I went this morning to the last of my Roman River Festival concerts, a solo recital by a young violinist in the church of St Mary the Virgin in Little Bentley. The artist was Savitri Grier, who has just graduated with first class honours from Oxford and is now studying at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Little Bentley is only ten minutes up the road, and this sounded like a chance to hear a pretty good young musician, and see inside a local church I'd never visited.
The church is delightful. I arrived in ample time to bag a seat and a parking space, not wanting to end up sitting behind a pillar or having to squeeze the car into an impossibly tight gap or in the muddiest corner of the car park (there was no car park, just a field that you accessed by turning around in somebody's front drive. Goodness knows how they manage for weddings or funerals. I have thought this about quite a few rural churches).
St Mary the Virgin is Grade I listed and is medieval with tudor additions, built out of a glorious muddle of bricks and pudding stone with a nice little flint tower. Some of the bricks were those very narrow ones that look as if they're old, and sure enough the listing particulars include Roman bricks. The chancel ceiling is a nineteenth century barrel vault painted a glorious teal blue with coloured beams, and if you look hard at the hammer beams in the nave you can see the rough lines of robes and limbs, making me think it must have had angels until the puritans got at it. The glass is Victorian but extremely pretty. There are some touching memorials, and this morning somebody had made a real effort with the flowers. Altogether it has the air of a church which is loved, and I gather that it is normally open in daylight hours, so I needn't have waited for a concert to visit. Though in truth it hadn't occurred to me to go until I read in the Roman River brochure that Little Bentley had a 'beautiful, simple medieval church'.
The violinist was good too. The Bach partita was more my sort of thing than the Ysaye, but that could be a question of what I'm used to. I think Ysaye could grow on me if I gave him a chance, though that's not to say I'll be rushing out to get a recording. Being musically ignorant, anybody who has progressed as far through their musical career as Savitri Grier is going to sound OK to me, and if she goes on to become famous then in five or ten years' time I'll be able to preen myself and remember that I heard her in a little parish church in north Essex when she was just starting out. Which is fun. I got a buzz when Kate Rusby played the Royal Festival Hall, knowing that I'd seen her in the upstairs room of a pub in Manningtree.
It should not make any difference what musicians look like, and I know that some orchestras have experimented with blind auditions where candidates play behind screens and can't be judged on their gender (or race, or whose pupil they are). In practice, however, looks matter a lot. Even though, as long as you have got the right blend of technical mastery of the instrument and musical grasp of the material, it shouldn't matter if you look like Moomintroll and Tweedle Dee, research has found subjects who listen to a recording and are shown a photograph of the players rate the musical performance more highly when the picture is of nice looking, smartly dressed people than when it's a bunch of shabby scruffs. I have seen this in action at the local level, when actual decisions about who to book are being taken.
Savitri Grier need have no worries on that score. She has the calm, secret smile I last saw on the faces of the buddha statues in a Royal Academy exhibition, and a profile and hands straight out of a Mughal painting. It will be interesting over the next few years to see how she gets on.
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