Travel, Theatre, Music, Cricket, Tennis, Writing, Life
Pretty much everything I want to say about this excellent three days in the Midlands has been said in the King Cricket report, attributed to Daisy:
Should a mishap ever befall the King Cricket site, a scrape of that piece can be found here.
Daisy omitted to mention the excellent meal Harish, Daisy and I enjoyed at Sabai Sabai in Moseley. We vowed to return there and stuck to our vow in 2025.
Gurdain Rayatt getting ready
We don’t really patronise The Wigmore Hall for the wow factor. We quite like the fact that we are quite often amongst the youngest people in the audience. We like early music and we get a good dose of that from The Wig.
But we do sometimes book a concert at The Wigmore Hall that we think might have a wow factor and sometimes, like on this occasion, we call it right. It does tend to mean that we are bringing the average age up rather than down, though.
Here is a link to The Wigmore Hall stub for this concert.
We have seen O/Modernt before, under the enthusiast auspices of Hugo Ticciati:
They like a bit of fusion, do the O/Modernt gang. On this occasion, it was an East/West fusion that they explored, as well as a temporal “Bach to Beatles” shtick.
Here’s what we heard:
To give you a feel for what we heard, here is a clip from O/Moderndt playing Distant Light by Pēteris Vasks. The piece we heard was the follow-up concerto by Vasks. It was a nice touch to have Vasks at The Wig for his premier – I even managed to congratulate him in person as we were leaving the hall.
The sarod, tabla and a heap of special furniture/equipment arrived during the interval for the second half of the show.
There’s no video to be found of O/Modernt and the sarod & tabla fellas all playing together, but here is a 15-year-old clip of Soumik Datta and Gurdain Rayatt playing as a pair, which will give you a feel.
Here is a more recent recording of that pair playing together:
The most “wow” piece of the evening was Orawa by Wojciech Kilar. Here is that piece played by a more formal orchestra than O/Modernt.
The encore had to calm us down again, which it did. Here’s what Across The Universe sounds like in O/Modernt’s hands.
The sarod & tabla coda to the Across The Universe encore helped us all to float away from The Wig.
We heard several younger members of the audience saying that they had been blown away by the evening. This is surely the sort of thing The Wigmore Hall should be doing more often.
To the Royal Court Theatre on a Friday evening. “Why Friday?”, I hear you cry. Because the Royal Court is now, in its wisdom, starting Saturday shows at 6:30, which is a bit early for us in the summer months, when we like to take advantage of the outdoors in daylight.
We fancied this, as we had seen one of Nassim’s previous works, the eponymous one…
…and loved it.
This sounded a bit more techie but a similar idea.
That’s exactly what it was.
When we booked it we had no idea who we were going to see. We discovered a week or so before our evening that our performer was to be Rebecca Lucy Taylor aka Self Esteem.
This is what she looks like when she does one of her more regular things – singing contemporary music:
It is hard to review a piece like this because I imagine every performer stamps their own mark on the piece – that is sort-of the idea. But certainly the evening we spent at The Royal Court was a gripping 80-90 minutes of theatre, using multi-media the way theatre can use multi-media best. It added to the live performance rather than making me wonder whether we should simply be at home watching a film.
It seems to have had mixed reviews, but then different reviewers saw different performers respond to the piece in different ways. Here’s a link to reviews.
We found it moving and thought-provoking. We’re very glad we went and we’re very glad we saw Self Esteem. We could have done without the screaming groupies, but you can’t have everything…or rather you can’t omit everything that you don’t want.
The last time Janie and I had seen England Women play New Zealand Women was a World Cup Final 15 years earlier…
Back then, I wasn’t a member of the MCC but I did know how to tick boxes on a form requesting a chance at returns if there were any.
This time, I simply applied for a guest ticket and this time, now that diversity is all the thing, I could even take Janie as a Member’s Guest into the pavilion and enjoy a relaxed dress code in there.
Janie loves the upper sub deck. Given that the sun indeed chose to shine on us that evening, that is the spot I picked, getting to Lord’s early enough to secure good seats up there.
Last time I travelled to Lord’s separately from Janie for the sun deck, Janie walked straight past me up there, so I decided to take no chances and sent her a selfie so she might recognise me…or at least recognise my shirt.
I hope readers have noticed the little nod to MCC colours about that shirt.
