Wednesday 31 May 2006

Stansted airport (again, only 20 minute delay this time)
Last night's concert in Salisbury Cathedral was quite good fun in the end. Playing in an over-generous acoustic has its own problems, but it dealt with many of the difficulties that arose from playing in the cramped ungrateful sound of yesterday's rehearsal room.

I did manage to break one of the basic coarse acting rules of 'don't turn your back on the audience and don't bang into the furniture' though. I had organ and harpsichord to play with, after rehearsing only with harpsichord, and it was fun to decide which to play as I went along. But I also decided to wear shoes - Salisbury Cathedral is spectacular but it's not warm - and in a precious moment of silence between movements, I clattered into the stack of noisy metal chairs that I was sitting on, as I tried to make a swift and elegant dash from one instrument to the other. Oops.

After a mix-up with the schedule, the Arrival of the Queen of Sheba made it into the programme halfway through the afternoon, but the orchestral parts were still in transit, so in rehearsal the bass section played it from memory. All those hours spent playing the piano duet version aged 10 weren't wasted after all.

I stopped playing twice in the concert, unable or unwilling to join in the willfully ugly playing that was going around me. But I think I've figured out why it happens. Andrew Manze's been directing the group for a couple of years now, and as a soloist he's not averse to using ugliness to make a musical point. That's fine if you like that sort of thing, but when it's been taught to a whole orchestra so that it becomes a deliberate habit, it's really quite distressing to try and play along with it - and it sounds hideous. I'm a big fan of ugly music - many of my favourite musicians are capable of spectacular and virtuosic feats of hideousness - but to play Handel's music like that flies in the face of all we know about 18th century aesthetics. And it doesn't sound too good either.

Still, it wasn't all like that, and there was time for a nice picnic by the river in the sunshine before the concert.  Alison also let me hear her soon-to-be-released recording of the CPE Bach A major cello concerto, in which she successfully transcends the musical attention-seeking going on around her. The second movement's very beautiful indeed.