Piano à Deux (Robert Stoodley & Linda Ang Stoodley) at Chichester

 Robert Stoodley & Linda Ang Stoodley, Chichester Cathedral, October 13

Autumn has properly arrived and with it comes three concerts in the diary this week, all family affairs which is a rare alignment.

The Stoodleys come with a complete show including shared commentary and even some choreography. First, though were two Brahms Hungarian Dances - no.5 rollicking and, I'd say, jokey and no.6 with further mood swings.

Some pieces are by now hard to separate from the uses they were put to long after their composers left them to us. Frank Muir made The Nutcracker Suite into Everyone's a Fruit and Nutcase and Bach found himself the author of an advert for cigars after the Berceuse from Fauré's Dolly Suite became, for some of a certain vintage, the comforting memory of Listen with Mother on the Home Service. Robert and Linda perhaps carried forward some of their Hungarian energy into their tempo which could have been dreamier because they didn't slumber through it. Mi-a-ou, as was explained, was not as feline as one might have anticipated because that's not what it's about, and then the rhapsodic onrush of Le pas espagnol in some ways anticipated Rachmaninov.

Robert and Linda's arrangements of seven songs from his op. 21 were presented in three sections, the bigger canvas of Melody running into the enchantment of Loneliness after Linda got up, nipped round the back and took up the right-hand stool while Robert moved to his left while transposing into the second piece, a neat manoeuvre I'd not seen before but  saw more than once today. Then, Lilacs was a thing of some delicacy, The Ratcatcher had the merest suspicion of Scott Joplin and Spring Waters was a cascading downpour. Rachmaninov somehow always manages to convince either in spite of, or by doing something more than, the Romantic excess that he could otherwise be thought guilty of. To finish, the lushness of How Fair This Spot led up to the climax with What Wealth of Rapture, with a big clue in its title, and with Linda leaving Robert solo to the last few bars of a very amicable, impressive, well-rehearsed set.   

It's been a while since I did Chichester, the summer being such an inconvenience, so it's good to get back towards the old routine.