start of the concert season

The year is advancing.  Today the music society's concert new season began, with a youngish quartet playing Haydn, Schumann and Beethoven.  There was a good turnout, which was especially pleasing since the first autumn meeting of any society that breaks for the summer is apt to be tricky, as people have fallen out of the habit of going and they fail to notice that things have started again and go and do something else instead, or just sit at home until it is too late.

One of my former colleagues from the plant centre was there, looking extremely chipper, and someone else who I last heard of as being extremely unwell following an embolism had made it, albeit wearing surgical hose which he flashed at me under the hems of his trousers when I said it was good to see him out and about again.  But somebody who was perfectly fit the last time I saw him back in the spring seemed to have shrunk to half his former volume, and was walking slowly and painfully with a stick.

I liked the programme.  I adore Papa Haydn, whose music always sounds so fundamentally good natured.  Robert Schumann is not a composer I've ever got to grips with, and I don't think I have a single recording of anything of his, but I liked his quartet in A minor well enough, and when I asked my uncle the other day what new thing I should listen to next he suggested Schumann's Rhenish symphony, so probably I ought to make an effort with Schumann.  The Beethoven was late and strange, with passages in the middle that I'd probably have guessed were written in the middle of the twentieth century, if I'd heard them on the radio without any prior warning of what they were.

My friend from the music society was not entirely convinced by the young quartet's rendering of the Haydn, muttering that something was missing.  I pointed out that she didn't like Baroque music anyway, which she conceded.  It had sounded perfectly fine to me, but I do like the Baroque, despite knowing awfully little about it.  For a fair test we should both do a blind listening to the young quartet and to a quartet of acknowledged Haydn specialists, and say which version we thought was better and if possible why, and see whether we'd both backed the experts over the newcomers.  My friend thought there were some iffy passages in the Schumann as well, which again sounded OK to me.  Everybody agreed that the Beethoven was very fine.

I had to stay after the concert for the society's AGM because I was taking the minutes.  It was a model of brevity, and rather sparsely attended.  I am afraid that most concert goers are not interested in how the society is run or the idea of membership.  Somebody else has arranged for professional musicians to come and play to them on a Sunday afternoon and for tea to be served in the interval.  They come, they listen, they drink their tea and chat to their friends, and they go home, without the bother and expense of having to get themselves to the Wigmore Hall.  They are perfectly happy with that, and the fact that if they buy a season ticket they become a member of the music society concerns them not one jot.