A damp evening.
The carriage which stopped next to us at Epsom station appeared to contain some noisy people, so we went to the next and sat in a four seater in what started as an empty end of carriage. But we were joined a few stops along by five lads who had been playing football, probably for some school nearer central London. Some of them were eating savoury rice out of foil tubs. One of them was of an age and disposition which meant that he had to dominant the space, talking more or less non stop until he got off, perhaps at Wimbledon. All about how he was not going to go to university as that was a waste of time and how he did not pay fares on public transport as that was for dopes. He may have had ambitions to be a footballer. But the two that were left when he got off looked rather relieved to be rid of him. Part of all this may have been a desire to annoy respectable adults such as ourselves.
Picnic'd outside on the one bench outside the perimeter of Cavendish Square. Then something of a gala occasion at the hall, pretty much full right up, with enhanced prices to match. The left hand flowers were not quite up to the standard of the right hand flowers for all that.
The two Germans turned out in proper formal attire. The singer had music and turned the pages but did not appear to use it. While I thought the pianist had two copies of the score side by side, which meant that he did not have to turn pages during a song. And we both thought that they did very well indeed; as good a Winterreise as we had heard. We wondered whether a German singing in German had more brain waves available to concentrate on the singing, than a foreigner to whom the language and poetry were apt to be unfamiliar. We also liked the sense of detachment given by the singer: he was both of the journey and looking on. A slightly wry looking on; a certain self-consciousness about all this romantic misery.
It also sounded different, something I had noticed in the baritone rendering at reference 1. Once again I associated to Bostridge's observation that transposition up or down by the odd semitone or so was not as neutral as one might think. It did funny things to the intervals. I certainly thought I heard lots of nuances in the accompaniment which I did not think I had heard before.
We both had the words. I did not use mine, preferring as usual to watch, while BH did use hers.
Audience very enthusiastic.
On the way to the tube station I had a Eureka moment: I thought I had really cracked the business of why one major key sounds different from another, being all to do with the vagaries of the difference between a just-temperament and an equal-temperament. I also wondered about how many different keys were involved in the 24 songs.
Just caught the 2115 from Vauxhall which was good, and once home I turned up the score, which told me both that there were quite a few keys and that some of the keys were a bit uncertain, with different early version having different keys.
And then this morning, I turn up the business of temperament and decide that my Eureka moment was an error. If you transpose a piece of music up or down some fixed number of semitones, what you end up with will sound very similar, certainly to the amateur ear, to what you started with. The various anomalies of equal temperament, disliked by some early music buffs and others, just move up and down with the transposition and the vagaries of just temperament have nothing to do with the resultant sound. So still grappling with what difference transposition might make and have run down what I hope are two factlets so far. First, an instrument like the human voice is often tweaked at the edges, away from pure equal temperament. Second, a piano is not tuned to an exact equal temperament because of something called the Railsback curve. Google also turns up something called mode. Work in progress.
Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/04/winterreise.html.
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