Mateusz Rettner at Chichester

 Mateusz Rettner, Chichester Cathedral, Nov 22

It was fitting, for what is likely to be the last concert I attend in a rich and busy year, to arrive at The Well-Tempered Klavier. It is like an index to all music, the most lucid setting-out of a well-organised mind. It might be pure maths but it encompasses all else besides and beyond. Matteusz Rettner played the C sharp preludes and fugues from Book 2. One can find in them whatever one wants to look for, darkness or light; precision or impressionism; either ceremonial or improvisational attitudes and something both impersonal but with an emotional charge. They reflect back whatever you are thinking of and today were maybe autumnal.

Some pianists have specialist repertoire while others take on the whole range. We haven't got all day and Matteusz moved on to the early Mozart Sonata K.280 with its teenage high spirits in the Allegro, the impossibly mature minor key Adagio and the quicksilver Presto.

Four of the opus 20 Mazurkas by Szymanowski were short, unsettling with their changing rhythms and a long way from Bach and Mozart but not quite as far away as the grandstand finale which, one suspects, might be where Mateusz's main interests lie. At least on the evidence of this crashing performance.

I've never acquired the taste for Messaien and would be happy all day with the Bach but two 'explosive' movements from the Vingt Regards sur l'enfant-jesus were extraordinary and will live in the memory longest. The derivation of the word 'messianic' could come from Messaien. It doesn't but maybe it should. These two excerpts were not representative of the twenty, we were told, but, percussive and ostensibly in the same spirit as The Rite of Spring's more demonic passages, they were a dazzling blast of 'joy', or so Olivier intended, including a torrential downpour and an urgency that delivered us to an entirely different world from where we had begun with such orderly discipline and decorum.

It is usual for a concert to put in a big finish but this was the end of the season, too, and so appropriately a bigger finish than ever. I might be forgiven if I don't explore it any further but as a once-in-a-long-time experience, I'm surprised but also glad to be able to say that it was the Messaien that most justified the journey.

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That is likely to be that for concerts for me this year. I think there have been 32 of them, all of them thoroughly worthwhile. It won't be easy to pick a few to feature on a short list among other 'events' for a forthcoming Review of the Year but I'll have to have a go sometime soon.

It's an idyllic little routine, often checking out the fast-moving stock of the Oxfam Bookshop beforehand. It's not often one leaves there empty-handed. One could hardly leave a further addition to the Samuel Johnson collection there for somebody else to snap up and so David Nokes's biography was readily added to the pile. But also, most scholarly, The History of Writing by Steven Roger Fischer is not the sort of thing you'd find in most shops, or even know about, and finding it is an advantage of looking in such shops rather than buying what one knows about on the internet.

English might seem a big language from our perspective but, Good Lord, a quick glance at this comprehensive survey going right back to when some bright spark decided to scratch some representation of meaning onto stone (I'm guessing) makes it seem the tiniest mode of expression that we take part in, eminent though it has become for quite some time. I don't know whether I want to learn Safaitic or Old Church Slavonic first but for the time being I'll have to stick with,

strange, dark marks on the page, like these.

 

I think it's 24th January, back at Chichester unless something unexpected crops up. That's two months off.

And then we can do it all again.