I went up to London today (are there parts of the British Isles from which one goes down to London? North of Watford, perhaps). Radio 3 record some of their lunchtime concerts at LSO St Lukes in Old Broad Street, and today's performance was by Florilegium, the opening concert in R3's first ever lunchtime concert series wholly dedicated to early music. Well, that's what they say in the programme, though I don't really think of Handel as early music. The theme of the series is music composed in London around the time that LSO St Lukes was built, and besides Handel we got Johann Christoph Pepush, Francesco Barsanti, and home grown composer John Bannister. Bannister died in 1679 or thereabouts, and St Lukes was built between 1727 and 1733, but he squeezes in because he is thought to have been London's first ever concert promoter, charging people a shilling to hear performances in a room at a Whitefriars tavern.
I'd heard of Florilegium, but never seen them live before. Now that I have I'd make the effort to see them again. I rather think that the Suffolk Villages Festival booked them not very long ago, and I was too mean to pay the ticket price and too idle to drive to wherever it was they were performing. Today's line up consisted of harpsichord, viola da gamba, violin, and their director alternating between flute and recorder, and they were great fun. I love that kind of early eighteenth century music when it's done with a bit of bounce and panache, but it can be a bit twiddly diddly after a while, and an hour's worth is just right. Today we got an hour and five because they gave a burst of Telemann as an encore, saying they weren't in a hurry if we weren't.
And the crypt cafe had millionaire's shortbread back on the menu, so I was happy on all counts. The only tiny blemish in the whole experience was that I found myself sitting behind a programme fiddler. People who go to classical concerts should be made to swear a solemn oath when they buy tickets that they will not fiddle with their programme during the performance. It is distracting to those sitting directly behind them to keep catching the flicker of moving white pages out of the corner of their eye, and creates an unfortunate impression that your fellow audience member might not be very interested, which detracts from the shared concert experience. If you are not interested that's tough. Just practice your best expression of polite neutrality. It's bound to come in useful on other occasions, for weddings, speech days and so on.
From Old Street it's a short walk to the British Museum, whose exhibition about the Celts runs until the end of January, so you have ages to go and see it if you like the sound of it. There are a lot of broaches, an awful lot of torcs, weapons, cauldrons, and a reconstruction of a Celtic chariot with a rather dinky leather suspension system. I was pleased to discover that the first recorded Celtic stone cross acquired the now trademark circle of stone because when it was initially made without it the cross arms fell off under their own weight. I would really have liked to know how you put the torcs on. Were they flexible enough to bend open enough to slip around the neck? I couldn't see hinges on any of the British examples.
The trouble with interpreting Celtic history and culture is that so little is actually known about it. The purpose of the mysterious spoon with a hole in it may have been to drip liquid through the hole and use the pattern of the drops as a tool for divination but honestly, how d'you know? The last section of the exhibition deals with the hokum cooked up about the Celts from the eighteenth century onwards and Celtic inspired trends in Victorian homewares and jewellery. The Avebury stone circle predates any written reference to Druids by about two thousand years, by the way.
It's a good exhibition, though, and certainly worth seeing, and worth taking your time over because the details on much of the jewellery and pottery are quite faint and you need to look at them carefully to see them. I don't think I ever did believe there was a homogeneous people called The Celts spread across modern day Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Cornwall and Brittany, so the purpose of the exhibition to debunk that myth was a bit lost on me, and by the end of it I think my ideas of the Celts were still mainly derived from the novels of Rosemary Sutcliffe, but I enjoyed looking at the objects.
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