This seemed like a wonderful idea – improvised music to please lovers of jazz and contemporary music, after the Evelyn Glennie concert, in the bar/restaurant.
It didn’t attract much of a crowd if I remember correctly.
We enjoyed our cold compilations and some wine…
…more than we enjoyed the music, which we found surprisingly bland – not jazzy in the way we thought it might be.
We’re all for the Wigmore Hall experimenting and the late night format is one of the more interesting experiments, although they are still struggling to find a formula that works.
But we have booked two more Wigmore Lates this year (as I write in 2018), both of which look right up our street, so we really hope the idea will find its feet eventually.
Anyway, below is the running order for the concert we heard on 22 June 2012:
In truth, not all of the music pleased us, but most of it did and it was fascinating to watch Evelyn Glennie play so many different percussive instruments at such close quarters.
Here is a little vid of her playing the Vivaldi Concerto she played us that night – albeit from a different occasion and with a bit more of an ensemble in the vid:
We also booked the late night concert the same night – I seem to recall we arranged for a rather tasty platter of cold compilations at The Wig between the gigs. Yum.
The late night concert, which was served up in the restaurant, was less to our taste – click here or below – but never mind:
…then following the test match for the rest of the weekend, then rounding off the weekend with some early music at SJSS?
That was a rhetorical question, people. There is NO better way.
We went to see Musica ad Rhenum under Jed Wentz. I always worry about people named Jed, because I am so regularly having my pseudonym, Ged, mis-spelt as Jed. My life would be easier if these J-people chose not to abbreviate their names to Jed. I don’t think I am asking too much there.
But I digress.
The music was mostly Couperin – see extract from the programme below.
It was part of the Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music that year – we just chose the one concert. It was one delightful concert too.
Yes, Janie and I did have a giggle at one of the pieces being named “La toilette de Venus”. Yes we can both be very childish.
For some reason, Jed Wentz and Musica ad Rhenum have put an enormous amount of their Couperin instrumental music into the public domain, so you can listen here:
The closest I can get to a sample of the lovely soprano, Andréanne Paquin, is the following choir piece, which includes her, singing Charpentier/Lully – not a million miles from Couperin:
Anyway, the above is a really lovely short vid. If you don’t like it, you can metaphorically flush it down La Metaphorical Toilette de Venus by not playing it.
But actually I was brought up with some early Baroque madrigals ringing in my ears – a reel-to-reel recording, made by my father, from the radio, of Monteverdi’s Madrigals of Love and War.
The extraordinary BBC genome Project allows me to find the concert in question so easily it is almost embarrassingly easy – it was broadcast on 4 June 1974 at 21:50 – click here. I wouldn’t have heard the recording on that day – clearly, but dad probably played it to me pretty soon afterwards and I remember listening to it a lot that summer. The concert had originally taken place in October 1973 – a few weeks after I started secondary school.
But I digress…
…except to say that I had never heard any Madrigals of Love and War live and was keen to hear some – hence my particular desire to book this concert.
Thursday evening is not (and in those days certainly was not) Janie’s favourite night to go to a concert. Nor is Monteverdi one of her favourites.
This concert conformed Janie’s view that Monteverdi is not really for her. All too noisy and the male singing is a bit shouty, she claims. I sort-of know what she means, without agreeing with the conclusion.
Janie did enjoy some of the instrumental music, though…
…here is a vid of some other folk playing the opening number we heard that evening – Falconieri’s lovely Ciaconna in G major:
Angela & John “a few” years ago – Michael & Pam would approve the photo choice
This concert was the evening before Uncle Michael’s funeral, for which I was scheduled to be the soloist – i.e. eulogist.
Angela and John are patrons of the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO). They suggested that I might join them for this concert. An element of bonding exercise and an element (I suspect) of last minute stage management. John had stuck his neck out a little with his Rabbi by suggesting that a member of the family undertake the eulogy and they didn’t want any mistakes.
We discussed matters over drinks and nibbles with the patrons and benefactors before the show.
“Rabbi Rosenfeld is absolutely clear that you should keep the eulogy brief”, said John – who is a graduate of the Arsène Wenger school of management.
