I didn't think I'd make it, wondered if I could creep in at the back during the overture or if it would just be an unnecessary and convoluted ride to Chichester and back to no avail.
To be fair, the connections were all in place and when the bus driver said it would be twenty minutes, it looked more encouraging. After all this touch and go cliffhanging, a quick march through South Street and the cloisters, I arrived with five minutes to spare. It was packed and standing room only, which turned out to be a blessing because rather than sit at the back, which is some distance away, I stood right next to the orchestra. It was worth it after all.
Beethoven, in one of my glib generalizations, is Mozart with more muscles. The overture The Creatures of Prometheus is rousing and exactly that. The Chichester Symphony Orchestra might not be heard of in the same south coast galaxy as the Bournemouth but they do a fine turn. But it's never about the overture and, with the exception of Mendelssohn's Hebrides, one has to feel sorry for these warm-up pieces.
I had prepared over the weekend with a couple of plays of Mitsuko Uchida but standing so close behind the cellos heard more detail and finer points in live music than is possible from a CD. Music is a living thing and a performance that is happening now, not a facsimile of it. Maria Luc found a great balance between Beethoven's stridency and passion and those impossibly sensitive passages that come from somewhere deep and inexplicable that it's hard to credit him with although he does it plenty elsewhere, too.
The Emperor Concerto is a major cornerstone of Western classical music and likely to astonish again and again, not least in such confident and fluent hands. It flows so naturally from one stage to the next it seems to take no time and, standing out of necessity, one realized that it could be a dance piece.
One doesn't think of lunchtime concerts as full orchestral events. Most often it is a soloist or chamber group as if somehow orchestras are for the evening. That is, of course, nonsense but that is what happens. Even if Chichester is always great, though, this was as great as it has ever been and there were some who chose to stand to applaud even though, unlike me, they didn't have to.
The day had looked like calamity upon calamity but it was saved with only the narrowest of margins to spare. I have much to be grateful for and will check carefully in future. One can take nothing for granted.