Today we had a lazy start to the day, before setting out this time to St John's Church for another concert.
The concert began with two Russian students playing - a 16 year old girl and a 17 year old boy. They both study at the Academic Music College at Moscow Conservatory. The girl played Bach Prelude and Fugue in F Minor BWV 534 and the boy played Bach Trio Sonata No 6 BWV 530. There were two different organs played throughout the concert. The two students played a smaller one situated at the front of the church. It was quite a reasonable size organ with two manuals and the pedals. We thought they played absolutely brilliantly and they obviously have bright futures ahead of them. The audience reaction was really positive.
The rest of the concert was performed on the big organ at the rear of the church in the organ loft, by Yuval Rabin, who was born in Israel. He has lots of experience performing in various countries and also teaches and composes. He started his performance with a piece he composed himself. It was based on Jewish Shabbat songs, written in 2000. It certainly had a Jewish sound about it. He went on to play a work by Liszt then a work by a composer called Haim Alexander (another Jewish piece). The concert finished with a well known piece by César Franck. His performance was fabulous.
During one of the pieces, there were two women a few rows in front of us, nattering away. Luckily we couldn't hear them so they weren't bothering us. They were, however, bothering the man sitting in the row in front of them. He got up and went over to them and said some stern words to the ladies. Thankfully they got the message. What on earth could be so important to discuss, that people feel the urge to talk about it during a concert, when they should be quiet and listen!
This brought back memories of a time we attended Evensong at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle. There was a lady who was incessantly talking, annoying quite a number of us. We all turned to her and, in unison, said SHHHHH and thankfully she promptly got the message. We can't understand why anyone would come to a choral evensong and proceed to talk! And at Windsor!!
The audiences throughout the Aldeburgh Music Festival that we went to earlier in this trip, were very well behaved! This reminds us, that we saw a brief documentary a few days ago on DW TV (on this occasion, an English version). It was about the Aldeburgh Music Festival, and in particular, Benjamin Britten and the centenary festival. In our first coastal walk to Lowestoft during the festival, along the shingle beach, we had a German film crew with us. We found out that they were making a documentary about the festival. When we saw it on TV, there we were, walking along the shingles! We achieved notoriety! They interviewed Alan Britten, Benjamin's nephew (who we met several times through the festival) and on camera he admitted that Uncle Ben had taken him to the pub on numerous occasions, when he was a tad under age! Tsk tsk!
