Grand Finale, 13 November 2013

Tuesday, 13 November 2013

Heathrow Airport
London

Our European trip is concluded. We are en route home...in business class. I am pampered. Wes is too good to me. I appreciate it.

London was a whirlwind of outstanding things.

The River Cafe was warm, comfortable, expensive, sumptuous, delicious. Wild grouse quick roasted in a huge orange wood-fire oven.

Turbot steak, perfect, juicy with tender braised small fennel bulbs. Roast porcini and buttery pan-sautéed bruschetta drenched in merlot. We drank our own wine. A two-thousand-four Barolo. We brought it with us from La Morra. It's specific grapes were grown on our inn's hillside. The wine, to our surprise, had a white truffle aroma.

We heard the Takács String Quartet in two concerts. We heard them in the spacious, elegant, blue and white,  Georgian-era Assembly Hall in Bath where hang five brilliantly gleaming very oversize chandeliers.

I imagined them to be Waterford crystal.  And we heard the Takács in London's Wigmore Hall.  Superlatives aren't enough. An event like this is the reason one hears a group live instead of on a recording. The Takács are meticulously rehearsed, yet they play as if the music originates from deep within them and bubbles out like a natural spring and at times like a geyser. With great ease. Incisive rhythm. Ravishing tone. Thrilling and stunning. Words fail. Wes sat in the third row. It is not an exaggeration to say he was sitting among the musicians. The violist is an acquaintance. We were privileged to get to know her a bit over cocktails after the Wigmore concert. We met her in the Green Room. Wow! What a room. On it's four walls are photos autographed to the Wigmore by the legendary performers from one-hundred years ago. Of course they loved Wigmore. It's acoustics are perfect. Flattering in every way. Geri took us to stand on the stage. I gasped at the thought of playing on it. It is a serious platform for creating hand-wrought musical beauty. For musical rituals.  Behind and over the musicians heads is a quarter-sphere frescoed wall that serves to thrust the sound out to the listeners. And serves for the listeners as a something beautiful to rest their eyes upon.  Paraphrasing Harriet Beecher Stowe, "the room was designed so that anywhere her eyes would fall it would be upon something beautiful."

Wigmore Hall is like that.  Walking the violist back to her hotel, we passed Queen Anne Street where five years ago we met Charles Beare who waxed poetic over my viola made by Jacob Rayman in London in sixteen-fifty, and where I played a few notes on the famed "McDonald" Stradivari viola, but that was five years ago. Back to Wigmore, after the concert I was so excited, exhilarated, I could hardly sleep.  Months ago, I mentioned to Wes that the Takács program was tailor made, as if they had selected my favorites. We tried for tickets. SOLD OUT. Entirely sold out. Wes showed once again his ability to make dreams come true. He got two tickets by checking daily for returns and my dream came true. Command performance.

We saw Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream directed by Michael Grandage. We swooned.  The backdrop was a large luminous moon. It made everything seem an enchanted dream. The staging seemed inspired by Hair, the musical. Slightly hippy. The director and performers made the story absolutely clear from beginning to end.      David Walliams stole the show with his Bottom.  He was hammy, extroverted, over the top, charming and adorable. It is said he is a best-selling author of six children's books published by HarperCollins. And that he is admittedly bi-polar. He, like his cast mates, expressed much of his character without requiring a spoken word, so expressive was his physical depiction. And when they did speak their diction, their articulation, their projection was impeccable. Lots of consonants: tee's and pee's.

We went to see Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. It was the opposite of the above. Though it was perfectly fine, it was not particularly funny and the live and real cigar smoke blown from the stage was affronting and annoying.  The cast seemed in two teams. One, American, with James Earl Jones. The other, British, with Vanessa Redgrave. The Americans, to my ear, to a man, lacked consonants. Not quite mumbling, but lacking in clarity.  Their acting was from the neck up. Bodies unexpressive of character, with an occasional hip-hop hand gesture inappropriate for their World War Two characters. The British were extremely articulate. I don't think diction is dependent upon country of origin, but in this instance it was. The director, Mark Rylance, was AWOL. He is in New York starring as Olivia in the Globe Theatre's all-male production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night which we will see during Thanksgiving weekend.

We visited the small city of Bath. Much of it dates to the Georgian era which refers to the one hundred and twenty six years when there were four King George's in a row. Seventeen-fourteen to eighteen-forty. The four King Georges loved music, literature, and architecture and manners and tea and letter writing and botanical paintings and all things aesthetic.  As I understand it, not so interested in governance, they performed makeovers on English villages. Built crescents or circles of residences. In Bath there is the Royal Crescent and the Circus.

The Royal Crescent is as it sounds, an arc, a continuous row of several dozen connected stone townhouses forming an arc overlooking a vast descending lawn with woods in the distance. The Circus is also a series of connected townhouses but it is comprised of four arcs which form a large circle. In the center is a lawn with a grove of trees. All these were constructed during the Georgian era. They are fairly simple in design, uncluttered, without excessive ornamentation.  Unpainted stone. Part of their beauty results from the rhythm created by their repetition. A friend said, "you should see them at night when all the lanterns on the townhouses are lit."  We walked amidst them on a cold drizzly, wet day. It was peaceful, calm and the stones of the pavement and of the townhouses glistened in the rain.

