The Year in Review

 It's been a good year for Beethoven, and for Rosemary Tonks, in my little world which means it must have been a good year. It's been a tremendous year, though, keeping up the record of 40-ish concerts attended and 'reviewed' after my own fashion and other things besides so that in summing up the Event of the Year it needs must be restricted to mentions of almost only those things that could have been winners in other years but not this one.

Event of the Year is by some way the biggest and perhaps the only competitive category I'm left with by now with my reading of new poetry and buying of new release records not providing enough for a shortlist these days. The monthly Visa account bears witness to no decrease in expenditure but it's nearly all on back catalogue items.

Even if it was the only new book I'd read this year, though, I'd have to make The Scapegoat by Lucy Hughes-Hallett my Book of the Year. Absolutely never a dull moment and if only History had been half as gripping at school, I might have taken more interest.

But Events of the Year for the shortlist, after due consideration, are,

An Evening with Rosemary Tonks, with Goat Star Books, in the Queen's Head, Soho, 26/2;

Katie Wilkinson, vla, and Marios Argiros, pno, in the Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, 11/5;

Oliver Nelson and Julian Jacobson, as Oliver stood and delivered the Tartini Devil's Trill Sonata in Chichester Cathedral, on 18/6;

Durham Cathedral on 31/7, as part of my excursion to Northumbria;

Yo-Yo Ma with Emmanuel Ax and Leonidas Kavakos playing the Archduke Trio at the Proms, 31/8.

A special mention for the impressive Mario Sofroniou at the Menuhin Room on 14/9.

 

I dare say the result ought to be Yo-Yo and his Beethoven for Three purely on their world class status but the Berliner Philharmoniker don't even make the shortlist because that's not quite how it works. It became apparent a few years ago that the award is judged on the pure visceral reaction that I almost have no control over and so it goes without a doubt to Katie and her Shostakovich Viola Sonata that extended the experience of this downbeat existence into areas at the very limits of time and space.