It's been a long day. I had a ticket for the R3 lunchtime concert at LSO St Lukes, which meant I had to go to London, unless I wanted to waste my ticket. The concert was one of four I booked last year spread over several months, the theory being that I'd enjoy them when I got there, while if I didn't book it was very easy to never get round to going. It was raining too, so I wouldn't have been able to do anything in the garden, though the downside was that I had to get myself about London in the rain and my cold is still refusing to budge from my chest. The Systems Administrator assured me that it was going to stop raining later, and when I got to St Lukes I discovered from a fellow concert goer that the fourth and final concert I'd booked for in June was already sold out.
Today was the Atos Trio, and while the eventual audience was respectable the hall was not full. The pulling power of chamber musicians seems to work on the same pyramidal basis as folk musicians. A few, Nicola Benedetti or Martin Carthy, can be almost guaranteed to sell out and advance booking is essential. For the great majority you'll probably get in OK just turning up on the day. It was so long since I booked the Atos Trio I'd completely forgotten what the programme was, but the blackboard on the pavement outside told me that it was Haydn and Brahms.
I love LSO St Lukes. I like the performance space, the programming of the lunchtime concerts, the informative programme notes that are thrust into your hand free and gratis as you go in, and the peaceful depths of the crypt cafe where you can get a piece of millionaire's shortbread and filter coffee with refills for £3.50. If I worked around Silicon Roundabout I'd try and schedule my meetings so that I could go every week. Today's music turned out to be interesting without making me fall in love with either piece. The Haydn represented an early stage in the development of the string trio, according to the notes, when the violin and cello were still emerging from their subsidiary roles as supplementary bass line for the harpsichord on to an equal footing. The Brahms was a mixture of his early and late output, Brahms writing the first version as a young man and then substantially reworking it thirty-five years later (I was mildly perturbed that the notes referred to the fifty-six year old Brahms as elderly). The whole thing is being broadcast at lunchtime tomorrow, Friday 27 March, on Radio 3.
After the concert I made my way to Trafalgar Square to see if I could get into the National Gallery's current exhibition Inventing Impressionism. If I'd had anybody with me I wouldn't have risked dragging them down there, since if there's one thing a British art audience likes more than another it's a nice dose of impressionism, but a friend got in without booking on a Saturday a couple of weeks back, and it seemed worth a try. I had a fall back position just in case, to go round the corner to the National Portrait Gallery and learn about the Duke of Wellington instead, but the National Gallery was selling impressionism tickets for immediate admission. The show has reviewed well, but it seems that to really tickle the public taste a job lot of impressionists isn't enough, the great British public want wall to wall Degas dancers, or else Van Gogh.
There was nothing of Vincent's at all in the current exhibition, because the uniting theme is the work of art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who put his reputation and all his capital on the line by taking up many of the impressionists (though not Van Gogh, and scarcely any Cezanne), acting not merely as agent but as a principal, buying their work from them and holding it as his own stock, sometimes for years. I thought that made the show doubly interesting, as a document of social and economic history as well as a collection of paintings, although by now they are so highly regarded it's a hard stretch of the imagination to see them as the worthless alien daubs that the French art establishment treated them as at the time. A Monet near the end of the exhibition was originally going to be offered as a gift to the National Gallery, except that the management let it be known that the offer would be declined. It was not a very big Monet (and not red, which according to Grayson Perry puts up the price of pictures), but even so how much of their annual acquisitions budget would they have to part with to buy it now?
I liked some of the coastal and river scenes and landscapes very much indeed, and a Manet still-life of half a cooked salmon on a table (I've seen a knife balanced over the forward edge of a table to break the line of it somewhere else quite recently, and can't remember where. I think it was a device used by Rubens, or Rembrandt, or both). Some of Renoir's sweet, soft focus, characterless or at least extremely passive young women were less interesting. Courbet's 1868 Venus arising from the waves complete with underarm hair was arresting given the date, and the amount of tizz that breastfeeding and female pubic hair can still provoke nearly a hundred and fifty years later.
After all that I'd have been happy to curl up for the evening with Our Ginger and a good book, but it was the beekeepers' monthly club night, and I'd already missed last month because I was ill, and I needed to drop off a cheque for the hall hire we owed for January and February as well as today. I could have posted the cheque, which I made sure I got signed at the last committee meeting to be on the safe side, but that would still have left me with the task of finding a signatory for another cheque for something else. So I took myself off to the meeting. We had a good turnout, and a panel led discussion of practical beekeeping issues with contributions from the floor which was useful and entertaining, not least because the panellists didn't always agree with each other.
The Secretary introduced me to a new member who lives round the corner from us. I promised to help him if I could, and lend him my extractor if he got a honey crop, while warning him that I wasn't a very good beekeeper and probably not a good teacher. It's a mixed blessing having a new beekeeper set up just up the lane. On the one hand he seems a nice chap and it's good to know the neighbours, but on the other hand our bees will be competing for the same forage. It would be easier if the local farmers favoured field beans or borage, but lettuces and winter wheat are no use to bees.
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