That Terrible Piano At The Wigmore Hall

I have described the first part of the concert by the Silisean Quartet in another post.

There was an interval, when the Wigmore's piano was wheeled out, for Juliusz Zarebski's Piano Quintet in G Minor.

The band trooped out, took their seats, and prepared to play.

The pianist, Wojciech Switala, looked like a man familiar with the ideas of finesse and light touch, touched the keys, and all hell broke loose. However much he might have tried to do justice to the light, skipping phrases on the sheet music in front of him, what came out were blurred phrases, indistinct runs, and chords that could have had any notes jammed together, so hard was it to hear any harmony in the sheer noise. The musical effect was of standing on a seaside promenade during a bad storm: great crashing waves of sound drenching the poor band in front of the piano, and a dense sonic spray soaking the audience.

I had first heard this ghastly racket in a lunchtime concert given by some music students. I imagined that the young pianist was, however skilful, simply over-excited and hence heavy-handed. Switala is undoubtedly skilful, and looked every inch the consummate, experienced professional. And he could not hold back the crashing waves of deafening sound that over-sized horror produces.

It is so loud that when played quietly it provides a useful accompaniment to the unemployed busker at Piccadilly Circus underground, and renders inaudible the announcements at Euston mainline station. At a brisk forte, commercial airline pilots on approach to landing at Heathrow have been known to wonder if their engines have failed, as the piano effortlessly drowns out the engines' sound.

That monstrosity clocks up over 90 dbA at full thump. I measured it. 90 dbA is as loud as the big bass drum of the Royal Household Guards. It's as loud as the Rolling Stones playing a ballad in concert. There are quieter lawnmowers and pneumatic drills. 90 dbA is in more-than-thirty-minutes-is-hazardous territory. By the end of the piece, my ears felt slightly numb, a feeling I have previously only associated with huge stacks of loudspeakers and amplifiers. I heard less sheer noise from the organ in the Royal Festival Hall recently.

And the Siliseans may as well have been playing Mozart or Bartok for all they could be heard.

That piano is just TOO DARN BIG. It's at least half the width of the stage.

It's TOO LOUD.

It makes the best pianists sound like ham-fisted key-thumpers with no sense of interpretation or subtly of touch.

For the sake of the reputation of any pianist who plays there, get a smaller piano.

For the sake of the audiences' ears, GET A SMALLER PIANO.

Silesian String Quartet at the Wigmore Hall

To the Wigmore Hall one fine evening earlier this week to hear the Silesian String Quartet.

The Silesians played the two string quartets, Bacewicz's Fourth, and Weinberg's Third, in the first half of the concert. At some point, I realised that they were not playing £400 instruments from Chimes at the Barbican. Theirs sounded like the real thing: audible and clear without being loud or shrill, warm and articulate. As far back as I was, the music was in mono, and I had to watch the players' hands to link the sound with the instrument, but that's live music for you. We see the different strands of music rather than hear them: or at least amateurs like me do. The Silesians sounded like a top-flight string quartet is supposed to sound: confident, clear, familiar with the music, but not having over-thought it.

Polish composers from the mid-twentieth century have became a Thing a couple of years ago. Even I have Grazyna Bacewicz' string quartets, and some Mieczyslow Weinberg symphonies, on CD. Good listenable stuff it is too. Looking at the cover, oh, silly me! It was recorded by the, ah, Silesian String Quartet. The live performance of the Fourth was definitely clearer and the playing at once more relaxed and precise: maybe they have grown much more familiar with it since the recording.

That first half was how I remembered live chamber music. I could let it wash over me, or listen to the details, depending on how I felt at the moment, and both were rewarding.

Then came the interval.

See the next post.

Epping Forest

We west-London-suburb people think we have the best parks: Richmond Park, Bushey Park, Virginia Water, Hampton Court. All terribly royal.

But we don't have Epping Forest.

How has it taken me so long to go there?

Because I'm for sure going back.

I met Sis at Liverpool Street, we took the Overground to Chingford, turned right outside the railway station, walked through the bus station and so help me it's right there. Open parkland and forest stretching into the distance.

For our first outing, we stuck to the east side, walked up to Connaught Water and turned right to go to Loughton to pick up the Central Line. Nice little walk. We'll do the big stuff off to the west on the next trip.

(Shots like these are the benefit of fancy cameras. This picked up all the detail from quite shady scenes.)

