Matthew Parris
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So I bought some LPs, rather randomly — some Bach, as I recall, some Tchaikovsky, some Brahms (because of Dad), Hummel’s trumpet concerto because I adored the acid sound of the trumpet — and Bruch. I played and replayed my small collection, determined to enjoy it; and soon I did — almost all of it.
But the concerto I loved most was Bruch’s violin concerto. Soon I knew it by heart. Friends grew tired of my playing the same LP all the time. To my great friend Francis Jacobs I confided my ecstatic enjoyment of this music: ‘just listen quietly for a moment,’ I said to Francis (we had reached the slow movement) ‘to this. The pathos! The intensity! The sorrow!’ Francis listened dutifully. ‘Don’t you think so?’ I said.
‘Er, no, not really,’ Francis replied. ‘It’s very nice, of course, and quite sweet. But the thought that comes to mind with me is not really of great depth or tragic-ness. It’s more a “wasn’t that a lovely summer holiday we all had this year?” sort of thought.’
I considered Francis’s response shallow. And ever since then when (very occasionally) this piece of music gets an airing on BBC Radio 3, I’ve caught in passing a phrase or two and been reminded of how I love Bruch’s First Violin Concerto.
But never in my life have I heard it performed live. And now, at the Proms, I had this to look forward to. ‘The exquisite Nicola Benedetti’ (as she has been described) was to be the soloist. I sat through the Simpson, the Suk, the Delius, the Verdi and the Massenet, enjoying each in its way but on tenterhooks for the Bruch.
At last it came. And Nicola Beneditti was indeed exquisite. In fact I think she played it better than the performance on the old LP I had finally worn out with replaying at Cambridge. Beneditti ‘stood on the stage like Snow White, forlorn and vulnerable; occasionally gazing reverently into the heavenly dome of the Royal Albert Hall,’ wrote Adrian Hilton in the Mail, ‘then genuflecting to underpin the cadenzas, her auburn locks wafting in worship of the rich, expansive theme that lies at the heart of the concerto…’. I anticipated, followed and knew backwards, every phrase.
But all the magic had gone. I saw and heard that it was tender, nicely conceived and superbly interpreted but, in the end, no more than an accomplished, affecting but minor work, by a secondary talent, and of no great depth or complexity at all. At times it was almost (oh, I hate to write this) banal. Almost saccharine.
There’s an interlude in Wind in the Willows when the Mole, now living a new life in exalted company, scents beneath his paws the burrow to his abandoned subterranean home; yearns to return just to see the dear old place where he was once so happy; and does return — and finds his erstwhile dwelling small, unimpressive, confined and dusty, and the whole experience sad. I was, as it happens, in exalted company at the Royal Albert Hall; and, listening to the music that had once meant so much to me I found it meaner than the work of lofty genius I remembered, and was sad, like the Mole. It reminded me of revisiting in her home an elderly Scottish schoolteacher whom as a boy of eight I had once looked up to as a goddess of wisdom, learning and understanding, and departing with a heavy heart: she was just an old lady, rather prejudiced, with narrower horizons than mine had become.
As we pass through the changing scenes of our lives there are people and experiences, I suppose, that act for us as portals from a narrower into a wider scene. We remember them for the enlargement of our vision — for the view through and out into the open sky. But when we look back from the standpoint of that enlarged vision they are now small, unmemorable. ‘Oh,’ I said to my partner during the applause at the end of Bruch’s First Violin Concerto, ‘great performance, but the piece doesn’t have the stature that I thought I remembered.’
Julian, who really does understand music, nodded. I had said the right thing. But it felt like a betrayal of something, or someone.
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