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To the Wigmore Hall last night for my first concert of the autumn season, and what promised to be a marvellous evening, part of clarinettist Michael Collins’s residency at the Wig.

Arriving super early – there was very little traffic on the way in – my friend and I had time to enjoy a leisurely glass of champagne in the front bar where we surreptitiously surveyed the other concert-goers, quite a mixed bunch, as one would expect from the programme. We observed, not for the first time, that some people were very scruffily turned out for the evening. Whenever I go to a concert, whether it is popular music (rare for me) or classical, I make an effort to get “dressed up”. It’s an occasion, after all, and if the performer/performers have gone to all that trouble to learn all that music and turn out to perform, I feel one should make a similar effort with one’s dress. Of course, these days, many performers, particularly men, are opting out of the traditional virtuoso “uniform” of white tie and tails, favouring instead Nehru jackets and collarless shirts, presumably because this attire is more comfortable. Given that performing the Rach Three is akin to shovelling several tons of coal in terms of its physical effort, it might be more comfortable for some performers to appear in a vest and shorts! But while male performers are dressing down, there is a general outcry if the women are not in sparkly evening dresses……but this is material for another blog post.

The first half was all Mozart: the Clarinet Trio K498, the “Kegelstatt” was undemanding and pleasant to the ear, while the Quintet in A K581, the one with all the recognisable “laahvely melodies”, was intelligently and sensitively played, Michael Collins displaying some fine virtuoso playing, especially in the arpeggiated passages in the last movement. This piece is very familiar to me: my father, who was a fine amateur clarinettist, played it many times as I was growing up –  with his chamber group, with me at the piano in a reduced version, and with Music Minus One. I am sure, had he come to the concert (I did invite him), he would have thoroughly enjoyed Michael Collins’s superb, precise playing.

As the final movement of the Quintet drew to a close, I had the sense of the performers clearing the way for what was to come in the second half: Olivier Messiaen’s ‘Quartet for the End of Time’.

Messiaen is one of those composers (and there are many!) whose music nudges at the edges of my musical conscious; that is to say, I am aware of his music, but I have not had the opportunity to explore it in depth. At the piano course I attended in the spring, one of the students played one of the Vingts Regards sur l’Enfant Jesus, and I found it utterly captivating. I keep meaning to look up this music and learn one or two of the movements, but as usual, there is just too much repertoire and never enough time!

The Quartet for the End of Time was famously composed during a period when Messiaen was a prisoner of war in Silesia, yet it remains a work of religious meditation rather than political protest: as the composer said “this quartet was written for the end of time, not as a play on words about the time of captivity, but for the ending of concepts of past and future……..for the beginning of eternity”. I have heard excerpts from it on the radio – the more melodic, contemplative sections – but I have never heard the work in its entirety, performed live. Imprisoned with the composer, were a cellist (Etienne Pasquier), and clarinettist (Henri Akoka), and Messiaen wrote for them “an unpretentious little trio”, which they played to him in the latrines. This became the creative impulse for the remaining seven movements, and the complete work was first performed in the prison camp. The Quartet was directly inspired by a quotation from the Book of Revelation, and retains a sense of the Apocalypse throughout, even in the most quiet, meditative movements.

But one really doesn’t need to know all this: from the outset, it is obvious that this is a work of immense scale and emotional range, born out of incredibly straitened circumstances. The instruments clang, shriek and scrape; they sing and cry plaintively. There are fragments of birdsong (and I wondered whether these were the sounds the composer desired to hear while in captivity, or whether they were the only pleasant sounds he could hear), distant celestial trumpets, sirens, hammers falling on anvils, angelic choirs…. In one movement, Abime des oiseaux, the clarinet plays long sustained notes, from ppp to fff, and one can only marvel at the  technical control required to achieve this sound, while feeling one is staring right into the abyss.

The overall effect was searing, painful, extraordinarily beautiful. I told myself I would not cry, yet at the close, the tears poured down my cheeks, staining a path through my make up. There was a full two minutes of silence at the end as the audience continued to absorb what they had just heard, before rapturous, sustained applause. To adapt the composer’s own quotation at the first performance of his work, never before have I listened with such consideration and understanding. The elegant Wigmore Hall seemed altogether too refined a place for such a performance: it seemed as if we should be gathered on a rocky, windblown outcrop, the musicians playing while the churning sea below pounded the rocks to eternity…..

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In the last thirty-six hours my musical life has gone from one extreme to the other, both in terms of genre and venue. Saturday night: jazz legend Courtney Pine at an open-air swimming pool. Sunday night: Chopin at the Wigmore Hall. Monday morning: my monthly piano lesson in Finsbury Park. All special and memorable musical experiences in their own way.

