music and sculpture

Addendum in advance  Apologies for the peculiar font.  There have been technical problems all day chez cardunculus.

I went to LSO St Luke's today, for the last in the current series of Radio 3 lunchtime concerts.  The season ended with a flourish, with a performance of Mozart's violin sonata number 21 and Beethoven's violin sonata number 9 by Nicola Benedetti and her regular piano partner Alexei Grynyuk.  I know the performance has been sold out for at least the last couple of months, because the people behind me in the queue at the last concert I went to were lamenting that they hadn't been able to get tickets, and I felt rather smug, having sent off for mine before Christmas.

I must admit that the big draw was the chance to see Nicola Benedetti live, after seeing her do the last night of the Proms a couple of years ago on the TV.  If I were to compile my Desert Island Discs top eight I’m afraid that neither Mozart nor Beethoven would make it into the final selection, even if I were to limit myself to classical.  I know they are the two titans of western classical music, but there you go.  My affections leapfrog from Bach and Haydn to Schubert.  I keep hoping that if I persist in listening to Beethoven I will learn to love him, and there are moments when I think I’m getting there, but on the whole he still inspires my respect rather than unreserved adoration.

It was a very good concert, though, and if anybody could make me love Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer’ sonata it would be Nicola Benedetti.  It will be broadcast on Friday 9^th July, and if the sound engineers don’t manage to clean the two outbreaks of coughing off the final edit, it wasn’t me you can hear.

Then I went to the British Museum’s exhibition on the body in Greek art, which finishes in early July.  Despite that it was not packed.  It has been on for some time, so maybe most people who really wanted to see it already have, or maybe classical sculpture doesn’t have the pulling power of Chinese terracotta warriors or the grisly relicts of Pompei.  Quite a few of the exhibits are Roman copies of Greek originals, but I decided not to worry about that and just go with the broad aesthetic flow.

How much is what we like determined by what we’re used to?  I like the Parthenon marbles, and quite often pop by to look at them anyway when I’m in the museum (you could say it was a swizz including some of them in a paying exhibition when they’re free to view the rest of the time), and by extension I liked the other plain marble sculptures, more than the recreated painted examples, even though originally many of them would have been painted.

I tend to feel that once I’ve seen six brown and black terracotta vases I’ve seen them all, though it would have helped if the curators had used slightly shorter plinths.  At five foot four I had to stand on tiptoe to see the pattern at the top where the vases curved in, and I was by no means the shortest visitor.  And the storylines of some of the vases come as a shock, when you have a broad view of ancient Greece as being the cradle of democracy and western civilisation.  The labours of Hercules are all very well, but King Priam being clubbed to death on an altar using the body of his grandson?

My only real criticism is that the air conditioning was too fierce.  I don’t know if the space had to be like that to preserve the artefacts, though the rest of the museum isn’t, or if it was just that the British Museum has got brand new air conditioning in their swanky new exhibition space and thought they might as well use it on a (fairly) hot day, but after an hour and a half I began to feel quite uncomfortable, and decided to call it a day.  I never have liked air conditioning very much.