our way through to Cavendish Square to inspect an impressive courtesy car provided for his patients by one of the dentists in the vicinity.

And so to the competition, where we could buy a programme for £4 and the words for £2 and where we made the mistake of thinking that the former included the latter and ended up buying both. The young lady sitting in front of us, from London's fourth singing school (see reference 1), explained that all the contestants had to submit their programmes three months in advance so I was wrong to be impressed by the Wigmore's printing arrangements. Not like those at the Treasury at the time of the Budget at all - in this last case the print copy only being finalised the day before with a couple of thousand smart fat booklets being needed by 1500 on the day.

The competition was run on very sober lines. There were five pairs (voice and piano) in the finals and each had a half hour slot. Three slots in the first half, two in the second, with a supper interval (!) following. The judges judged during the interval and the idea was that we returned at 2200 to hear the results. Which in our case would have been about six hours after we started out, and a lot more hours than that since we got up in the morning. No judges on the stage waving numbered cards or sounding important, or anything like that at all. Each pair simply came on and did their stuff, and very good they were too. With a plus for us being the singing a lot of stuff which we would have been unlikely to have heard otherwise - Schumann, Wolf, Mahler and Poulenc to name but a few.

We did not stay for the session at 2200 but we very chuffed to be told by Cortana (see reference 3) before we got home that the judges went for the same line up as we had: Siljanov/Cholhonelidze first, Hasselhorn/Rohling second. As it happened, the winner was last up and the runner-up first up. I presume that batting order was decided by lot, as I imagine there is lots of stuff there out there on the internet and elsewhere about the merits of the various positions on the card and on how best to play the position that you have got.

We also wondered about whether any jiggling of the programmes went on to reduce duplication. The aforementioned young lady seemed to think not.

As a special bonus we got Mahler's song of Antony of Padua's sermon to the cod fish. We were very taken and I have now had Amazon deliver the whole wonder horn of it, with piano as originally scored, rather than the more usual orchestra. That is to say 'Des Knaben Wunderhorn' with Thomas Hampson & Geoffrey Parsons. Antony of Padua being a special favourite of ours as we have a twelve inch coloured statue of him, in plaster, reaching us from a small church in Belgium as a result of some first world war activity by some relative. He is also the patron saint of lost property. See reference 2.

PS: today's viva voce concerned the considerable mess made by the horses trying to make a living out of the small amount of rather short grass available to them. Was it a disgrace or a valuable introduction to the facts of equine life for the children of Epsom? I was reminded of the tendency of more respectable horse owners in the depths of the Surrey commuter belt to run their daughters' horses in fields which are far too small, and which end up a muddy mess, at least around the edges.

Reference 1; http://www.trinitylaban.ac.uk/. Several of the singers had brought their claques from their schools. Not to mention their note taking supervisors.

Reference 2: https://www.stanthony.org/st-anthony-of-padua/.

Reference 3: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-10/getstarted-what-is-cortana. Available on better telephones.