LSO St Lukes and Lucien Freud

Today I went for the first time to LSO St Lukes for a lunchtime concert.  I liked everything about it, and hope it will be the first of a series of regular visits.  St Lukes is an arts venue in what was originally a church (the clue's in the name) half way down Old Street, a short walk from Liverpool Street, or a ride on the number 135 bus.  The church was constructed in the early eighteenth century as part of a church building programme, presumably to provide for London's growing population.  Unfortunately St Lukes was built on soft ground, and suffered from severe subsidence problems from early on in its career.  By the mid twentieth century the roof had been removed for safety reasons, rather than through the action of the Luftwaffe, and it now has a new career with a modern metal frame and roof inside the old Hawksmoor designed walls, as a concert venue.  (Apologies for any material errors in this mini biography of St Lukes.  I read the educational display on the wall of the crypt cafe rather quickly as we were leaving to bag our (unreserved) seats in good time).

As a first time visitor to St Lukes you may find a few things useful to know.  The building doesn't open to the public at all until mid-day on lunchtime concert days, even though the concerts start at 1.00pm, but a very kind and helpful man on the desk of the back entrance told us what time it opened up, and which door the entrance was when it was open, and recommended a cafe that did good coffee where we could wait for half an hour.  The cafe in the crypt does self service hot food, quite tasty, before and after the concerts, and the staff were cheerful.  The staff on the front desk were unruffled by my tale of tickets lost in the post, checked a list and gave me replacement tickets without demur.  The table in front of them held a great many tickets for collection on the door, so that might be the way to do it another time, rather than risk having them posted.  The concert, two Bach solo cello suites by a Dutch cellist I hadn't heard of (though I'd be hard pressed to name many extant cellists beyond Steven Isserlis) was well attended but not a sell-out, so we could have got tickets on the day instead of booking three months in advance.  The Dutch cellist (who is probably well-known to people who actually know about classical music) was delightful (to my ears) and made the suites sound more like dance music than they sometimes do.  The seats in the stalls are on one level in the part of the hall nearer to the stage, and raked in the back half of the auditorium.  Wandering in twenty minutes before the concert started we got seats in the raked part, directly lined up with the central aisle so that we had a superb view.  The acoustics are clean.

There are three more lunchtime Bach concerts, and then other lunchtime concerts in the autumn, and evening things I will probably not go to, though getting back from there would be easier than the south bank, let alone St John's Smith Square.  I went with a friend and we both liked it very much, so it is a useful place to have discovered.

In the afternoon we went to the Lucian Freud portraits at the National Portrait Gallery.  They are only on until May 27th, so that was leaving it late, but we wanted to fit it in with the concert.  It is a large exhibition, which has been comprehensively reviewed by expert critics, leaving me not a lot to add, except to express my sincere personal belief that Lucian Freud was a genius and that it is a superb, wonderful exhibition.  We looked at it for two hours, and then our brains were full.  I don't understand why his pictures are so gripping, and could have done with an art expert to tell me how he did it, but he did.  Several of his subjects are recorded as saying that being painted by Freud was exhausting, as at the end of it you felt sucked dry (apart from having to pose for an enormous number of sittings).  David Hockney sat for Freud for 130 hours, at the end of which Freud had produced a small head (no shoulders, just the head).  When it was Hockney's turn to paint his friend, Freud sat for two and a half hours.  Freud's portraits are as revealing of his subjects as you would expect from a genius, but equally revealing of Freud.  The picture he paints of himself, presented from a downward viewpoint using a floor mounted mirror, two of his children shown doll size tucked in the foreground, apparently oblivious to their father towering behind them, tells you that Lucien Freud lived to paint.  His many children, and wives, and lovers, and friends, were all in the end secondary to the overwhelming fact of his being a painter.  And a genius.

Back at Liverpool Street with three quarters of an hour before the cheap trains, my friend introduced me to the Pontis cafe at the end of the chain of shops above the concourse.  I remember the Pontis name from my City days, when they had some sandwich bars, but had no idea that the Liverpool Street one was so big.  It goes back a tremendous distance, with lots of tables, and so we were able to sit down and drink tea and eat wafer biscuits, which beats standing on the concourse looking at the indicator board and ducking out of people's way.

So all in all it was a good day out.  Tomorrow I am on tour, so there may be a blog posting, depending on whether the Systems Administrator lends me a dongle, and whether I can get it to work, and if not whether I feel lavish enough to spend £5 on wi-fi access at the Grantham Travelodge, and if so can get that to work.  Otherwise news of my travels will have to wait until Saturday, or for the details probably Sunday, since by the time I've driven back from Grantham I might not be feeling very literary.