Hastings

Sis and I went to Hastings recently.

OK. Stop rolling your eyes. We didn't know, okay?

A day or so afterwards, I started to wonder: what am I taking photographs for anyway?

The camera-phone stuff I took on my way to work was basically pretty. Striking buildings, blue skies, odd contrasts, reflections in office windows, the sort of scene that makes your day feel a bit better.

Hastings... is not pretty.

What I wanted was a "nice day out" and some pretty photographs.

Didn't happen.

So I took a few shots and gave up.

I look at these now, and you know? They're they're not great, but neither are they bad. The hotels going diagonally across the frame; a perfectly serviceable joggers-on-the-promenade shot; the shops underneath the hotels, and that long iron-stain on the front of the Palace Court. You get some kind of feel for the place.

Then there were these decay-as-art shots...

And here's the pretty one to end with. A study in greys worthy of Whistler.

The next trip to the coast we make will be prefaced by enough research to ensure sandy beaches. With sunshine.

If I was a real photographer, I would make trips to Kent Coast towns with pebbly beaches and take well-framed shots of tired 1890's buildings, closed shops, unsightly modern developments, and whatever attractive views there may be.

But I'm a tourist. I want a nice day out and some pretty pictures.

Which is sort of an answer to my original question, but now I want to add: is that all?

Xenakis at the Queen Elizabeth Hall

To the QEH Saturday to hear an hour's worth of Xenakis.

The QEH is a 900-seater with reasonable rake up the rows. The stage is fairly narrow

and these look like acoustic treatment panels

as these

look like speakers. As you can see from the stage photograph (click to enlarge) there were mics all over everyone. So I'm not sure if they were recording, or if were really hearing the PA rather than the live instruments. It felt like we were hearing the live instruments.

The band was the London Sinfonietta. This is a long-established, well-respected crew that specialises in contemporary music. Most of the players have quality careers and academic positions.

The last piece was Thallein, which was written for the Sinfonietta.

It so happens I have a recording of Thallein. (Doesn't everyone?) Boulez, Ensemble Contemporian, 2007. I tried to listen at comparable volume levels, without scaring the neighbours.

Boulez' interpretation has a lighter touch, a better sense of pace, and brings out the tunefulness and rhythm of some of the phrases. It might have been a different piece of music.

The recording / mixing / mastering engineers on Boulez' session knew what they were doing. Placement and separation of instruments. Clarity. Neither the percussion nor the piano over-whelmed, even when it was required to be loud. On stage the percussion was in the centre and overwhelmed everyone when it hammered forth. On the recording, it's on the right speaker: it's loud, but it's localised. On stage the piano was on the left, as it is in the recording, but on the recording it's one instrument out of many, whereas on stage it was the instrument when it had a part.

The CD + Hi-fi win this one.

Now let's talk briefly about post-war avant-garde music. Most of it was produced by academics or composers with generous government grants. It was deliberately written to be hard on the ear - lest any moment of it sound like Mozart or Wagner. It has many instruments playing different notes at the same time, but they are not playing a chord (not even a C dim flat 4 sus 5 add minor 11), as the intention is to make a LOUD NOISE rather than even a wonky harmony. It is very easy to interpret this music in this way, and played like that, it is barely listenable. That's why Boulez' recording is such an eye-opener.

Had the Sinfonietta's interpretation picked out the strands in the music more clearly, turned down an f in the forte-s, and found reason to be delicate at times, as well as to insist on some rhythmic structure to the phrases that might support it, well, it still would have been Xenakis, but much better-tempered. He started as an architect: architects do rhythm and elegance and nice little surprises - even the Brutalists - why would he change when writing music?

Which brings me to ticket prices. I was sitting down front, in the sweet spot, and it cost £30. For just over an hour. On Amazon the Boulez 2-CD is £8.84 with free Prime delivery. It's available on Qobuz. When I go to a live concert, I'm not paying to hear the music: I can do that almost for free at home. I'm paying for the quality of the interpretation by conductors and instrumentalists, nearly all of whom are very smart people with degrees and years of playing experience and scholarship behind them. I want them to let me hear something I haven't heard from anyone else before, that makes me go home and listen again to what I have.

For that £30 would be cheap. Without that, it's too much.

Clown-World And Other Media Content

I used to write about political and social issues.

