Sebastiani

On the afternoon Good Friday we attended a performance of Sebastiani's St. Matthew Passion at the Wigmore Hall. Five voices, supported by portable organ, two violins and four viols, these last from Fretowork. An afternoon show for Easter, which meant that we were able to go - and it made a very successful change from our current diet of lunchtime concerts.

A light lunch of pork sandwiches, mentioned in the previous post, followed by a stroll to the station.

From there to Vauxhall and onto a rather crowded tube, where I was promptly offered a seat by someone young, probably foreign. It seems a long time since I was declining such offers!

Out at Oxford Circus for the traditional pre-concert visit to All Bar One.

[Brueghel the elder, painted around 1595. To be found at the Kunst Historisches Museum in Vienna, along with 58 other works by the same master. Brought to me via Bing, via the Huffington Post. There were some rather rum offerings, perhaps reflecting changing tastes in such matters. For example, one by one Maerton van Heemskerck from half a century before this one]

From there to the Hall, pleasingly full - with booking having been quite slow. Handsome, but muted flowers, with the reds and greens blending with the brown wood backdrop. Entirely suited to the solemnity of the day, the passion and the crucifixion.

The concert itself was very good, with very high impact - in which connection I might mention the two lady singers. Perhaps because the music was fairly straightforward, without a lot of fancy footwork. The accompanists were content to accompany and did not show off.

We were given the words, which ran to more than ten, two column pages. Which meant that there was audible page turning. But the lady in front of us managed to turn the pages for her partner more or less silently. We didn't bother with the words, preferring not to be distracted by the business of keeping one's place in two languages. Which meant that one only knew what is going on in very general terms and makes the high impact slightly surprising. But I suppose I could say much the same thing of Schubert's songs - art songs as they have it over the pond.

Onto Ponti's for an early dinner, where we survived a confusion about our booking, to have a rather good table of the left hand. Following BH on the previous occasion, I took their risotto, which I found a little disappointing: a bit damp and I prefer the drier, more savoury paella. But entirely acceptable. As was the tiramisu which followed, the sort which is mainly off-white and comes in a sundae glass, rather than mainly brown in cake format on a plate. To drink, the Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi DOC had a good name for the day, so we took that. Entirely satisfactory. But their website, to be found at reference 4, was very badly infested with advertisements for Rimmers pianos.

A big enough operation to bother with producing a flier in Chinese, snapped above. Possibly a very large operation with lots of brands, with the wine that we had being just one of many. For which see reference 5.

Followed by a spot of light brown grappa. Others took teas and coffees.

Out to find a smart Porsche, although not as smart as the Maserati of our last visit, noticed at reference 6.

A herd of what we took to be evangelicals outside the entrance to the tube at Oxford Circus. A herding which seemed to involve, for those in the middle, a subdued form of dancing on the spot.

Lots of young people milling about at Vauxhall.

Our train turned up more or less immediately, which meant that we were unable to check out the scene at the Raynes Park platform library, which, from our seats on the train, appeared to have been restocked. Too bad.

And so to Epsom to sample the delights of Friday night at the Marquis of Granby, declining a Waitrose trolley on exit from the passage down from Station Approach - my excuse on this occasion being that the Ashley Centre was shut. The Marquis turned out to be quite busy, almost as busy as Wetherspoon's opposite, functioning mainly as a scene for those in the 20-29 bracket, plus a bench for the older male voyeur. These last being a feature of the evening Marquis for as long as I can remember.

While we discussed the loss of control options over bank accounts with the move away from cash and cheques to cards. 'Two to sign' being something that BH could remember from her days as treasurer of something - and which is now more or less consigned to history.

I also rashly asserted that guineas were both something to do with Africa and US slang for Italians - to find that I had no idea why this might be so - a business already mentioned at reference 7. This afternoon, Bing confirms the Italian connection and suggests it may have something to do with Sicilians often having a rather dark complexion.

No moon visible at this point, but it had risen, bright and clear, by 22:30, after we got home.

PS: at one point in the course of the evening, I was talking with a Brazilian about dreaming. A chap who had been in England so long that he was starting to dream in English, which he found rather odd. And I remember my mother saying that at one point her French was so good that she started dreaming in French, at least some of the time. All of which goes to support the notion that the thought part of dreams is close enough to speech to be in words with an identifiable language. Not that anything of the sort has happened to me, so I am finding it hard to imagine what this might feel like: I think I do words in dreams, but they are rather ethereal, not articulated and without any awareness of their being in one language rather than another at all. And no foreigners in my dreams at all either. A pity I did not quiz the Brazilian more closely.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Sebastiani.

Reference 2: https://www.fretwork.co.uk/.

Reference 3: https://www.pontis.co.uk/.

Reference 4: http://www.verdicchiodeicastellidijesi.it/.

Reference 5: https://piersantivini.com/.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-marmens.html.

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/04/kings-cross.html.