The music society has had its last regular concert of the season with a nine piece European ensemble of strings and a trumpeter. They are part of a larger orchestra, on an English mini-tour, and kicked off with a Baroque first half, culminating in an oh-goodness-this piece of Bach, before veering off into the second half into Mozart, Borodin and Holst. It wouldn't have occurred to me to put that programme together, but what do I know? The Borodin and Holst were both know-them-when-you-hear-them radio staples, and the whole was performed with gusto. There was even an encore, a smoochy tango-esque number by a composer whose name I didn't catch, and still didn't recognise when a friend told me she thought it sounded like.
We were back to a four o'clock kick-off. I like that as a start time, now I'm not working on Sunday afternoons. It leaves room to sort oneself out and get to the concert at a leisurely pace after lunch, and there's still time afterwards to fit something in before supper. I stopped off for a cup of tea with a friend who lives in the village. We have been experimenting with three o'clock starts, but they have drawn complaints from regular concert goers whose Sunday lunches are more elaborate and sociable than the Systems Administrator's and my normal frugal and solitary fare of cheese and crispbread.
There is basically a shortage of meeting spaces for community groups in this part of the world. It's probably the same everywhere. So the beekeepers went through a homeless, wandering phase when a Zumba class set up in the larger room next door, because they were so noisy. Fortunately (unless you have invested heavily in training to become a Zumba teacher) that craze appears to be dying. At the beekeepers' preferred hall Zumba was replaced by Tai Chi, which was much quieter. In the case of the music society, the intermittent Friday evening bookings in the village hall fell foul of the ballet class, which being a regular earner and not a three or four times through the whole winter thing took priority.
The music society uses the local church as well as the hall, which is larger and altogether more beautiful and atmospheric. And colder. So cold, in fact, that it isn't really suitable for the middle part of the October to March music season, so when we were bumped out of the hall on Friday evenings we had to look for alternatives. Hence the experimental 3.00pm Sunday concerts in the hall. The committee discussed the fact that they had met with less than universal acclaim, and it was suggested that they could be pushed back to 4.00pm, like the church concerts.
Then some bright spark suggested Saturday evening concerts. Leaving aside whether we'd be able to get the hall for the dates we wanted on a Saturday night, when we'd be competing with weddings, birthdays and goodness knows what, I privately thought that our audience might give Saturday evenings a bigger raspberry than 3.00pm on Sunday. All families are different, but in my book Saturday evening is prime family and friends time. Even if we weren't planning to go out, I'd feel mean about leaving the SA alone too often on a Saturday night. For people who work conventional hours, it is one of the only two days in the week when they don't have to get up in the morning, and for commuters it's the one day in the week when they don't have work the next day and aren't at risk of being stuck on a train on the way home. The optimists on the committee said that people would know months in advance when the concerts were and could plan round them, but I wasn't too sure they would. After all, their friends inviting them to dinner and adult children suddenly announcing their intention to come home for the weekend weren't going to plan their social lives around the music society's programme.
My hunch is that on reflection cooler heads will prevail, and Saturday evening concerts will be seen to be a no-no. Although a later start in the hall on Sunday afternoons throws up the question of refreshments. By tradition, 4.00pm concerts have tea and biscuits in the interval, whereas evening concerts have wine and nibbles afterwards. A couple of years ago the Chairman outsourced the tea making to the ladies of the church, who were happy to do it at a pound a head in aid of church funds. They were honestly much better at it than we were, and nobody seemed to grudge a pound to the church, so everybody was happy. But they probably wouldn't want to come and make tea in the hall. The 3 o'clock concerts had an interval with no tea, and wine and nibbles afterwards at what seemed to me an indecently early hour for wine (though as I was driving I was abstaining anyway). So what refreshments to offer with a 4 o'clock hall concert?
Now the Chairman and secretary are investigating the facilities at the High School, so it may all change again.
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