Travel, Theatre, Music, Cricket, Tennis, Writing, Life
This was an afternoon concert at the V&A. I’m not sure how we got on to this one. Daisy wasn’t yet a member of the V&A – perhaps one of her clients suggested it.
The Sephardic music was very sweet and interesting. A relatively small room/small audience at the V&A, I recall.
We very much enjoyed the experience.
The programme follows:
Neither Janie nor I remember very much about this concert, other than attending it.
I can see some e-mail correspondence with The Roundhouse, as I had booked a package to include VIP bar (whatever that might have meant), but they decided not to have a VIP bar that night so refunded some of my money.
Quite right – the idea of a VIP bar is not very Castro-Cuban, is it?
We heard recordings of and bought some Los Van Van music while we were on holiday in Cuba in 2007 (which I shall Ogblog in the fullness of time).
I can’t really recall why, but the concert at The Roundhouse didn’t quite send us. I think we expected something a bit livelier and Janie had such wonderful memories of dancing at Casa de la Trova etc. when in Cuba…
…of course it wasn’t going to feel like that…
…although this write up from 2009 and enticing video promised plenty – click here.
(If the above link doesn’t work, the text at least is scraped to here).
So I’m not entirely sure why this wasn’t more memorable for us…but it wasn’t. Just as well there is a vid from the previous year’s concert, then.
I think this might have been the first time we saw Juan Martín team up with The Nash Ensemble at the Wigmore Hall; something they do irregularly but resolutely.
Not all the sort of music we normally seek out – Janie prefers earlier stuff, but she is partial to a bit of flamenco guitar and Juan Martín sure provides that.
I am especially partial to a bit of De Falla and there was plenty of that on show.
This is a few months ahead of the Wigmore Hall’s on-line archive resource starting, but I have found an on-line review – Jim Pritchard for musicweb-international.com – click here- that sums up the concert very well.
Goodness knows what we ate afterwards. My guess – shawarmas.
Janie and I spent two consecutive evenings at The Wig, where we enjoyed the enchanting sound of Julia Fischer playing:
The music is, of course, simply divine. I’m no expert, but Julia’s interpretation is full of texture and flavour to my ears.
No mucking about, I bought the CD set there and then – I still listen to them quite often.
The concerts had this superb review in the Guardian – deservedly so.
Truly memorable evenings and a very special way to spend Valentine’s Night too.
This was the second Reverb: Roundhouse concert we went to over a long weekend in January – we took that Monday off work.
This one didn’t wow us quite as much as the Joanna MacGregor one on the Saturday, but still we really enjoyed it.
In many ways this one was more star-studded, with Charles Hazlewood, Adrian Utley from Portishead, Charlie Jones from Goldfrapp and both of the Unthank sisters to thank.
It was an interesting idea to set The Beggar’s Opera with folk tunes and baroque music from Purcell and Handel. It succeeded in its own way, but perhaps, to my mind, Brecht/Weill have taken that work as far as it can go down the fusion line.
We were thirsty for more of this sort of thing at the Roundhouse, but have not since (writing in 2017) seen quite such inspired-looking programmes at that venue. Which is a shame, as we really like the place.
Still, this evening rounded off a long weekend well, at the Roundhouse
We went to two classical concerts with early music leanings at the Roundhouse in the space of three days as part of the Reverb series; we loved both.
This was the first of the two, on the Saturday.
We hadn’t seen Joanna MacGregor before, although we had heard of her. I was aware that she had been a Gresham professor of music.
There was real flare and excitement to this concert; a really interesting blend of early music, south american music and contemporary and jazz themes.
In the moment, I bought a couple of Joanna MacGregor albums on the night:
We’ve listened to these albums a lot and had a lot of enjoyment from them, although they bear little resemblance to the music we heard that night.
Subsequently I bought another one, Play, which reflected at least a couple of the items we heard in the concert.
Anyway, the concert was lovely and left us very excited ahead of the next one, a mere two days away.
Trio Mediæval by Tore Sætre, CC BY-SA 4.0
Trio Mediæval, the Bananarama of high quality mediaeval singing, bowled us over with this concert in late 2009. Three Scandanavian sopranos who sing beautifully and look like they are having fun doing so.
This is what we saw:
I have managed to find, on YouTube, a fragment of Trio Mediæval singing some of these fragments, albeit singing them somewhere other than the Wigmore Hall.
It should give you an idea of what we heard:
After the concert I bought their album, Words Of The Angels – we listen to it quite often it is so lovely.
Janie and I were not yet daunted by the dread of going up west that close to Christmas (to be fair, Sunday evening is probably as tolerable as it gets), so we booked this concert for mid December and I’m so glad we did.
A very memorable and enjoyable evening; we also enjoyed a Monday off work the next day.
We had actively encouraged “The Wig” to do more jazz, so booked up a couple of Brad Mehldau’s concerts when he was first appointed jazz curator.
We went to the first of these, Brad playing solo, back in April – click here.
We rather liked it and eagerly awaited the second concert, which was to be a trio with bass and drums, which we thought would be more to our taste.
It was.
Why we subsequently booked to see Brad solo again for stressy pre Christmas 2015, during which we vaguely remembered feeling that we anyway preferred seeing him with a group rather than solo, is a bit of a mystery to me – must have been the Bach link. My bad, as the young folk say.
Anyway, the Trio concert from 16 October 2009 is all explained in the sheet below.
This was one of two gigs that week at The Wig. The other gig was with the saxophonist Joshua Redman, whom we have subsequently seen at the Wigmore Hall. John Fordham in the Guardian gave both very good reviews – here.
This concert did more for me than it did for Daisy.
I thought she might like classical music, of the Mozart and Mendelssohn kind, in the form of string quartets rather than the symphonies and orchestral pieces she claims not to like.
Wrong.
She still found them twiddly and not to her taste really.
Not that she minded; an evening at the Wigmore Hall would struggle to be unpleasant.
This is exactly what we saw:
Take my word for it; they were very good.
The conceit of this tasty concert was to play baroque music that has been used in movies in the last 25 years.
It would have made little difference to us had we remained ignorant of the movie link, but possibly the conceit helped to pull in an audience, not that the Academy of Ancient Music needs much help at the Wigmore Hall on a Friday evening. Perhaps it helped the night before in Cambridge.
Richard Egarr has a very pleasant manner, as do the named soloists for this gig.
This is what we heard:
Just what the doctor ordered after a hard week’s work. Or under any circumstances really.
