Tag: John Lennon

Miloš & The Piatti Quartet At The Wigmore Hall, 13 July 2025

Miloš: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, CC BY 2.0

Janie and I were really taken with Miloš Karadaglić when we first saw him, at The Wig, more than 10 years ago:

Miloš Karadaglić, Wigmore Hall, 22 February 2015

I bought some CDs (remember them?) on the back of that concert and we attempted to see him again a year or two later, but he had to cancel that concert due to injury and disappeared off our radar for a while.

I had noticed his name on schedules relatively recently, but this was the first time that the timings worked for us…more or less.

I say “more or less”, because I knew that we would most likely be at Lord’s that day for the fourth day of the test match…

Four Out Of Five Days At The England v India Lord’s Test, 10 to 14 June 2025

…and a day at the test followed by a concert at The Wig was sure to be a rigorous test for Pinky, my brand-new hip.

Still, Lord’s and the Wigmore Hall are the only places left on the planet where some stewards and fellow patrons still occasionally refer to me as “young man”, so it had to be worth a go.

Pinky and I passed the test with flying colours, as did Miloš Karadaglić. But things have also changed for Miloš since we last saw him. For a start, he has become mononymous; “Miloš” is his entire billing name now. Miloš now plays with some strapping on one of his hands and plays accompanied rather than solo, perhaps to help manage his workload.

When I booked the concert the plan was for him to be accompanied by an accordion player, but the concert was changed substantially between booking and concert. Instead we saw him with the Piatti Quartet, which, frankly, was more to our taste than I imagine the accordion would have been.

Here is a link to the Wigmore Hall resources for the concert.

The concert was lovely. Miloš still plays delightfully and with great elegance. You could sense that he had built a great rapport with the quartet for this concert/mini-tour. The Piatti Quartet also played beautifully.

Miloš explained that, in a musical world that is increasingly about playlists that keep individual items short, while mixing and matching styles, this concert was designed like such a playlist. Hence the four movements of the Castelnuovo-Tedesco Guitar Quintet unusually peppered throughout the concert.

In the first half we heard:

  • Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco – Guitar Quintet Op. 143: I. Allegro, vivo e schietto
  • Benedetto Marcello – Oboe Concerto in D minor: II. Adagio
  • Luigi Boccherini – Guitar Quintet in D G448 ‘Fandango’
  • Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco – Guitar Quintet Op. 143: II. Andante mesto
  • Malcolm Arnold – Serenade for guitar and strings Op. 50
  • Anon – Spanish Romance
  • Ástor Piazzolla – Libertango

This video clip of him playing the Spanish Romance will give you a sense of his playing:

During the interval, Janie struck up a conversation with the American lady who was sitting, alone, to Janie’s right. The lady told us that she had become a bit of a groupie for Miloš, having seen him several times at various locations in the recent past. She seemed surprised (and perhaps a little envious) that we had seen him as long ago as 2015. She then admitted that she had somewhat of a crush on Miloš and blushed. I asked politely what Miloš has that I haven’t got? I thought I heard a rather complimentary response from the blushing lady, although Janie claims to have heard the response differently. “Young man” was not part of the answer in either of our rememberings.

In the second half we heard:

  • Philip Glass – String Quartet No. 2 ‘Company’
  • Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco – Guitar Quintet Op. 143: III. Scherzo. Allegro con spirito, alla marcia
  • Pablo Casals – Song of the Birds (arranged by Piatti Quartet)
  • Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco – Guitar Quintet Op. 143: IV. Finale. Allegro con fuoco
  • Harold Arlen – The Wizard of Oz: Over the Rainbow (arranged by Tōru Takemitsu)
  • The Beatles – Eleanor Rigby
  • The Beatles – Fool on the Hill
  • The Beatles -Here Comes the Sun
  • Encore: Antonio Luca Vivaldi – Concerto in D major for flute, oboe, violin and bassoon RV90: II. Largo

Here is a link to the Programme text.

