I made a return visit today to LSO St Luke's for another of their lunchtime solo Bach series. In a way it would be nice for us country day trippers if concerts on a theme that we like could be spaced out through the year, instead of there being four in as many weeks. My companion and I couldn't decide which we preferred out of the cello and the harpsichord, and solved the question by going to both, but I'd have been quite happy if today's event had been in two or three weeks, instead of in Chelsea week. But it wasn't.
My faltering musical brain fails to grasp most of what is going on in the music of JS Bach, but in the end I find it the most perfect music there is, just as TS Eliot is in the end my desert island poet. I listen to Radio 3 programmes that explain what a fugue is, or how the theme in the second part is the first theme played upside down, and I try hard but I can't hear it. But today's three preludes and fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier felt as large and mysterious as the universe, planets and stars rolling on through vast unimaginable space, while the closing Partita was as lively and complex as the whole life of a human being. If there were a god and it spoke, it would sound like the music of Bach.
Today's harpsichord recital was by an astonishingly talented and astonishingly young Iranian born musician named Mahan Esfahani. I hadn't heard of him until this series came up, which says more about me than about him, but I'm sure I'll be hearing more of him and from him in the next few decades. You can hear him sooner than that, since today's performance will be the Radio 3 lunchtime concert on Thursday 18 October at 1.00pm. The concert was respectably attended, but by no means a sell-out. Quite a few of the audience were there by themselves, mostly dressed in casual shirts or T shirts, and significantly more than half of them were men. I wondered whether some were from the high tech firms that now cluster around Old Street (according to the Telegraph), taking in some abstract musical high culture in their lunch hours. Pairs of ladies up from the provinces for the day were definitely in the minority. Maybe Bach's abstract complexities appeal to the male brain, or maybe the fringes of Hoxton are still a bit threatening to some visitors, but it was a very different demographic to the RA Friends' room.
It seemed a terrible waste that music of such high quality was going on with plenty of empty seats in the house, but was an odd echo of Monday night's concert in Colchester with Brendan Power and Tim Edey. The previous week when it was Spiers and Boden the Systems Administrator and I had to arrive ridiculously long before the main act to get seats, and were beset with silly women who professed not to understand why everybody was sitting down instead of dancing, having talked and giggled their way through half the numbers instead of listening to them. The gig was a sell out. For Power and Edey the room was set up with chairs around cafe tables near the stage, and rows of chairs behind with a generous central aisle, a signal that the Arts Centre knew it was nowhere near sold out and wanted to make the room look full. Brendan Power is a harmonica player of world class, with a polished stage presence and a decent voice, while Tim Edey plays the guitar and the melodeon to a very high standard (though obviously not at the same time) and faster than you would have believed possible. I'm rather with my dad when he said he did not altogether approve of people playing tunes faster than they were meant to go, just to show off that they could, but it was a jolly good and entertaining gig by two superb musicians at the top of their game, who won a major folk award (Radio 2 Best Duo) only three months ago. The audience did not talk, or giggle, or try to clap along, but sat listening with the same level of attention that Mahan Esfahani got for JS Bach. In terms of musicality and technical proficiency you could not squeeze a hair between them and Spiers and Boden, but in marketing terms, the latter have got caught up in the broader media enthusiasm for New Folk and Bellowhead, while Power and Edey are still mostly only known to harmonica enthusiasts (and there aren't very many of those) and hard core folkies who follow Mike Harding on Radio 2.
We wandered up after the concert to the Geffrye Museum, since it was a long time since I'd been there and my friend had never been there at all. It is a lovely museum, opened in some former almshouses early in the last century partly with the aim of providing instruction and inspiration for the furniture industry that still occupied Bethnal Green and Shoreditch, and it contains room sets with furniture for English homes from Stuart times to the late twentieth century. It has a charming garden behind, a large and restful expanse of grass and plane trees in front, and a cafe, that served a really good bagel on my last visit and this time round produced a passable scone. Entry is free.
Then we were able to go home when we wanted to, on a train leaving Liverpool Street at twenty to six, instead of having to wait around for an hour, because the new franchise holder on the Colchester line has scrapped the restriction on the time of homeward travel using a cheap day return. The quid pro quo is that the fare has risen by over three pounds, on the other hand we spent close to that last time on refreshments to tide us over and buy us a place to sit down while we waited for a train. Day trippers were not consulted about whether we wanted to make this trade off, but I'd say it was a fair exchange. It's a pity that after all that the train going home ran late. I shall look up the timetable presently, and check that it was more than half an hour late, in which case I can put in a claim for 25 per cent of the cost of the ticket. Oh, and this morning the Circle line was suspended entirely when I got to Liverpool Street, so thank goodness it didn't do that on Tuesday morning when the SA and I were going to Chelsea.
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