first concert of the season

It was another very beautiful day, and it seemed rather a waste to have to go indoors at half past two to start scrubbing my finger nails prior to setting out for the first music society concert of the season.  I consoled myself with the thought that I wanted to go to the concert anyway, and I was only really going half an hour earlier than I would have otherwise, now that I'm helping with teas.

It didn't take four people three quarters of an hour to set out the cups and three plates of biscuits, but never mind.  The hot water urn has to be switched on about that long before the concert starts, so that it has time to come to the boil before the music starts, and is turned down to tickover for the first half.  The tea making brigade all bagged aisle seats, so that we could leg it to the kitchen while the applause was still sounding and before the musicians had left the stage.  Even so, the rest of the audience caught us up and we had a queue a minute or two before we had any tea ready.  We'd poured milk into most of the cups before starting, and got into quite a reasonable rhythmn pouring tea for four people who hadn't worked together before.  The bad news was that we had to wash up and dry the cups before the second half started.  I have never dried so many saucers in a quarter of an hour in my life.

The string quartet, who were the original reason for going in the first place, were very good.  They are called the Piatti Quartet, and are young and upwardly mobile, the recipients of various awards and winners of competitions.  They will be playing the Wigmore Hall for the second time next April.  In the first half they played Mozart's quartet in C major and Bartok's quartet number 3, and after the tea we got Smetana's quartet number 1.  I really, really liked the Smetana.  That was the piece that would inspire me to go and get the CD.  I struggle with Bartok.  My hunch is that quite a lot of the audience secretly struggle with Bartok, but don't like to admit it.  I am hopelessly middlebrow and any attempt to pretend otherwise would be futile, and I find Bartok tough going.  But I really liked the Smetana.

Then there was the AGM, which was all over inside twenty minutes, and my fellow new committee member and I were voted on with the rest of the committee en bloc and unopposed.  Phew.  Then there was cheese and wine in the back of the church, watched over very strictly by the verger, to make sure that everybody used a plate as requested.  After last year's AGM it took him an hour and a half to scrape the scraps of brie out of the carpet.

The next concert will be Chaconne Brass, playing 'a varied programme ranging from Handel to contemporary and jazz'.  It's in St Mary's Church in East Bergholt on Sunday 20 November at 4pm, for anyone whose interested.