The Light Within: O/Modernt Chamber Orchestra Feat. Soumik Datta (Sarod) & Gurdain Rayatt (Tabla),The Wigmore Hall, 21 July 2024

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:

O/MODƏRNT: Monteverdi to Tango & Monteverdi in Historical Counterpoint, Wigmore Hall, 3 July 2015

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:

  • Johann Sebastian Bach –  Contrapunctus 1 from Art of Fugue BWV1080
  • Pēteris Vasks – Concerto No. 2 ‘In Evening Light’ UK première I. Andante con passione • II. Andante cantabile • III. Andante con amore
  • Max Richter – On the Nature of Daylight
  • Soumik Datta  – Migrant Birds from Awaaz (arranged by Jordan Hunt)
  • John Lennon & Paul McCartney – Blackbird (arranged by Johannes Marmén)
  • Soumik Datta – 1947 from Awaaz (arranged by Jordan Hunt)
  • Jordan Hunt – Misremembrance
  • Wojciech Kilar – Orawa
  • Soumik Datta – Awaaz from Awaaz (arranged by Jordan Hunt)
  • John Lennon & Paul McCartney – Across The Universe (arranged by Johannes Marmén, plus sarod & tabla riff) – encore

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.

Soumik Datta getting ready

Technician “turning it up to eleven” for Soumik Datta and Gurdain Rayatt

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.

Luxury Travel Fair, Olympia West and Revolutions Weekender, V&A, 4 to 6 November 2016

6-november-2016-va
Doesn’t look all that revolting to me.

Janie and I arranged a day off on the Friday (4th) primarily to visit the Luxury Travel Fair.  Conde Nast Traveller Magazine had bunged Janie a couple of freebie tickets and we are seeking ideas for our next trip.

We had also wanted to keep some extra time free for the weekend as the V&A had mysteriously pre-announced that there would be a weekend of activities around the Revolution Exhibition – which we saw in preview a couple of months ago – click here. Janie had chased this up a couple of times but we only got the programme about a week before – still several items looked good.

Here’s a link to that very V&A programme – click here.

I didn’t hold much hope for the travel fair, so wasn’t too disappointed when Janie announced that she needed to get Bill to sort out a problem with the boiler at the house and that first thing Friday was the ideal time. Naturally, that took up the whole morning, so in the end we got to the travel fair around 14:45.

There were a few interesting stands, but on the whole the larger agents had sent their “B” teams to staff the stands and very few of the smaller agents covered holidays that might appeal to us. Cruise anyone? Not us.

So we had bags of time to get to the V&A for the first thing we wanted to see: a movie entitled Louder Than Love by Tony D’Annunzio which was due to be shown at 18:15. We got there about half an hour early, to discover that the movies were running early so that piece was playing to an empty room as we arrived and we caught the last 20-25 minutes of it. Probably got enough out of it that way nonetheless. Roger Daltry and Alice Cooper being the most interesting people from that scene still alive and their interviews were in that last reel.

That timing shift enabled us to see John Lennon “In His Own Write” that same evening. This is basically a performance piece based on John Lennon’s 1964 poetry book of that name. Cartoons too, projected onto a screen. The performers; Jonathan Glew, Peter Caulfield and Cassie Vallance, were all very good. Some of the poems were good; some very silly, some horribly violent. Still, certainly an hour well spent before dinner.

We also saw a small exhibit about Glastonbury and danced for a while in a rub-a-dub stylee to Babylon Uprising. Not quite “Janie and Ian, the only one’s dancing”…but not far off.

Sunday 6 November

After a cold game of tennis at Boston Manor, we went straight to the V&A to see a conversation between Joe Boyd and Nigel Waymouth. We were keen to see this, not least because Joe is a client of Janie’s and I found his book White Bicycles fascinating.

I thought I should try to sport some fitting gear, given our incongruous “just off the tennis court” look, so I wore the tee-shirt Kim had made for me from Janie’s “guru on a camper-van” picture which she used as the 60’s party invite in the spring:

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I also thought I should sport one of my most psychedelic-looking bandannas. It was indeed all in keeping with the subject matter of the conversation, just as I thought, although perhaps not so much in keeping with the way the rather elderly (on the whole) audience was dressed.

We ran into Brian Eno briefly before the session started. I don’t think he stayed for the session, so must have been popping in to see Joe before the start.

At the end of the session Janie asked Joe Boyd a rather penetrating question about commercialism (or rather lack thereof), which I thought was by far the most interesting question (and indeed answer) in the Q&A bit of the event. Whether or not Joe will have anything more to do with Janie after that question is hard to say.  I’ll guess yes.