We heard a retired concert pianist speak, Alfred Brendel. He is also a poet, scholar, painter, author and thinker. I have read his books. I admire his probing mind. I repeatedly listen to his recordings finding in them a logic, an orderliness, that soothes me. He spoke for an hour in the previously mentioned Bath Assembly Room.  He is in his early eighties, lives in London and his hearing is weak. He is well spoken and has a Germanic inflection in his English. Shortly before retiring, he recorded Beethoven's sonatas for cello and piano with his son. Months ago, I heard a bit of it on the radio.  To my ear, I hear the piano-father lovingly coaxing the best out of the cello-son. I asked him to autograph his recent book, An A to Z for Pianists.  As he signed, I asked him what literature he'd take to a deserted island.  Without hesitation, he raised his head, looked me in the eyes and said, "Shakespeare. And Lichtenberg's Aphorisms."

In Bath, during the late afternoon, we visited the Abbey.  Inside, music was playing. A small chorus and orchestra. Handel's oratorio, Jeputha. Something to do with a father who in payment for a benefit he's received takes a vow to slay the first person he sees, which tragically is his daughter.  Father and Daughter were singing when we entered the Abbey. The music was ethereal, gentle, emotional, regretful, foreboding. The Abbey's interior is a magnificent display of elegant details. Long rows of fluted gothic columns on both sides of the room rise to the ceiling where the flutes blossom into fans. Looking up,

the ceiling has a compelling visual rhythm from how the fans splay out and where they meet in the center. The most architecturally beautiful ceiling I've ever seen. The abbey is very old.  Parts of it vary in age from five-hundred to eight-hundred to twelve-hundred years old.  The small highly regarded chorus is called Sixteen. Their orchestra had two violists. One of them looked familiar. Could it be? From thirty-three years ago at Banff Centre's summer music program? Yes, it is an old acquaintance. We did not know each other well and he may not remember me at all, but I'll leave him a note. The Abbey was closing and I could not speak to him directly. Fast forward twenty-four hours...we heard from him the next day and spent our final London evening with him and his partner. They have an exceptionally nice place and are great hosts. We had an excellent time with them.

I travel to learn about the people of the world. How they co-existed, solved problems, what they created, what were their difficulties, what made them happy, what were their challenges, what evidence did they leave behind. I tend to dwell on the past. But when there are live performances as there were this week in London and earlier in Paris I become very emotional. When I walk into an ancient cave—Font de Gaume—where nineteen-thousand years ago people, by torchlight, made drawings of animals on the walls—two deer touching their noses together—I can't help but imagine them as you or me or anyone present day that wants to be remembered and leaves a
mark of some kind. Musicians do it with sound. And maybe knowing it is only of the moment, not a trace left behind, they go at it with a special ardor.  "Listen! What beauty resides inside of us! Listen!"

I have a viola made in the year sixteen-fifty in London. Specifically the area south of the London Bridge called Southwark.  Near the Tabard Inn where Chaucer thought up the Canterbury Tales. Near the Marshalsea debtors prison where little Charles Dickens's father was held. Near Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and near Saint Saviour's Church where Shakespeare used to go to cry over his brother's grave. My viola maker, Jacob Rayman "dwelt in Bell Yard" and we went to find Bell Yard. Streets have been slightly rearranged through the centuries, but armed with enough old maps we were able to locate within one-hundred feet where he "dwelt." Though the present day buildings are old, very little remains from sixteen-fifty, but little by little the picture of the history of this viola is coming into focus. The wife of it's owner in nineteen-hundred was an actress that put the teenage John Gielgud in his first plays.  That same owner did not join his string quartet's cellist on the Titanic.  I love the hunt. Magnifying glass in hand. Sherlock Holmes hat. Snooping for the clues. Connecting the dots. We roamed Southwark today. Slipped thru the slender alleyways. Popped into small community gardens, libraries. I told anyone who'd listen what I was researching, about the viola. Several people became excited. They want to see the viola. They want me to come play it on it's home turf. Nothing to do with music. It involves local pride. One of their own citizens. The viola is his cave drawing. It survived him. Proof he was here. That he once lived, worked, loved, died in Southwark. Will I return with it? Yes.

It was a perfect end to a perfect trip. I told Wes/Casey last night, you are like a genie in a bottle. I only have to imagine a desire and you make it come true.

At this moment, we are en route to Kalamazoo, Michigan to visit the two genies that made this all possible, Kit and Joan Hough, Wes's parents. They are a cornucopia overflowing with goodness. In not too many hours we will be with them to celebrate Wesley's, aka Casey's birthday and that will be the truly perfect ending to our perfect trip.

Marlow and Wes
Tuesday, 13 November 2013
Heathrow Airport
London

(I did not take any of the photographs in this e-mail. Photo credits are available on request.)