festival music

I went this evening to a Roman River Festival event, a recital by the Sacconi Quartet at Colchester's Firstsite.  I'd arranged to go with a friend from the plant centre months ago, so long that by the time the concert came round I'd forgotten what it was that we were going to hear.  I was none the wiser once we'd found each other and bagged a pair of seats, since Roman River don't do programme notes for the individual concerts.  They do do a large and splendid and correspondingly expensive book covering all the concerts, but if you're only going to one event and are too mean to buy the book then you don't get anything.  It has been suggested to them, but apparently the organisers are resistant.  Not wanting to undermine book sales, perhaps.

The festival's chief architect welcomed us to the space, and told us that we were going to hear Nielsen, Sibelius, and a world premiere of a new work by someone called Gwilym.  From the first violinist's introductory remarks I gathered that it was early Nielsen and late Sibelius.  Whether it turns out to be early or late Gwilym Simcock will depend on how long he keeps going.  He looked very young when he came forward to introduce his piece (along with policemen, vets and finance directors), but Mozart had written everything he was ever going to write before he was thirty-six, and Sibelius lived to a ripe old age but stopped writing music.

I enjoyed the Nielsen and the Sibelius, in a lyrical, periodically spiky, romantic sort of way.  The World Premiere was sandwiched in as the second part of the first half, as is the way of concert promoters.  Give the punters something they'll like first to warm them up, but don't risk programming the new music last, or half the audience will leave before it.  I listened to it with quite a lot of respectful attention, once I'd grasped that it had actually started and the quartet weren't just engaged in a protracted tuning exercise, but I'm afraid I couldn't get into it.  Honestly, I'd have been happier with a nice bit of Haydn.

Firstsite has a couple of drawbacks as a classical music venue.  One is that the bass line of the music from a nearby nightclub was came through the walls loud and clear, and the other is that it is at the scuzzy end of town and so the walk back to your car afterwards is not very nice if you're by yourself.  Nobody did bother me at all, but I wouldn't make a habit of walking around that part of town alone after dark.  The Festival's big book has a drawback in that audience members who don't find the music sufficiently engaging may start reading it during the concert.  There was a wretched woman sitting in front of us who kept flicking through the pages during the Sibelius, and I found the movement at the edge of my field of vision quite distracting.  There's no excuse.  If you go to a classical concert you should know roughly what to expect, and if you find one of the pieces not quite to your liking it won't hurt you to just sit still for twenty minutes.  You can practice cultivating an expression of polite interest while thinking about something else, a skill that might come in handy in all sorts of future situations.

I looked up the evening's programme when I got home and discovered that I'd been listening to Nielson's String Quartet in G minor and Sibelius' in D minor, Op. 56.  The photo of the quartet showed two ladies and two chaps, as does the Sacconi's own website, but tonight's cellist was definitely a bloke.  Nothing was said about there being a stand-in cellist, and there's no mention of a substitute on their website, so his identity remains a mystery.