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.

watching pictures and people

I abandoned the garden, and went to look at Gerhard Richter at Tate Modern.  It's good to go and be cosmopolitan for the day, once in a while.  I still love the City, though it is less and less my place.  Buildings I knew are demolished and new ones erupt, and restaurants and wine bars where I was once wined and dined by stockbrokers, or met friends, or went out for after-work drinks with my esteemed colleagues, cease to be or are transmuted into something else.  I don't wear the uniform any more.  I used to have a briefcase, blue leather, handmade in Ireland and bought in Liberty, and was allowed into the offices and the livery halls, when I had an appointment or was on the list of names for the meeting.  Nowadays I look at it from the outside.

I love the Members' Room at Tate Britain.  It is right at the top of the building, with a fabulous view over the river to Saint Pauls, and is not generally full.  It appeals to cultured solitaries like me, young mothers with toddlers, friends on a day out, and people with laptops doing some sort of work, or filling in the time between meetings.  Two elderly ladies behind me in the queue for coffee (staff a bit slow today noticing that they had customers) were having a stately argument as one tried to pick up the whole tab, and the other insisted that she was paying for herself, and threatened her friend that 'otherwise I won't come out with you again'.  A young chap with a laptop called someone up as he waited for his 1.00pm business meeting.  He already had a bottle of beer on the go, and proposed meeting them at 3.30pm for draught prosecco.  'I love prosecco' he told them.  He was upset that somebody else had sent him a clumsily worded e-mail, and said it might sound odd, but he really preferred not to do business with people like that.  I thought that in these hard times his business must be going well for him to be able to be so picky.  He tried to tell the person on the phone about Winston Churchill's remark that he didn't have time to write a short letter, and was obliged to send a long one, but the line can't have been very good, because he had to repeat it about four times, and I don't think they had heard of Winston Churchill, and he forgot the punchline about the long letter.

Gerhard Richter is a major German artist.  He addresses serious themes including Germany's wartime past, and the nature of perception.  Some of his pictures are large soft focus painted versions of photographs, which I find physically difficult to look at, and would be fascinated to know if they have a similar effect on other people.  As the crystalline lenses of my eyes have lost elasticity (middle age), I need separate glasses for reading and seeing, which is fine when I settle down to either read or see, but cumbersome in situations where I need to switch between the two.  Looking at Gerhard Richter's out-of-focus pictures I had the uneasy sensation that I was wearing the wrong glasses, and my eyes struggled to compensate.

It's a big exhibition.  There are some abstracts, and some messing about with sheets of glass (regular readers will know what I think about that sort of thing).  I don't grudge spending the morning there, instead of weeding, but I didn't emerge loving Gerhard Richter.  Viewed as a sensory experience, his palette didn't do it for me.  That is a matter of subjective, personal taste, but there it is.  When Paul Klee painted a little square canvas only about 30cm by 30cm, made up of tiny coloured squares, Klee's colours made me so happy that I wanted to laugh, and then steal the painting so that I could look at it every day for the rest of my life.  When Gerhard Richter painted a large square canvas made of lots of coloured squares, it didn't make me any happier than the paint chart said to have inspired it.  Wrong colours (personally speaking).  The political paintings were interesting, but if you really want to explore those sorts of ideas, words are better.  (I'm reading Robert Fisk's history of the Middle East at the moment, The Great War for Civilisation.  It is grim but fascinating.  I'm up to page 657, and conveying the same range of facts and emotions using pictures would require an art gallery the size of Tokyo).

I had thought I might look at Rothko's Seagram murals, but they have been put into storage to make way for the forthcoming Damian Hirst show, and won't be on display again until that's over, which isn't until next September.  Apparently some of the works are so heavy the Tate is having to reinforce the floor.  Rothko displaced by a charlatan shark-pickler.  How depressing.