I nearly didn’t make it to the Wigmore. Living in leafy suburbia can be delightful, but on a Sunday there is a frustrating lack of trains into the capital, and if you don’t time your arrival at the station correctly, you can be left waiting for half an hour. It takes me an hour to get to the Wigmore from home and so in order to arrive in time for pre-concert drinks and chat with my friends, I needed to be on the train at 6pm. I arrived at the station, after a somewhat fraught consultation with my son about his plans for the evening (he is just 12, and has the sort of complicated social life no A-list celebrity would tolerate). Having established that he would be having a sleepover with a friend, I set off for the concert. Arriving at the station in the warm early evening sunshine, I wanted to purchase a bottle of water. I reached into my handbag: no wallet, and therefore no concert tickets. I had already missed one train by a whisker, and as I stomped back home to collect my purse, another train swept into the station. The next train was 20 minutes later, thereby denying me my pre-concert drink.

On reflection, I could have gone up to town without my wallet. Sylvia, my regular concert companion and the person who books all the tickets, would have been able to procure a replacement ticket for me at the box office, and I know she would have stood me a drink or two. I was pondering this while broiling on the Bakerloo line. I was alone in the carriage but for two men sitting opposite me, one of whom I recognised as the radio presenter Paul Gambacini. I have enjoyed his programmes, especially his music quiz and the one about the Oscars, but since it was a Sunday evening and he was clearly “off duty”, I didn’t tell him this. I followed him and his friend out of Oxford Circus station and across Cavendish Square, and when they turned into Wigmore Street, like me, I concluded they may well be attending the same concert.

At the Wigmore, the vestibule was crowded with people still hopeful of returned tickets. I bolted down the stairs to the loo, as far as it is possible to “bolt” against a tide of (mostly very) elderly people tottering up the stairs, and then followed the tide back upstairs to the hall. At the door, the young man who had been sitting with Mr Gambacini turned to me and said “Oh, hello! I saw you on the tube. I hope you enjoy the concert.” I was flattered that he had noticed me and said “It should be really lovely. Just the thing for a Sunday evening!”. We took our seats in different parts of the hall (I’m always near the back as Sylvia prefers economy to enjoying a good view of the stage). Sylvia was waiting for me, fanning her face with the very thin programme (“£3! For this!!” she grumbled), and soon after Gefry joined us, and we settled down for what promised to be a delightful evening of readings about and by Chopin – from his letters, from George Sand’s diaries and letters, and observations from other friends and colleagues who had known him (Lizst, Charles Hallé, Delacroix). The readers were the actors Sam West, who looked the part in his long velvet coat, and the painfully thin Harriet Walter. The pianist was Lucy Parham.

The mood of the evening was immediately set by the first piece, the Nocturne Op 48 No. 1, in which there is only momentary relief from its overriding sense of melancholy and poignancy. The readings were interspersed with music: Mazurkas, Polonaises, Waltzes, each half of the concert ending with a Ballade (the third and fourth). The music was not presented chronologically, rather it was selected to suit the mood or context of the readings. The whole thing worked very well; indeed, as the chronology of the readings drew inexorably towards the composer’s cruel treatment at the hands of Georges Sand marking the end of their relationship, and his tragically early death, there were some deeply moving moments. It is all too easy to present a saccharine, sentimental view of Chopin: the effete pianist with the delicate constitution and fondness for lilac kid gloves, coughing consumptively in a cheap, cold room in an unfashionable arrondissement of Paris. The romance and legend surrounding his death goes on: a Polish friend of mine told me that Poles believe he died of “zal”, that particularly Eastern European condition, an inexpressible longing for the homeland, because he could never return to the country of his birth. True, his music is imbued with “zal” – and trying to recapture that particularly untranslatable emotion is one of the most difficult things to do as a performer of his music – but listen carefully and you hear the sounds of nature too: the flora and fauna of Nohant, Sand’s house in the French countryside, which he loved.

In fact, if his letters to his friend and factotum Julian Fontana are anything to go by, the sickly “Chip Chip” (Sand’s nickname for him) was actually an astute businessman, demanding the best prices for his scores because he had bills to pay. And whatever one may speculate about his relationship with Sand, there was a time when she clearly cared deeply for him, as a lover, artistic companion, champion of his art and craft, and helpmeet when he was ill.

The Wigmore programme, entitled “Nocturne” was really charming, and if the piano playing was a little flat and sloppy in places, it didn’t matter. It was a delightful event, imaginatively presented, and I hope it may encourage similar evenings at the Wigmore.

I was planning to play Chopin at my lesson this morning (the E-major Etude from the Opus 10). Playing it at home before my lesson, I felt it really coming together (at last! After 8 months work on it!) but in the end there wasn’t time to play it for my teacher, as we were busy with Debussy, Gershwin and Poulenc. When I said goodbye to her, she urged me to perform the Chopin for friends, and then put it away for six months. This is wise advice: I did the same thing with Schubert’s D960 sonata, after working on it for over a year, by which time I had developed all manner of “issues” about it and was beginning to resent it. Playing it again after a long absence, I learned to love the piece again and I know I will revisit it, ready and willing to learn the rest of it.

In the meantime, my next challenge is a Chopin Ballade – not sure which one yet, but I was chuffed to bits that my teacher reckons I am at least up to it. “Not for the Diploma, just for fun!” were her parting words. I suppose it depends on what one classes as “fun”!!

