a classical week

a quieter week, by recent standards, but still time for 3 classical concerts:

at the RFH – Leif Ove Andsnes performing Beethoven , Sibellius, Grieg and Debussy;

at the Wigmore Hall – The Zehetmair Quartet performing Schubert, Holliger and Schumann;

at the Barbican – Piotr Anderszewski and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra performing Mozart Haydn and Beethoven.

What can I tell you?

At the Wigmore Hall I was sat in seat C13, just 4 along from the seat made famous in Ian McEwan’s ‘On Chesil Beach’ – as far as I could tell, none of the Zehetmair string quartet looked longingly in my direction.

The Holliger piece was a newly written piece. It was atrocious, buttock baringly bad. Sounded like a dreadful soundtrack to a gormless horror movie, full of atonal tuneless clichés. The rest of the evening was sublime.

The Barbican audience were the friendliest. And the baldest. I’d estimate that 4 in 5 of the blokes had some form of male pattern balding. These are my people.

Best encore was at the Barbican too, performed solo by Piotr Anderszewski, Bach if I’m not mistaken.

I drank too much coffee. This is because I am anxious about falling asleep. It doesn’t stop me nodding off though, but it does make me anxious about being anxious and my mind go whirling. Well the music makes it do this too, but I think the coffee enhances the effect. I should do what the regulars do, have a couple of glasses of red wine and just let it all hang out.

I should tell you what the pieces were but I can’t be bothered. You are not reading this anyway.

Also at the Barbican I checked out their latest exhibition, the Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art . The central conceit (I think that’s the right word) is that we are on Mars, looking at a museum the little greenies have put together from their foraging on Earth. But they get things wrong, and make weird connections. So far so – crap, but bearable. The problem is that the whole thing is put together in this weird alien accent – ho ho such funny mistakes the Martians make – but it is a bad accent, totally unconvincing, and one which keeps slipping when the curators feels the need to tell you something about the artist or work. So early impressions were as depressing as the not very funny art and humour shambles at the Heywood. But at least here some of the art is interesting – I liked the totem poles, weird masks, and generally a preponderance of peculiar wooden boxes with strange things in them – fake cabinets of curiosities. And for all the curators’ knowing irony, I wonder if they haven’t unwittingly stumbled upon another truth, that much contemporary art is in fact pants and completely unfathomable, that it might as well come from another planet.