As I saunter down to the Barbican for the first in a series of piano recitals I shall be attending over the coming months…
It started the night I went there for the Icelandic Peer Gynt production and was struck by the excitement in the audience waiting to go and see a recital by Evgeny Kissin. I want some of that excitement.
So last night was Maurizio Pollini playing Chopin and Liszt. The Chopin half was a little flat and dull to be honest, listless you might say, but things picked up with the Liszt, especially the last tune, a sonata in B minor. There then followed a series of encores but of course I can’t tell you what they actually were, although I overheard someone mentioning Debussy. Anyway this was definitely a concert that got better as it went on, partly because the numbers were more melodic, and partly for me at any rate because mental tiredness brought with it a certain relaxation and mellowness which allowed the music to wash over me .
But what really struck me was the audience. Albeit less excited than for Kissin, two things stood out:
First was the sense of joy people emitted as they left the Hall. These were smiley happy people and they hadn’t need pills to get like that. “Oh it was wonderful” gushed strangely attractive girls all around me. This contrasted with the dowdy smelly too cool to actually enjoy themselves crowds at the gigs I normally go to.
And second was diversity. I read recently about how the English Lit school syllabus is now geared towards “equal opportunities to such an extent that there is not one English or Welsh poet in a prescribed list of poetry" so pupils are studying Carol Ann Duffy (whoever the hell she is) rather than Milton. The myth is that somehow this represents diversity and inclusiveness. But looking around the Barbican, at an event which one might have expected to represent the pinnacle of elitist conservative western high culture, gave lie to the myth. On every level – age, sex, gender, ethnicity, nationality, eccentricity of nasal discharge, this was a more varied and diverse audience than at any other event I have been to. And a happier one too.
One only hopes that one day this crowd might rise up and sweep away all the bullshit and nannyism that infects this sceptred isle.
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