Then I went to see The First Actresses at The National Portrait Gallery, which was great fun.  The National Portrait Gallery does these small exhibitions very well, placing the pictures in an historic context, and so while gazing at the Gainsboroughs I learnt odd snippets of social history.  The romantic and sex lives of the most popular eighteenth century actresses were scrutinised every bit as keenly as Sienna Miller's is today, and their dresses were copied.  Some actresses on retiring from the stage succeeded as novelists and playwrights.  Others married into the aristocracy.  Richard Brinsley Sheridan forbade his wife to have any further involvement with the stage following their marriage, and her portrait gives no clue as to her past profession.  Sarah Siddons looks a forbidding creature, but I suppose she was a tragic actress.

I'd been wondering whether I even wanted to see the Leonardo exhibition, on the grounds that the ratio of visitors to paintings would be too high, but the question has been taken out of my hands, as I read in the papers days ago that all advance tickets were sold for the entire run of the show, and today there were no buy-on-the-day tickets available.  Never mind.  I remember the Vermeer exhibition several years ago, where the main thing I saw was the backs of other people's necks, or the corners of paintings with other people's faces in front of most of the canvas.  When the Systems Administrator and I were on holiday in The Netherlands we made a special trip to den Hague, to visit the excellent Mauritshuis, where we had Vermeer's View of Delft all to ourselves.  Not even the security guard could be bothered to come and join us.

art and music

I went to London today.  Three times in eight days is well above my normal rate of visitation, but my aunt was playing in a concert in St Pancras Church.  I managed to catch the earliest train consistent with getting cheap(er) parking as well as an off-peak return and went first to the National Portrait Gallery, to see their exhibition of photos of Hollywood Stars, Glamour of the Gods.

I like the National Portrait Gallery very much.  Portraiture is a fascinating art (and infinitely preferable to perspex tables with bags of maltesers on them).  I like photography as an end result, while knowing nothing about the process and not being a keen photographer myself.  I can't think when I have ever been to a boring exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.  Today's was not boring, though compared to some it left me a little cold, and I'm not sure why that is.  Maybe because most of the stars were from before my time, so their pictures didn't give me that thrill of nostalgia for the films of my youth.  But I like Van Dyck and Gainsborough without it prompting fond memories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so it can't just be that.  I think it was the glamour that was the problem.  These portraits weren't designed to show the personalities of the stars, or the photographer, so apart from thinking that they were a very good looking bunch of people and that fashions in clothes and makeup had changed a lot since then, you didn't learn anything about them.  Compared to Ida Kar or Hoppe it was all rather superficial.  According to the gallery's publicity blurb it has been a massively successful exhibition, and they were urging people to pre-book tickets, so maybe it was just me.  Though it wasn't especially crowded when I was there.

The concert was of three pieces by British composers born at the turn of the twentieth century.  I'd gone with a certain amount of trepidation, as I struggle with some twentieth century music.  If Martin Simpson sometimes sounds as though he has started playing, and then it turns out he is still tuning up, there are some twentieth century composers that have the opposite effect on me.  I put the radio on, and think the orchestra is still tuning, and then realise that this is it.  Today we got Eric Fogg, who would have been a great composer according to my aunt if he hadn't died when he was only 36, Humphrey Procter-Gregg and Thomas B. Pitfield.  I never heard of any of them, but happily for me they turned out to compose in the English tradition (comparisons with Delius featured in my uncle's programme notes) and were not too discordant and jangly for conservative escaped folk enthusiasts like me.  Humphrey Procter-Gregg only had time to really get stuck into composition in retirement, and he wrote his first cello sonata at the age of 82, three years before he died.  My aunt thought that today's performance was the world premiere.  I hope that he persuaded somebody to play it for him so that he could hear how it sounded in the flesh as well as in his mind's ear, but maybe it had never previously been played in concert, to a bona fide audience drawn from the public as well as family members.  It isn't every day I get to go to a world premiere.  The pianist was a distant relative, my father's cousin's son, which seems to make him my second cousin according to a chart on Wikepedia.  We are of the same generation, and have a great-grandparent in common.  He is a professional musician and can play the piano properly.  Shame that musical gene didn't come down my branch of the family.

three exhibitions

I have visited three exhibitions today, and my brain is rather full.  That's the trouble with occassional cultural trips to London: I feel the need to cram in as much culture as possible, what with the cost of train tickets, and finding the time to take a day off from everything else to go to London at all.

