Got to the Festival Hall to find that the policy of providing shelter for various strays, not to say indigents, had been reversed by the removal of a lot of the tables and chairs, which meant that we had to go upstairs to find somewhere to sit while we took our picnic. The attendant that I asked seemed rather embarrassed by the matter, but suggested that paying customers had been complaining.
The Hall itself was very full, even to the boxes. And for the first time I noticed a row of what looked like the gun ports of a battleship of the time of Trafalgar above both left hand and right hand banks of boxes. Most of the ladies were wearing trousers although there were quite a lot of very high heels.
Uchida had elected to both play the piano and direct the orchestra, for which purpose the lid of her piano had been removed. And for someone just about our age, she displayed a huge amount of energy, not least in the speed with which she could switch from playing to directing. In which she made much display of her large hands, very much the hands of a manual worker. I thought at first the absence of a lid was weakening the sound of the piano, but I had forgotten about that by the time she finished. She played without music and seemed to spend most of the time gazing into space, only coming down to the keys in the tricky bits.
The leader was a young man from the UK and he appeared to be leading his troops with the end of his violin; I couldn't compute its movement, but there was a lot of it. I felt sorry, not for the first time, for the long wait to come into action of the trumpeters and the timpanist. Contrariwise, the flautist had a very big part, played on a black rather than a white flute. Black, the chap next to me explained, for a more mellow tone. String sound very good, and not hearing orchestral music very often, struck by the distinctive quality of the sound of a lot of violins playing quietly.
We wondered about the terms of employment of the orchestral players. Were they salaried or were they zero-hours, supplemented by salaries from their day jobs?
A much stronger atmosphere than one gets in the Wigmore Hall, which we put down to there being a lot more people. Four times as many? And we thought there was a rather bigger proportion of people of working age.
All in all, a tremendous concert. We will look out for more of the same.
On the train home, rather than football, we had a long debrief, from a few seat away from a middle man into his mobile phone, about his game of Dungeons and Dragons, or some such.
Eventually, he was replaced by a lady of uncertain years who had travelled up from Cornwall, with a 23 year old dog in a shopping trolley, but very little luggage otherwise.
PS: the middle of row K was spot on for a concert of this sort.
Reference 1: https://mahlerchamber.com/. 'The Mahler Chamber Orchestra (MCO) was founded in 1997 based on the shared vision of being a free and international ensemble, dedicated to creating and sharing exceptional experiences in classical music. With 45 members spanning 20 different countries at its core, the MCO works as a nomadic collective of passionate musicians uniting for specific tours in Europe and across the world. The orchestra is constantly on the move: it has, to date, performed in over 40 countries across five continents. It is governed collectively by its management team and orchestra board; decisions are made democratically with the participation of all musicians'.
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