Filippo di Bari in Chichester

 Filippo di Bari, Chichester Cathedral, Oct 7

 Filippo di Bari played Chichester Cathedral last year as half of a four-handed performance but this year was limited to two, not that 'limited' is the right word for either the music of Beethoven or his playing of it.

First up was Robert Schumann's Kinderszenen, op. 15, thirteen miniatures on memories of childhood, mostly gently nostalgic but with more boisterous parts, too. The atmospheric Träumerei lingered in Filippo's sensitive account and prefigured the resolution of the set in the elegiac Child Falling Asleep and the soft finale of The Poet Speaks. 

But Beethoven is in a different league. The Sonata, op. 110, is perhaps no more than mid division in the immense cycle of 32 of them and has not been given a distinguishing name either by Beethoven or any subsequent writer. However, had almost any other composer written it, it would surely be among their best pieces.

The Moderato cantabile opens serenely before floating and glinting onwards. The increasingly more challenging, both to play and interpret, Allegro molto, demanded subtle modulations that Filippo delivered gorgeously without any undue attempt to be 'flash'. But the Adagio beginning to the third movement sank to depths of melancholy with tenebrous left hand. The rapt attention of the audience did them great credit this week and Beethoven treated us to some retro Bach keyboard configurations before a radiant final passage left me reflecting that op. 110 might not have a name appended to it because there is no word, not even in German, perhaps, that would do it justice.

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Lou Reed once wrote a song about a day like this. 

My bus pass arrived yesterday with a letter saying it could be used immediately - like I didn't have to wait until next week when I become officially a 'pensioner'. So, travel to Chichester today, to Portsmouth Cathedral on Thursday and the Menuhin Room on Saturday is already for nothing. Thank you, Portsmouth Council. Not that any such extra gain lasted long in the Oxfam Bookshop and then the Flapjack shop but, with time in hand, I sat in the benign Autumn sun in the Bishop's Palace Gardens among its delicate colours and quiet to consider my forthcoming reading and listening choices before the whole point of the excursion, the op. 110 Sonata. And also consider what it might have been that I ever did to deserve it.