First of all I saw Jan Gossaert's Renaissance at the National Gallery.  It is very good, and it is on until 30th May, so plenty of time left for others to go and see it.  There are a fair few religious works, as you would expect of a Flemish artist working in the first part of the sixteenth century, an entire room full of portraits, and some frankly sexy ('erotic' is the word favoured by curators) versions of Adam and Eve and Mary Magdalen.  As well as paintings and drawings by Gossaert, there are works by some of his contemporaries, including a couple of lovely Durer woodcuts.  I went to this one with a friend, who bought the tickets, so I was relieved that they seemed to broadly enjoy it too, once we got past the initial rash of Virgin and Childs.  It is a heavy responsibility inciting other people into art galleries.  As a 21st century person of No Religion I tried to imagine what you would feel looking at a portrait of the Virgin and Child, if you were a devout Catholic in the sixteenth century, but failed.

In the afternoon I went to the National Portrait Gallery and looked at a couple of photographic exhibitions.  There is a risk doing this of ending up completely confused about who took which pictures, but in this case they are not that similar.  The big show (timed entry tickets, eleven quid) is of Hoppe portraits.  I'd never heard of Hoppe (sorry, there should be an accent over that final e but I can't work out how to insert it), not being all that well up on the history of photography, but it reviewed well in the papers.  It's great.  Again on until 30 May.  These pictures were mostly taken in the 1920s and 30s.  Some of the subjects I know of and admire, including poet Edward Thomas (looking tense), John Masefield (The Midnight Folk, The Box of Delights and The Bird of Dawning still count among my favourites) looking unexpectedly young and romantic, and Vita Sackville-West (in literary rather than gardening mode).  There is a marvellous picture of Thomas Hardy as quite an old man.  He was notoriously camera shy and Hoppe had almost despaired of getting the shot when Hardy suddenly settled.  He looks composed but wistful, and I was reminded of his rueful poetry about his first wife (marriage not a success.  I rate Hardy as a poet hugely more than as a novelist).  Some of the portraits are of people I hadn't heard of, so while I imagined them and their lives I may have been wildly off the mark.  Then there are some quirky scenes from life: a cupboard of skeletons at a shop that used to sell them to artists and medical students (female skeletons were rarer and cost more), an elaborately quoiffed and made-up woman working making wax heads for Madame Tussauds, three bell-ringers (one gloriously podgy) captured in mid-ring at St Olaves in Hart St. before the war.  It is really, really good.  Some of the pictures are original silver and whatsit prints, and are soft and wonderful as objects in themselves.

Then I whizzed around Ida Kar, an Armenian photographic artist who moved to Britain after WWII.  This exhibition is mostly of works from the 1950s and 1960s, so later than Hoppe, though I think they both include shots of Jacob Epstein.  Ida Kar must be less prestigous than Hoppe in that tickets are untimed and only three quid, though she did have a blockbusting exhibition at The Whitechapel Gallery back in 1960.  You can get a combined ticket, as I did, in which case you don't have to go to Kar on the same day if you've run out of time or energy.  Kar's portraits mostly show their subject in their own home, or studio, or at least staged with a pile of props related to their career, whereas Hoppe mostly eschewed props, apart from the odd costume.  It is good show, and bigger than I had expected, and I'm slightly regretful that I ended up looking at it against the clock (last cheap day return home from Liverpool Street before the commuter period is at 4.15pm.  Miss that and you're left hanging around London until quarter to seven), and with a brain already stuffed with images.  It's on until June 19th, and if I do have a spare afternoon in town I'd like to go again.