Do that now, taking the media as one's lead, and one winds up dealing, mostly, with four kinds of content: clown-world, freak-show, temper-tantrums, and press releases.

Clown-world is a denial of economic or practical rationality, possibly accompanied by a recital of dubious research and a liberal dollop of bullshit. Masks are clown-world. CNN shouting Russia, Russia, Russia for three years. Putin starting a conventional ground war against the Ukraine. The IMF asking the British Chancellor to do what Gordon Brown would have done. Anyone who thinks that the world's economy can live with sub-5% interest rates forever. Anything backed up by unanimity, rather than overwhelming data, is clown-world.

Crucially, Indulging the freak-show is also clown-world behaviour.

The freak-show is any attention-seeking behaviour: a) for causes that have no basis in fact, or that has no economic benefit to the participants or anyone else; or b) reaches the levels expected from a borderline or bi-polar personality disorder.

Tik-Tok is an all-day freak-show. A Trade Union march for higher pay and better conditions is ordinary business. Pulling down statues to protest behaviour that happened two hundred years ago is freak-show, as is ostentatious Veganism. Modest religious practice is normal life. Almost all virtue-signalling is freak-show, if it isn't already clown-world. Extinction Rebellion is pure freak-show, because its cause is... unfounded. Pride Week is pure freak-show. On the other hand, drag acts are not freak-show since the drag artists get paid, and Morris dancing is just weird. Quintin Crisp was an eccentric, because he didn't care if people noticed or not.

Having a protest march to keep open a traditional right-of-way that some landowner wants to close is just fine - as long as they also raise the associated legal applications. Otherwise it's either naive, or a temper-tantrum.

The first huge temper-tantrum was after the Brexit poll, then Trump 2016, followed by the 2019 Brexit debates in the House of Commons, and more recently the EU threw one when Italy electing the "wrong" person, and the markets throw one every time a Chancellor does something they need him not to do. A group of people throws an enormous hissy fit, bad-mouths whatever it was, and tries to sabotage it, while also claiming that the people who made the "wrong decision" are everything from merely ignorant to Putin's stooges to the kind of criminal who has to be put in solitary for their own protection. One group of people exhibit the most open, snarling, vicious, seething contempt for whoever it was made the "wrong decision", and would rather burn down the world than shrug, move on, behave like a pro, and make it work for them.

Then there's the PR masquerading as news (any article based on something a charity says, or that tells you what a Minister is going to say, or in which a company name or senior manager is prominent, or reports an "expert" or a "scientist" pushing a political policy), and on the extreme end of that is outright propaganda, as with Covid. In newspapers and news shows, this covers the arts reviews, the sports reporting, anything on fashion and lifestyle.

As the good Lord Rothermere (or the other one) said: news is anything someone doesn't want you to know. Look at any newspaper in that light and find me one item of news.

Where Is Everyone? The Empty Universe Problem

Here's a nice video I stumbled across, about the perennial question of why ET hasn't visited us yet.



Here's another kind of answer: look at our own planet. There are / have been a number of major cultures / civilisations. At the start if the 19th century there were the Japanese, Chinese, Muslim / Arabic, Hundu and other Indian, African, South American, Native American, Aboriginal, plus smaller civilisations on ocean islands.

I may have missed one, but I'm sure we would still have had steam engines, dynamos, AC current, penicillin, powered flight... what's that?

Some of those cultures (Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Indian) at one stage or another deliberately decided to stop developing? And the rest simply didn't have the resources to develop? It was only the unwashed, disease-ridden, war-inclined, Europeans (counting the Western Russians as European) who developed advanced science and technology? And not all of them at the start.

That's the other answer.

The Universe is full of other civilisations. Most of whom are still struggling to survive on planets with even more marginal environments than ours (and most of our own is only good for the fishes, and a lot of the rest is sand, rock and ice), while the others at some stage decided to stop with all this intellectual development lark. It's a very popular political policy for the ruling class: wait until the circumstances are nicely beneficial for the rulers, and set everything in aspic forever. As long as everyone on the planet does that, it's going to work. Feudal bucolic bliss forever.

The question isn't where is everybody, it's what makes rulers tolerate revolutionaries and even take up the new ideas?

Never mind being alone in the Universe. Imagine if we weren't, and then found out that everyone else was pleasant but didn't have one idea to rub between them?

What do you mean: you don't need to imagine that?