Just back from an evening of music at the newly refurbished Victoria Concert Hall. It's amazing what a few licks of paint and a bit of new upholstery can do. The hall is now seriously classy. Even the toilets made me feel undeserving.
And 23 string players plus Okko Kamu conducting did justice to Strauss's desperately despairing Metamorphosen. I thought it sounded intense on CD - I've got a version with Von Karajan at the helm - but live it's even more so: the music really goes nowhere; it's just despair upon despair. Alex Ross in The Art of Noise reckons it's Strauss's requiem for himself, and that rings true to me.
I wasn't expecting much from the Mendelssohn Concerto for Violin and Piano which, oddly, came after the interval, but I found it rather fetching, all told, with a lovely slow movement. It seems that Felix wrote it when he was just fourteen. Blimey! Imagine having something like that on your resume.
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2 comments:
I was there as well. Extraordinary that we didn't cross paths!
Very odd indeed. It wasn't exactly packed and we did a fair bit of looking around. Pity we didn't chance to compare notes - as it were.
But hang on. I thought you didn't like music!? What gives? Or were you just splendidly misleading me in our last confab?
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