art and music

I went to London today.  Three times in eight days is well above my normal rate of visitation, but my aunt was playing in a concert in St Pancras Church.  I managed to catch the earliest train consistent with getting cheap(er) parking as well as an off-peak return and went first to the National Portrait Gallery, to see their exhibition of photos of Hollywood Stars, Glamour of the Gods.

I like the National Portrait Gallery very much.  Portraiture is a fascinating art (and infinitely preferable to perspex tables with bags of maltesers on them).  I like photography as an end result, while knowing nothing about the process and not being a keen photographer myself.  I can't think when I have ever been to a boring exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.  Today's was not boring, though compared to some it left me a little cold, and I'm not sure why that is.  Maybe because most of the stars were from before my time, so their pictures didn't give me that thrill of nostalgia for the films of my youth.  But I like Van Dyck and Gainsborough without it prompting fond memories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so it can't just be that.  I think it was the glamour that was the problem.  These portraits weren't designed to show the personalities of the stars, or the photographer, so apart from thinking that they were a very good looking bunch of people and that fashions in clothes and makeup had changed a lot since then, you didn't learn anything about them.  Compared to Ida Kar or Hoppe it was all rather superficial.  According to the gallery's publicity blurb it has been a massively successful exhibition, and they were urging people to pre-book tickets, so maybe it was just me.  Though it wasn't especially crowded when I was there.

The concert was of three pieces by British composers born at the turn of the twentieth century.  I'd gone with a certain amount of trepidation, as I struggle with some twentieth century music.  If Martin Simpson sometimes sounds as though he has started playing, and then it turns out he is still tuning up, there are some twentieth century composers that have the opposite effect on me.  I put the radio on, and think the orchestra is still tuning, and then realise that this is it.  Today we got Eric Fogg, who would have been a great composer according to my aunt if he hadn't died when he was only 36, Humphrey Procter-Gregg and Thomas B. Pitfield.  I never heard of any of them, but happily for me they turned out to compose in the English tradition (comparisons with Delius featured in my uncle's programme notes) and were not too discordant and jangly for conservative escaped folk enthusiasts like me.  Humphrey Procter-Gregg only had time to really get stuck into composition in retirement, and he wrote his first cello sonata at the age of 82, three years before he died.  My aunt thought that today's performance was the world premiere.  I hope that he persuaded somebody to play it for him so that he could hear how it sounded in the flesh as well as in his mind's ear, but maybe it had never previously been played in concert, to a bona fide audience drawn from the public as well as family members.  It isn't every day I get to go to a world premiere.  The pianist was a distant relative, my father's cousin's son, which seems to make him my second cousin according to a chart on Wikepedia.  We are of the same generation, and have a great-grandparent in common.  He is a professional musician and can play the piano properly.  Shame that musical gene didn't come down my branch of the family.