“I got the message – I’ve timed the speech; eighty-nine minutes…”
“…EIGHT OR NINE MINUTES…if it goes past ten minutes I’ll shut you up myself…”
…I think John knew I was joking.
Meanwhile, unlike our family funeral, the concert was not going to proceed as planned. The Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin had gone down with “severe gastric flu” (as described in the apologetic programme note).
So we had a late substitute from one of the other dominions, Australia, in the form of Matthew Coorey.
The result was a game of two halves in some ways.
Supersub Coorey was spared the first half of of the concert, as Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili, wisely, chose to lead the orchestra herself in the Mozart Violin Concerto No 3.
I say the first half…of course the Mozart is quite a short work whereas the second half, Mahler Symphony No 9, is a 90 minute marathon. So it was more like an 80:20 thing than a game of two halves…
…I’m digressing. Point is, the first piece I suspect included all the nuance and personality that had been planned for this concert. I have an affection for that simple but charming piece and it was delivered very well that night.
By contrast, the Mahler seemed, while very professionally performed, a somewhat retreated, standard performance of the great work. Hats off to Coorey for taking on such a monumental work at such short notice. But “letting the orchestra just do its thing” is probably as good as it gets in those circumstances.
Here is a short video of Lisa Batiashvili playing at home, Tbilisi. I couldn’t find a legitimate vid of her playing Mozart so I thought this gorgeous piece of Bach would do nicely.
While here is a short vid of Matthew Coorey conducting. It isn’t Mahler…instead it is Kodaly, so there is still rather a lot of early 20th century noise and some unusual percussion – it was the closest I could find:
This was an opportunity to hear two genres of Indian music in one concert. I don’t think that we’d seen Amjad Ali Khan before this concert – although I had heard my father’s recordings of him playing with Ravi Shankar.
This concert was part of his residency at the Wigmore Hall, which I think was a new idea back then.
The first half of the concert was singing in the Carnatic (Southern Indian) tradition. This was interesting but not as relaxing and delightful to our ears as the sarod music performed by Amjad Ali Khan himself in the second half.
For some reason the Wigmore Hall on-line stub for this concert is incomplete and has errors in it (at the time of writing – February 20180 – here is the link anyway.
So I have uploaded the information sheet, which I am sure is accurate:
Professor Tim Connell had no idea what he was unleashing when he asked me to produce a party piece for the nascent Gresham Society Soirée.
I had no idea what sort of audience we might have, although Tim suggested that he was encouraging Gresham Society members to bring youngsters with them to give the event an age-diverse, party feel. That year, there were a few youngsters in the end.
Unaccustomed as I was to putting on party pieces at that time…a dozen or more years later I am far more seasoned at it…I fell back on material I had prepared or used in the past.
As a youngster myself, I had often used Any Old Iron as a party piece for entertaining old folk, as the old folk at the time that I was a young person were steeped in music hall material.
I had prepared a version of Any Old Iron with a rap break a couple of years earlier…for the life of me I cannot remember quite why…I think I had intended to use it at a Long Finance conference, as Brian Eno had been recommending that we break up the serious s*** with some musical audience participation. Hilariously predictable results ensued, not least a roasting in the Evening Standard…
…but I digress, other than to clarify that my Any Old Iron with a rap break (aka a vocal cadenza) remained on the e-jotter unused in 2009, until the Gresham Society Soirée of 2011. Here’s the very piece:
I decided to dress up in my most spivy outfit (see headline picture from the Lingfield races a few months earlier), including a Rolex-like watch and chain which I had given to my father in the 1990s and then re-inherited on his passing.
I also took a clutch of old pennies from my childhood old pennies collection, as I figured that the youngsters present wouldn’t appreciate what a weighty and princely-looking sum “tuppence” might seem unless they received some coin of the appropriate era.
I also decided, with the benefit of hindsight, unwisely, to involve the pianist, David Jones, not only in playing the piece for me (which of course he was able to do with ease and aplomb). Unbeknown to me at the time, David is a master of the party piece in which you sing faster and faster – in his case the far more difficult Elements Song by Tom Lehrer…
…I am digressing again…
…anyway, I asked David also to join in some business, which occurred to me as we practiced ahead of the show, where I would approach the piano and say:
Hit me!
