The Lake at Victoria Park

 

Sis and I made a trip to Victoria Park earlier in the year, at the height of the Great Parching of Britain's Grass, and it wasn't a wonderful experience. A couple of weeks ago, we walked there from Haggerston along the Regents Canal (more photos to come) and it was a glorious day. We had sandwiches at the cafe, which is excellent with lots of outdoor seating, and has these views from the bench.

Cirrus Sky, Hanworth Air Park

It's been a long time since we've had an Autumn like this.

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.