Janie arrived in good time, as evidenced by the headline photo, which she took.
England had already secured the series by the time this match came around. We didn’t think they batted brilliantly but we guessed they’d batted well enough.
As it started to get a bit colder and my picnic got depleted, we decided to catch the end of the match at home.
Jimmy’s last warm up
I pretty much spent all three days at Lord’s watching this match – interspersed with some real tennis and stuff.
I wrote this match up for King Cricket:
If anything ever goes amiss at King Cricket, you can read that “match report” here.
I have little to add to that report. Here is a link to the scorecard and Cricinfo resources for that match.
My only other comment/memory is a conversation I had with a charming fellow when we were milling around in the Tavern Stand awaiting the post match presentations and inevitable Jimmy farewell ceremonials. He had come down to London from a remote place in the North of England, the exact location of which escapes me but I think Northumbria. He was recently retired and was also recently widowed. He had treated himself to some fancy photographic equipment and was delighted to be able to photograph Jimmy’s last match at close quarters and seemed similarly delighted that he could talk photography with someone like me while he waited.
Did my new friend get better pictures than me?
Almost certainly. But mine with my phone are not too shabby.
There will be a King Cricket piece of mine about this test in the fulness of time – I’ll publish the links here.
Meanwhile, just a placeholder to note that I:
It was a very one-sided match, but passing time at Lord’s when there is a test match on is always a pleasant experience, however the cricket is panning out.
Rune & Djokovic Squaring Up Ahead of Centre Court Battle
I scored us a pair of centre court tickets for the second Monday of Wimbledon this year. Not bad, I hear you cry. I thought it was a smart move this year. I always thought that “Manic Monday” was better observed from the comfort of a living room and a gadget that enables switching between channels. But the craziness of “Manic Monday” has, in theory, been dissipated by the use of “Middle Sunday” for half of the draw.
Theory and practice failed to collide this year, with so much rain through Week One and Middle Sunday, that our Monday, which was blessed with good weather until early evening, was pretty manic.
Still, we were scheduled to see the following matches on Centre Court…
…and there was loads to see on outer courts.
We arrived a little late to get in to one of the main outer courts for the first match of the day, but after wandering around for a short while, I worked out that we’d get on to Court 18 to see at least part of the conclusion of a rain-affected Ladies Doubles including several players we like: Katerina Siniakova & Taylor Townsend v Leylah Fernandez & Ena Shibahara.
We bailed out of Court 18 before the finish, keen to see the first match on Centre Court.
After the first set, I went out to stretch my legs, only to discover, on my return after the first three games of the second set, that Kalinskaya had retired. Still, my leg-stretching had enabled me to spec out the neighbouring outer courts, where some of the youngster action was now underway.
We watched Flora Johnson overcome Alena Kovackova before returning for the start of the Fritz v Zverev match – a rare example of a match between two players with Z in their surname.
Having consumed my hot smoked salmon bagel during the first match, perhaps my defences were down. Or perhaps it was the relentless big serves and not much else at the start of that match. Anyway, I must confess that Janie caught me napping during the first set and kindly prevented what might have been a notorious snore-gate incident.
I did the leg stretch thing again at the start of the second set and returned for the end of that set, which also went Zverev’s way. I suggested to Janie that the rest of the match was only going to be interesting if Fritz revived and that would take quite some time. Janie agreed, so we decided to wander around some more and take in the outer courts.
Janie’s eye’s fell on some mixed doubles: Jan Zielinski & Su-Wei Hsieh v Hugo Nys & Demi Schuurs.
It really is a privilege to be able to watch these fantastic players at such close quarters on those outer courts.
Then we focussed on some more youngsters for a while: Henry Bernet & Flynn Thomas v Mark Ceban & Charlie Swaine.
Then to Court 14, where I spotted that an interesting-looking mixed doubles was about to start: Maximo Gonzalez & Ulrikke Eikeri v Jean-Julien Rojer & Bethanie Mattek-Sands…
…but not before Janie snapped some hydrangeas that took her fancy:
All the while I was keeping an eye on the score from Centre Court. Once it became clear that the fourth set between Fritz and Zverev was heading for a tie-break, I suggested that we return to see the end of that match, one way or another.
That we did and it was a well worthwhile switch. That tie break was excellent and Fritz went up through the gears in the final set.