…in the time honoured fashion to encourage a musician to play. The joke was that David was to feign misunderstanding the entreaty and pretend to throw a punch at me.
We practiced the manoeuvre a couple of times. My final note to David was that he would need to put more effort into the fake-punch and I would have to put more motion into the fake receipt of the punch to make the device look realistic.
But in the heat of show, as it were, David possibly over-enthused…or I under-dodged…such that I really did receive a punch from David, which made me stop for a moment and say:
Ow, that really did hurt
…before carrying on. I think the audience thought it was all part of the show, so they laughed just as we had wanted them to. The song went down well. The bruise wasn’t too bad. David is still talking to me…just about…but perhaps not so open to my last minute bright ideas for performance tweaks any more.
We’d seen them perform before and had even previously seen one of their concerts at which Andrew Carwood explained the sectarian political backdrop to the music in those Tudor times…
…it must have been like the politics of Brexit but with capital punishment in place of the earhole bashing.
No wonder these Tudor composers took solus in lamentations and such Jeremiad material.
As usual with such concerts, it was fascinating to hear the contrast between the lesser and the better known composers; Tallis and especially Byrd being the better known and better represented composers on the night. The better known fellows deserve their status in my view; certainly for this type of music.
Late in life, mum formed an unlikely friendship with the young, extremely talented pianist, Karim Said. I can’t remember exactly how it came about.
I know I recorded some BBC4 programmes about young musicians, which mum loved and watched over and over. Karim was one of those featured artists.
I think mum then watched those programmes with Angela Broad and I’m pretty sure Angela knew Karim, perhaps because he was one of the Tabors’ sponsored artistes…so the rest is history…
…anyway, mum and Angela had been to see and had met Karim before this gig. Mum and Karim had also had some exchange of correspondence, I seem to recall.
A very young Karim, I think from mum’s earlier outing with Angela to see him
Mum the groupie. I don’t suppose artistes at Karim’s stage have that many groupies either.
When this concert came up, it was most fortuitously located and timed for me; lunchtime at St John’s Smith Square. As a friend of the venue, I get a fist-full of free passes for those lunchtime concerts. I was also able to organise my work around a visit to Church House that morning, which was maximally convenient.
Here’s the order of play:
Charlotte Bonneton And Karim Said at St John’s Smith Square. The violinist and pianist perform Beethoven’s Sonata For Violin And Piano No 3, Boulez’s 12 Notations For Solo Piano and Faure’s Violin Sonata No 1 In A.
My taste in music did not/does not always coincide with mum’s and Angela’s, but on this occasion we were as one. We all enjoyed the Beethoven and the Fauré; we none of us liked the Boulez, which seemed in any case to make poor Karim’s fingers bleed.
“I’m going to tell him if no-one else will…” said Angela afterwards, in the matter of the commercial sense (or lack thereof) in Karim pursuing the work of composers like Boulez.
No matter.
Mum had a cracking good time. Karim was extremely pleasant and attentive after the concert. He even introduced us to his fellow musician, Charlotte, making mum ever so pleased by describing mum as his friend.
At a very geeky level this is an exciting Wigmore Hall concert, because this was our first concert of the 2011-2012 season, which was the first season that Wigmore Hall archived fully on-line.
In truth, Brad Mehldau concerts tend to be a bit geeky anyway. The fellow has so many influences and blends so many styles in with his jazz piano, the concert is almost like a music quiz.
Back then, I was less fascinated by the mandolin than I am now at the time of writing (January 2018)…
…but I have long been intrigued by the instrument and it was very interesting to hear it used as a jazz pairing with Brad’s inimitable jazz piano style.
I think technically Brad was no longer the curator of the Wigmore Hall jazz seasons by the time this concert came around, although it might have been, technically, the tail end of his 2010/2011 commitment to the venue.
I seem to recall that I enjoyed this concert more than Janie did…
…I also seem to recall that we both felt that we had “done” Brad Mehldau now, this being the third of his we had been to, unless the concert works or partner musicians were the main attraction for us…
