A Chichester Tuesday

An ordinary enough day, a Tuesday in early March, not Cheltenham until next week, bright eaely but a bit if rain by the time I got home. It is useful to have Chichester nearby.

Yenting Wang, Chichester Cathedral, Tues 5 March.

 It looked like a wide-ranging programme taking care to move through the C18th, C19th and C20th and presumably advertise the pianist's inclusive repertoire in the process. However, she changed the programme from chronological order to ostensibly alphabetical although that was obviously not the point.
If anybody's playing The Well-Tempered Klavier within range of here, I'll go. Yenting 's account of No.16 in G minor was luminous and especially worthwhile in the brilliant fugue. I nearly always praise Chichester's Yamaha and how now come to wonder if some woudn't find it too resonant sometimes but it lights up Bach for me, not least under these confident and authoritative fingers. I was wishing we could have had more and maybe another time we will. It wasn't until afterwards that it dawned on me that Bach might not be the whole point for Yenting Wang but perhaps more like something one needs must do, although not without great respect and due diligence.
The Bartok folk songs were moved up the order being miniatures, compelling though they were in this delicate account. The first, The Peacock, noticeably created one of those moments that happens at Chichester sometimes went one realizes the audience are concentrating more than ever, rapt and focussed entirely on the performance ahead of their more wordly concerns. This is gentle, folksong Bartok rather than anything more modernist and, although brief, the pieces distilled something pure and memorable.
But the point was surely the Schumann. Schumann is about 'flow' for me, the entirely acceptable face of Romanticism with its lyricism, rapture and movement. The first movement did that before ending suspended somehow in its own faraway world. If the second movement marched more rousingly and anthem-like, it demonstrated Yenting's capacity to do the more muscular passages as well as the thoughtful that may or may not be what she will be known for. The third could have been Chopin, in fact I kept thinking it was, but the bells were striking for two o'clock as she finished which witnessed a full value set. The Schumann was bigger, much, much more than the Bartok and, yes, the running order couldn't have ended with either of the other two pieces.
Stephen Kovacevich was there last year and received a partially standing ovation. Maybe they knew he was famous or maybe they knew he was even better than most of the fine musicians Chichester get for this tremendous series but I looked round to see if anybody was prompting a similar tribute this time because I was ready to join in. If I don't see a better concert this year I will have no complaint.
Of course, Bach will still be played here more than Schumann but I ordered a recording of the Fantasie before I even hurried to write this. Sadly, it's not by Yenting Wang but with Tasmin Little announcing her forthcoming retirement, it looks as if there won't be a vacancy on my list of favourite musicians, and it's great to have one happy to provide bi-lingual autographs.

Harold Gilman: Beyond Camden Town, Pallant House, Chichester, to 9 June.

It's a marvellous thing that the Cathedral's lunchtime concerts are on Tuesdays and Pallant House is half price on Tuesday. At least for the parsimonious amongst us.
The reason for including Harold Gilman in the itinerary was that if you like Walter Sickert, you'll like him. It's a bit like if you like Bach, you'll like Telemann. You almost certainly will but maybe not quite as much.
When two artists are similar they can seem more defined by their relatively minor differences than if they were completely different in the first place. For example, Gilman uses more colour than Sickert even if, on this evidence, it's mainly by insisting on detailed expositions of the wallpaper.
Being Camden Town, we are downbeat English post-Impressionist and Gilman's realism is often interior, domestic and with female subject matter. But if colour was something he was conscious of or cared about, Interior with Artist's Mother is surely playing games with the idea and quoting Whistler's Mother in predominantly grey and black.

One can see Degas in some of the painting, as well as Sickert, and in some later pictures, before his early death, something of Cezanne. It is admirable work for being unsentimental and understated. His subjects are modest and glorified, if at all, only to record their modesty. For all that most of them are interiors, it was the London Street Scene in Snow that I went back to, but although I'm aware of a space on my front room wall that could take another print, it won't be that.
In the end I thought either that wallpaper goes or I do.
And so I did.