We stuck around for the first set of Rune v Djokovic (see headline picture), but by then we had seen plenty and thought that people queuing for returns were more deserving than us.
Besides, it had started raining and it looked as thought he rain would only get worse. We quite fancied getting home before the proper heavy stuff.
The young lad from Guest Services admired my poncho, describing it as “stunning”. Excellent taste, some youngsters these days, excellent taste and good choice of advective. He even sounded as though he meant it.
Here is a link to the order of play with results for the whole day.
We didn’t go too mad with the camera at this one – we were a bit photo-ed out from Eastbourne. But if you want to see all 60 pictures, here they are on Flickrt:
We always have a a great day at Wimbledon. This day, despite its frenetic nature, was no exception.
With grateful thanks to Misha, Viktoria and Bridget O’Donnell for allowing me to use their pictures from the evening.
We went to quite a few “Wigmore Hall Lates”, back in the day, but this is the first time we have ventured back at that later hour since the pandemic.
We were keen to see this much-lauded mother and son combination perform.
I had seen Misha’s dad perform more than 40 years ago – my first ever night at The Proms:
All the more reason to find out what Viktoria and Misha are up to, musically. Further, we liked the sound of the Brazilian theme for the concert, which we sensed, correctly, would please us.
We enjoyed a light supper of charcuterie and stuff at The Wig before the concert. They do that sort of thing very well these days. While we were eating, the performers were setting up and photographing one another.
Here is a link to the Wigmore Hall stub for this concert.
The conceit of this concert, if indeed conceit describes this simple rationale, is that Viktoria and Misha perform a selection of the stuff that they like to play together. Their joy in playing this music really came across in performance.
We heard:
Here is a lovely example, recorded a few years ago, of them performing one of the above pieces:
Their closing number, Tico Tico, is more than a bit of an earworm for me. Not least, because the Harris family gramophone records included a version of that song by Mickey Katz and His Kosher Jammers. Viktoria and Misha’s version sounded more like the above example and did not sound at all like the following recording:
I sense that Misha and family thought the event went well. Misha and Viktoria certainly look pleased in this green room photo.
Thanks again for allowing me to use your photographs, folks.
This Wigmore Hall lunchtime concert was a bit unusual.
Camerata RCO is the scaled-down chamber orchestra bit of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. They are making a bit of a reputation for themselves playing scaled-down versions of enormous symphonies, such as this sixth one by Anton Bruckner.
It’s all explained on the Wigmore Hall stub for this concert – click here.
Does this idea work? It was a BBC Lunchtime concert, so if you get here within 30 days of the concert you can listen here.
Or you might listen to the album version, e.g. on your favourite streaming platform – YouTube link here.
We rather liked it, although I don’t think we’ll be elbowing people out of the way to grab tickets for another such concert in a hurry.
A lovely way to spend a lunchtime, though – at The Wig.
Leylah, you’ve got me on my knees…
Janie and I had enjoyed our time at Eastbourne so much in 2023…
…we decided to book three days of Eastbourne tennis for 2024: Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
On the Tuesday evening we met Linda Wrobel (formerly Linda Phillips) for dinner. Linda lives in Bexhill, which, me being a died-in-the-wool Londoner, seemed to me to have no proximity whatsoever to Eastbourne. But last year, when I posted about our Eastbourne trip on Facebook, Linda messaged me wondering what the hell Janie and I were doing in Eastbourne without contacting and meeting Linda!
Linda first came to our Airbnb to have a look around, then we wandered round to the same Thai place that Janie and I had tried the previous year.
So deep in conversation were we, that we completely forgot top take pictures of each other or of the food. Here is a picture of Janie with the food from the previous year.
It was a very enjoyable evening with Linda.
After that, three days of tennis and picnics.
We took an infeasible number of photographs on those three days, which could do with some editing into a highlights album. If you like canonical, the 200 or so pictures are in the following album:
On the Wednesday we saw:
Here are some sample pictures from the Wednesday:
It was a very hot day, that Wednesday, hence the iced coffees quite early in the day.
On the Thursday we saw:
Cooler and breezier, it was, on the Thursday and the Friday.
On the way to the ground, Janie took some pictures along the front. She even made me park up so she could photograph the bandstand
On the Friday we saw:
In short, we had a really great time in Eastbourne.
