A mild, damp evening with the moon popping out from behind the clouds from time to time. And I was pleased to see that the gas men had got around to moving the cones guarding their parking space underneath the West Street bridge, giving locals their bi-directional access back. Or was it an irritated local who got around to moving them? On which subject see, for example, reference 3, from the day before.
Got to the station to find that Waterloo trains were off, but that there was a train to Victoria at the time the journey planner had given me. So climbed on that and sat down across the gangway from a young couple, apparently heading for a long bus journey at Victoria. The young man seemed to be a really bad tempered specimen, going on in a very bad tempered way about the racism of football fans of France and Italy. Which is a bad thing, but there was no need for him to go on about it to his girl friend in quite the way he did. And then he found another bone to pick. And another. All in all, he struck me as being both rude and ignorant. But perhaps he was just annoyed that she was spread all over the not very big table. Behind them another young lady was lecturing her telephone about diet and exercise, about which she seemed to know a great deal. Eventually, they all calmed down.
I thought to validate my picnicking on the tables and chairs outside the Finery (in Great Castle Street, behind Oxford Circus) by taking a glass of Quickie, as served in the Goat off Albemarle Street. It seemed very expensive, that is to say more expensive in the West End than in Mayfair, and I queried the price - to be mollified by the bother the barmaid and her manager (the house was not busy) went to to check the price. Which seemed to them to be right. Perhaps my memory of what they charged in the Goat had come unstuck; something to check on my next visit, due in ten days or so.
The couple with the individual coffee pots were back in the Beckstein Room, on this occasion complete with large format telephones on which to do their business while waiting for the off.
The concert was to be streamed, but this turned out to be fairly unobtrusive, with a few microphones, one camera on the wall front right and one camera on a tripod back left. Hall fairly full.
Somewhere, I had got the idea that the concert was to be given on a forte piano, the sound as Schubert would have heard it, but the piano on the stage was the usual Steinway. On the other hand a good chunk of the programme was given over to a discussion of the curious time signature given to the third impromptu - for cognoscenti, something called 'cut common time' - and the business of temperament and how it affected G sharp/A flat and G flat/F sharp, not the same thing at all to sensitive ears, despite what the regular piano keyboard might say. With Bing offering material on both sides of this particular fence. Furthermore, the piano did seem to have been tuned in an unusual way, rather as it seemed to have been for the similar concert noticed at reference 1. This despite the programme explicitly saying that the tuning was equal temperament, in the modern way. Perhaps this still leaves some wriggle room.
Impromptus very good, although my attention must have wandered slightly, as I was surprised by the ending of the last one. And I had grown to like the tuning.
Cock & Lion for the interval where we had car racing.
Sonata also very good, although some of the loud bits seemed a bit blurred to me; perhaps a bit too loud. And again, my attention must have been wandering slightly as I missed some of the many changes of mood until after the event, rather than catching the event itself, as it unfolded. Irritating.
I think we had the whole of the second movement repeated by way of an encore. Which I rather liked; made a change from the usual complete change of mood and tone.
All played from memory.
On exit from the tube at Victoria, I managed to get into what seemed like a very long tunnel, carrying me off to Cardinal Place. While I feel sure that before the recent building works, the walk between the railway platforms and the Victoria Line tube platforms was much shorter. Journey home otherwise quick enough, and uneventful.
Except for my telephone. For some reason it had been refusing to display recent photographs, having got stuck at some point during the day before. On the journey home, the display woke up - but by way of a quid pro quo - the calendar slipped into some funny new format, it taking me some hours to work out how to get the old format back again. Happened again yesterday, but on this occasion I though to re-boot, which cured the problem in minutes rather than hours.
Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/staier.html.
Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/piano-2.html.
Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/11/a-woman-of-no-importance.html.
Reference 4: http://francescopiemontesi.com/. Swiss, not Italian, as I had thought.
Reference 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_l9ZVYky5Q. This morning, this YouTube offering doesn't much remind me of the concert at all! Have to get a CD out.
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