A great week and not just for the Obamas

It’s been a funny old week. And not because of its curious, and exciting, political events which I’ve covered already, but even at a purely personal level.

We don’t tend to go out much on weekday evenings. Danielle works ostensibly part-time though – she has a hospital job – at an intensity worthy of most more than full-time positions. I commute daily to London, a tedious sapping of energy, which I shall be delighted to stop next month when I move to a new company with the good sense to have most of its staff working from home unless they’re needed at meetings.

The result is that we tend to go out only on Wednesday evenings, to a local bridge club. Otherwise we tend to collapse on a sofa, a cat on a lap, a dog curled up next to us and let a film or one of the better series that abound on TV these days, wash over us.

So it was unusual for us to add two further outings this week.

The first we felt was unmissable. The Luton Music on Mondays club has twenty or thirty concerts a year, and this Monday they’d invited back ‘Symphonia Academica’, the ensemble backed by our local University of Bedfordshire. It’s a fascinating group: talented musicians who reproduce the effect of a full symphony orchestra, but with only one instrument per section: one cello not a bank of them, one flute, one horn, and so on. That’s as much as the stage in the Library Theatre can accommodate and it produces a musical experience I’ve talked about before: grandiose in the scope of the pieces it plays, intimate for the size of the place.

Symphonia Academica: power with intimacy

It was particularly gratifying that in multi-cultural Luton, we actually saw one black face in the audience, which as a rule is drearily monochrome white. It was also a relief that we weren’t, for once, the youngest there, which is a slightly disconcerting experience given that we’re on the threshold of our sixties.

The second event was yesterday: an evening of a stand-up comedy with Jenny Eclair. Now it’s often said that male comedians in this country do little more than rely for laughs on having turned the air blue by their obsession with bodily functions, lavatorial or sexual. Having seen Jenny Eclair, I can firmly declare that at least one female comedian is right up there with the most outspoken of the men.

Of course, I’m above all that kind of coarseness. Which is why I spent the evening doubled up with laughter. My one problem with stand-up comedy is that although I enjoy it enormously while it’s happening, I can never remember any of it afterwards. I can’t quote any of it to you (and, to be honest, I’m not sure I could anyway, not in a reasonably sober blog like mine). On the other hand, I won’t forget any time soon the sight of Jenny striding around the stage with her hand firmly clamped to her crotch, urging the women in the audience (about 80% of all the spectators, I’d say), to try the same thing in various possible delicate situations they might get into in public, and promising them that it would have powerful impact. Which I can well believe.

Jenny Eclair: great entertainment if you don't mind the air being blue

The show was in Harpenden, a terribly nice (pronounced naice) market town only a few miles from dear old grotty, proletarian Luton. Jenny Eclair kept calling the audience ‘Harpenden’ but I suspect that if she’d asked where we were from, as a previous comedian we saw there did, she would have discovered as he did that most of us were from Luton. I find it a delicious irony that this is the case, underlining the fact that Harpenden is in fact just the prettier suburb of Luton up the road. Its inhabitants wouldn’t like to hear anyone say that but, hey, I’m not here to protect their sensibilities.

Anyway, it was a great evening. As was the concert on Monday. Even the bridge on Wednesday was fun though we played abysmally. All in all, as satisfying a week, at our level, as Michelle and Barack’s at theirs.

Luton does culcher too

The more we look, the more we find out about Luton. Recently, for instance, we’ve discovered that it does culture too.

On the very same stage which gave us the remarkable theatrical experience of Alison Wonderbra we recently attended a Monday night concert performed by the ‘Symphonia Academica’, billed as resident orchestra of the University of Bedfordshire. Now the stage at the Library Theatre is sumptuous, in the sense that certain pocket handkerchiefs can be sumptuous. So when it came to playing a great symphonic pieces scored for 70-piece orchestra, they ended up playing it fifty-seven pieces short: the musicians were down to thirteen, unlucky for some, though not, on that occasion, for us I'm glad to say.

Symphonia Academica: in greater numbers than when we saw them
and more spacious surroundings

The reduced numbers meant that, where in more conventional performances you might expect banks of violins, woodwinds and so on, what we got was one of each. It must be quite fun for the musicians: each of them is a section leader. Of course, rather like Nick Clegg of the rapidly imploding British Liberal-Democrat party, they’re leaders without followers, but I imagine it’s still quite a buzz. After all, you aren’t just one of the second violins, you’re the second violin, you’re the French horn, you’re the clarinet.

In fact, the only section with more than one player was percussion, but then you can’t play the triangle and the kettle drums at the same time.

The amazing moment was when the cellist did an impressive and moving solo. Curious, isn’t it? She was always the only cellist, and yet there was a bit where she was obviously solo, whereas in all the other bits she was just alone. Interesting, I suppose, if you like that kind of linguistic whimsy.

They started the evening with a much less conventional piece. It was the UK premiere – yes, Luton can be a trend setter too – of a piece first performed at a Music Academy in Bulawayo. Now Zimbabwe, as the composer who introduced the piece told us, is associated with many things in popular imagination but music teaching isn’t perhaps the first to spring to mind. The Bulawayo Academy is however a dynamic institution and 180 singers joined in the first ever performance of Richard Sisson’s The Mukamba Tree.

At the Library Theatre, 180 Bulawayans would have been a bit over the top, so instead we had a dozen students from Luton’s Sixth Form College, backed by the same mini-orchestra. They made up in gusto, and I’m glad to say in talent, for what they lacked in numbers.

I have to admit that I wasn’t looking forward to the piece. When I hear of a contemporary composition evoking African themes my heart sinks and I dread of something full of dissonance and pretension. But in fact it was jazzy, lively and fun. The whole evening, basically, was a great success.

Which was a bit of a relief after our first venture into classical music locally. Danielle has told me firmly that there’s absolutely no need for me to name the orchestra involved or to say any more than is absolutely necessary about a performance over which it is probably best to draw a veil of discretion. So I’ll just remark that if you go to see a bunch of people performing classical music in public, the least you would probably expect is that the musicians play in tune and in time with each other.

It seems that this is not always a reasonable expectation.

Perhaps it’s best to sum up the evening by saying that they played one of my favourite pieces and I wish they hadn’t.

However, I can at least now proclaim, with pride, that alongside its many other accomplishments, my adopted town also does culture.

And sometimes it does it rather well.