The day ended with a trip to the cinema with my son, and my best friend and her kids to see ‘Toy Story 3’: unashamed escapism and the happy ending we all craved.

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A summer’s evening in mid-July in the leafy suburbs of south-west London, and we’re queueing patiently outside Hampton Open Air Pool – and to those of us who live in the area, this is a very special place: an old-fashioned lido-style swimming pool which is heated and open 365 days of the year. You can swim there on Christmas Day (as I have) and New Year’s Day, you can swim on a weekday evening in April and have the pool almost to yourself, you can sunbathe on the terrace, or on the grass by the pool, and in the summer you can hear jazz legend Courtney Pine perform there.

I heard Courtney Pine at the pool two summers ago, and he and his band were magnificent. It was my first proper experience of live jazz. For someone who spends most of their concert life inside the rarefied surroundings of the Wigmore Hall in hushed reverential silence, jazz played by a UK jazz legend in the open air was something else, and I was completely blown away by it. Not just his fine skills as a performer, but also his generosity of spirit, introducing each member of the line-up in turn and giving each musician a chance to shine with solos and improvs – and they are all highly talented and very committed musicians.

Two year’s ago it rained, that fine rain that doesn’t look like much, but leaves you quickly soaked. It is a tradition at the Hampton Pool open-air concerts to bring a picnic, meet friends, share food and wine, and wait for the musical event of the evening to begin. We huddled under raincoats and umbrellas, passing food in tupperware boxes along the line of camping chairs, and in true British ‘Dunkirk Spirit’ dug in for a cold, wet evening. The ticket price at Hampton includes a swim, and despite the rain, my son spent most of the evening in the pool, until turfed out by the attendants. Then he surprised us by going right down to the front of stage and strutting his funky stuff, holding his hands up to Courtney. Fortunately, the rain stopped by the time the band took to the stage and we warmed up by hand-clapping above our heads and dancing energetically.

Yesterday evening was perfect: the sun came out and we had our picnic in the last warming rays, while big fluffy clouds scudded high above the stage and the occasional aeroplane shimmered in the clear evening sky. The feast laid out on the picnic rug at our feet was a joint effort, a kind of ‘pot-luck picnic’, and we enjoyed homemade falafels, venison pate, smoked salmon, Serrano ham, and my delicate green pistachio macaroons. Wine was served in a plastic jug in plastic glasses, beer was swigged from cans, people talked and laughed, sprawled on the grass, or settled into their picnic chairs. A typically English summer scene. Meanwhile, my son was diving into the pool, over and over again…..

The warm-up act was a Scottish singer called Eileen Hunter, who had something of Cleo Laine in her voice, and sang some forgettable, but pleasing-on-the-ear tunes, music more suited to the end of an evening in a jazz bar, the lights low, a weary barman cleaning up, pausing in his work to listen…… With my current obsession with Gershwin, I was more interested in getting a look at her hands on the piano, to see if I could pick up any technical tips.

The main event began with deep, rasping notes on the bass, shimmering cymbals and snare drum, some notes picked out on the piano – and then, seeming far away, the unmistakable throaty voice of Courtney’s saxophone. Thus, began nearly two hours of the most enegertic, passionate, raw and committed music-making. Courtney explained that his latest tour was a ‘hommage’ to Sidney Bechet, and many of the pieces he played were from his latest album, some familiar, some unknown. What I loved about the whole performance, aside from the music, was the way the musicians interacted. Watching string players in a quartet, you see the eye contact, the little nods and winks, the feet keeping time, and you sense their connection. It was the same with the musicians on stage last night: you notice that they are all watching each other, waiting for cues, listening, marking time before their solo. There were laughs too, some private shared joke between the drummer and the pianist (the amazing Zoe Rahman), who was laughing so much at one point, she had to stop playing. You sensed their sheer enjoyment in the music, as well as their deep commitment.

Toes tapping on the grass, hands clapping, wine glasss at our feet, one felt the audience, still rooted to their camping chairs, wanted to get up and dance, but were a little too restrained; nice, middle-class, middled-aged people just don’t do that! Or do they?

The final number was a sort of ‘township jive’, and soon, urged on by Courtney, everyone was on their feet, dancing, clapping, waving, all our middle-class, middle-aged inhibitions cast off (“we were wild, in the old days”, as Joni Mitchell once sang). Courtney left the stage, still playing, weaving his way through the moving crowd. I turned, and there he was, in front of me, grasping my hand in his, still playing…. He gathered a crocodile of people behind him, and together they Conga-ed around the grass at Hampton Pool, while the rest of us carried on dancing.

It was a wonderful evening, and he is a wonderful showman, who clearly loves what he does, a superb saxophonist and a fine flautist too. And I’m not sure there are many performers who would lead a Conga around a suburban swimmig pool! We left on a high, picking our way through the debris of other people’s picnics to the car.

“I’m going to the Wigmore tomorow night, for an evening of Chopin,” I told my friends as I said goodnight to them. “From one extreme to another!”

Yet, I have a feeling I will experience something of last night’s performance in tonight’s………though perhaps without the Conga.