We had a late start on Saturday, even though we had arrived back in London at an earlier hour. It was cloudy and gray and it seemed easier to sit around and chat and drink coffee. Vicki brought the cats home from the cat day care where they had been when we were in France. They were purring up a storm.
When we finally did get moving, we caught the tube at the Boston Manor station in nearby Ealing and headed into town. Our first stop was the theater district in Leicester Square. John really, really wanted to see Arcadia, the play by Tom Stoppard. The play was first produced in London in 1993, and we saw in in Los Angeles a few years later at the Mark Taper. John fell in love with the play there; I liked it but was not quite as overwhelmed. Does this surprise anybody?
Some of Act I deals with changing styles in English gardening, and since we were considering how to landscape our house at that time, it seemed to make a strike a response on that level. The Taper production seemed to stress this aspect by putting actual live grass on portions of the stage. However, watching this production I was struck that landscaping seemed like a fairly minor theme overall. There's a lot about the play online, so I will not spend any time going over the plot.
I liked this production. The acting was good, as it usually is in this country. I keep having to remind myself, however, not to get the actors too much credit for their outstanding English accents.
Onward, we headed towards Kensington to catch one of the Proms. The Henry Wood Promenade Concerts have been a British institution for a hundred years. They are sponsored by the BBC which broadcasts them live. They are held in the Royal Albert Hall, the gigantic auditorium built in the mid-nineteenth century as a memorial for the Prince Consort after his death.
Tickets to the Proms are not that expensive by U.S. standards, and one of the features is that about a 1000 tickets are sold for standing room on the day of the concert. This means that you have a chance to get in to even sold-out performances if you are willing to go without a seat. You have a choice of the "arena", a flat area in front of the stage well-suited for hosting a boat show, or the "gallery", a walkway high above the second balcony. We chose the arena line. Here you can see Vicki when the line was about half-way into the hall.
The hall itself is quite handsome. The enormous Willis organ in the back is somewhat hidden by the attempt to create an acoustic shell for the orchestra. It only partially works: the sound in the Royal Albert Hall is famously poor. But, like the Hollywood Bowl, perfect sound is not what the prom concerts are all about.
This concert was by the BBC Scottish Symphony with the City of Birmingham Symphony Choir. The chief item on the agenda was the Beethoven 9th symphony which explains why the concert was sold out.
The first item on the concert was the most interesting, Stravinsky's score for the ballet Orpheus. Strangely I don't think I have ever heard it before. The conductor was named Ilan Volkov, and I assume he was Russian. He seemed to really have a feel for the piece, though I cannot compare it to previous performances.
I was less taken by the Beethoven than my companions. The sound seemed muddy to me - I blame that on the hall - but there was a lack of crispness and driving rhythm in the performance I think may have been the orchestra itself.
We had Indian take-away for dinner which was quite good. They do have better Indian food in London than in LA, but, of course, they have a lot more South Asians.
Tomorrow on to our first visit to the rebuilt Globe in Southwark.
