a musical discovery

There was more live entertainment this afternoon, but in a different genre, since it was the second concert of the music society's new season.  Indeed, it was the highlight of the entire season, if you go by the fame and prestige of the performers, since we had the Henschel Quartet, who get regular air time on Radio 3 and are properly famous, as string quartets go, which is to say that the majority of people have probably never heard of them, but the rather small subset of the entire population who are at all likely to buy tickets for a recital by a string quartet probably have.

It was a really good concert, and all credit to the local architectural practice who sponsored it.  I am absolutely delighted to be able to listen to live, world class chamber music half an hour's drive up the road, instead of having to schlep up to London for the Barbican or the Wigmore Hall, and looking at the average age and infirmity of the audience I'm pretty sure that quite a few of them simply wouldn't.  For them it is Suffolk or nothing.

The Henschel started with Beethoven, then slipped in something by Erwin Schulhoff before the tea break, and finished with Dvorak.  I'd never heard of Schulhoff, which doesn't say much since I haven't heard of all sorts of people, but nor had anybody I spoke to afterwards, apart from the chap who wrote the programme notes.  That's the way you conventionally structure a concert, start with something in a familiar idiom to get the audience in the mood, then do the unknown or difficult piece they wouldn't come to hear if that was all there was, revive them with an interval, and round off with the big reward at the end.  You can't programme the tricky piece last, or half of them will sneak off before the end on the pretext that they can't leave the dog at home by himself for any longer, or they are worried about the car icing up, or they have to relieve the baby sitter.

However, while Schulhoff was strange, he was also wonderful.  Some of the noises the Henschel made, blended with influences from Czech folk music, were straight out of the radiophonic workshop, but in a good way.  Poor Schulhoff, he did not survive the war, dying in a concentration camp in 1942.  We heard his first string quartet, and I haven't looked him up yet to see whether he even managed to write another, but I do know that never before have I seen an audience queueing to buy the CD of a completely unfamiliar piece of twentieth century chamber music with the enthusiasm they showed this afternoon.  I think the Henschel must have sold out.  The newly converted Schulhoff fans were so keen, I have just had an email from the friend I went with saying that she'd ordered a copy on the internet.

The Beethoven and Dvorak were very nice too, and so was the reception hosted by the chairman afterwards to say thank you to the sponsor.  But the highlight was the discovery of a (to most of us) completely new and marvellous talent.