Gig-a-Blog™ (Rupert Luck & Daniel Swain, St Anne & St Agnes

Monday, 17 September 2007

Rupert Luck, violin; Daniel Swain, piano. Parry: Complete Series of Sonatas (1). Parry: Fantasie Sonata in One Movement for Violin and Piano; Elgar: Sonata in E Minor for Violin & Piano, Op 82.

A really enjoyable lunchtime concert with excellent performers and a fine programme.

• Parry - lively, passionate. I've never heard this work before: I really loved it and will be very keen to get the CD when it comes out. See www.parrysonatas.com for more.
• Luck has a wonderful warm singing tone. His performance is exciting, committed, yet precise: he's extremely listenable-to. Pianist Daniel Swain is also a fine and sympathetic player. Together - hallelujah! - they achieve a very, very good balance so, even with my hearing and even seated right at the back, I get to enjoy the loud bits, the quiet bits and all the pretty colours in between.
• Elgar - I'm short on notes here, but I've written that I rather liked the slow movement's almost-Mahler bits with great rubato, almost-café sounds, wandering off towards the almost-informal. But then it all shifts and you're off back to a more restrained form of Englishness again. I know I enjoyed the rest of the work too, but neither my memory nor my PDA can tell me in what way exactly.
• (I should explain that for reasons of too-much-stuff-going-on-osity, the last two lunchtime blogs have broken, quite badly, my rule about writing up the same day. Tsk.)
• The only other thing of note is that one of the Grumpy Old Men™ spoke to me today and was nice, friendly and sympathetic. As you can imagine, this threw me a bit. If this goes on I may have to reconsider their status. Mind you, my attempt to say goodbye to them when I left seemed to fall on deaf ears: but then perhaps it really did - fall on deaf ears, I mean - and thus doesn't count. Watch this space: maybe within a fortnight we'll be New Best Friends and then I will have to refer to them as the Formerly-Grumpy Old Men™.

Ho hum. All very pleasant: great players, great show. Another SS A&A sanity-saver for the stressed-out.