I went to London today, feeling slightly grudging as I set off, because the weather was so beautiful and I could happily have spent the day in the garden. However, I had booked myself a ticket for a lunchtime concert at LSO St Lukes, knowing that I'd like it when I got there, and that having already committed to buying a ticket would be a spur to going, if it should turn out to be a nice day. There is a single-minded obsessional streak that runs in my family, and while it would be very easy to turn into a muttering hermit who never bothered to change out of their gardening clothes, it would not necessarily be a good idea.
The recital was by the Doric Quartet, a youngish lot much garlanded with praise and competition prizes, who were playing a fragmentary trio by Schubert and his final string quartet, as part of LSO St Luke's Schubert season. I rather wish LSO would spread these things out a bit, since I would happily go to every one of their Schubert concerts, but it is feast or famine, Schubert every Thursday for four weeks on the trot, and then no more for a year or more. I can't go to London every Thursday for a month.
It was a lovely concert. Although busy, it was not a sell-out, and as I begin to get the measure of LSO St Luke's lunchtime concerts I'm fairly sure that you would normally be OK getting a ticket on the door, unless the artist were very famous. Last week they had Nicola Benedetti, and there already didn't seem to be any tickets for that available on the website when I booked in mid January, but she appeared at last year's Last Night of the Proms, and has that been-on-TV must-see quality. The final movement of the last quartet was oddly familiar, more so than the rest of it, and I still haven't worked out why. Does it get played as an isolated fragment on the radio, without the preceding movements, or does it sound a bit like something else? Or is it simply catchy in a way that fools me into thinking I've heard it before?
After the music I went to look at some pictures, and walked down to the National Portrait Gallery, to see Bailey's Stardust (and sorry, normally I would put links in for you, but I have just spent a very long time rebooting my laptop after making sure I'd saved something I absolutely couldn't afford to lose, and it's too late, and I'm too tired). I found it interesting enough, but oddly unmoving, and was surprised, given that David Bailey sounded an entertaining geezer when I heard him interviewed on the radio. I was not utterly surprised, though, given that I recalled I'd read an unfavourable review by an art critic I normally listen to. I have just checked, and it was Jonathan Jones in the Guardian.
I generally enjoy photographic exhibitions. I have not bothered to learn anything about cameras, exposure times, printing techniques, or anything else about the complex nuts and bolts of how professional photographers do it. I can grasp composition, how the subject is fitted into the picture space, which bits are cropped off, and how it is lit, because those are universal factors of representational images, whether they are done with the latest digital camera or paint and brush. I can tell how an image makes me feel. And quite a few of David Bailey's pictures made me feel...not very much. And I don't know why. It could partly be his choice of subjects. A lot of them seemed to be extrovert alpha males looking thoroughly pleased with themselves, which palls after the first few dozen. Quite a few were famous, but there seemed relatively few of my own cultural heroes among them. If he'd photographed The Jam instead of The Beatles, and Tilda Swinton instead of Beyonce, maybe I'd have been more engaged. There was a fashion designer whose reported opinions of women sound foully misogynistic, and another guilty of a public anti-Semitic rant.
There were some I liked. I loved the image of John Piper standing leaning against a tree in the snow, every branch topped in white, so that the angular undersides of the twigs stood out like a Mondrian. The two contrasting portraits of Marianne Faithfull were touching, and I liked the 1960s images of still-derelict buildings in the East End. But overall I barely connected, whereas the Man Ray exhibition the gallery mounted last spring was absolutely gripping. I shall re-read Jonathan Jones' review when I've finished this, to see if he can tell me why I was not more moved.
Nowadays I feel I must get maximum value from the train fare, so I walked back via Somerset House and looked at their little temporary exhibition of Romantic German and British landscape drawings, which were interesting, but in a bloodless way. My flagging energies only picked up when I got to a late, highly abstract Turner (who by 1841 was extraordinarily modern), and I went and looked at the Fauvists instead to wake myself up. I was very happy to see that Braque's white ship at Antwerp is still on display. I know that one day I'll call by, and it will have gone. Then I spent a long time sitting looking at Gaugin's Nevermore, a painting I must have first seen about forty years ago. I do like permanent collections, and being able to concentrate on one or two things, instead of that feeling that you will never pass this way again, and must seize the opportunity and get your money's worth looking at absolutely everything there is in the gallery.
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