By strange twists of fortune to relief for the soul

There are times when we just need to let the stress out. Little does that as well as music. Especially music in good company. Especially when part of the good company is provided by the musicians.

My family’s going through a stressful time. Well, the worst stress is for my mother. At 93, things can go wrong quickly, and they’ve been going pretty badly wrong for her just recently, as she bounces between a hospital and an intermediate care facility, a step down from acute care but still a medical establishment, not home.

She’d done well to get to 93 still able to live in her own flat. There was a part-time manager in her building but no medical care. Until a few weeks ago, my mother has coped with her own cooking, shopping and washing, only drawing on the help of friends when it was offered. Now, though, the pain she has suffered for some years has become worse and a series of other problems have led to her transferring in and out of different forms of medical care, and the sight is a sad one to see.

It’s the harrowing paradox of human existence: none of us wants to die young, but reaching advanced old age is no fun either.

The stress is worst for my mother, but the rest of the family has suffered from it too. So it was wonderful to find relief from it at another concert in the museum in Luton. These take place, as I’ve mentioned before, in the lovely surroundings of Wardown House. On this occasion, the concert involved two violinists playing a series of pieces; an unusual, and attractive, aspect of the event was that they stopped regularly to talk about the music they were playing or their composers. That was fun and it established a friendly rapport between the players and the audience.

Let me quickly indulge in what will feel like a digression, though it isn’t really.

Back the late 90s, a scandal hit the papers. It was a financial matter but not confined to the financial pages. Nicola Horlick was that rare creature, a woman who was a highly successful player in the financial services market. She was managing director of UK investments for Morgan Grenfell Asset Management, until she was suspended in January 1997 and resigned two days later. She was accused of preparing to move to another company, which was the excuse for her suspension; there was, however, widespread suspicion that she had irritated her employers by being far more successful than any woman was expected to be in that profession (or, it was felt, had any right to be).

In 2005, she set up Bramdean Asset Management. One of the partners there was Enrico Alvares. Now, he had a most unusual background to be a financial manager. The son of a professional violinist in Nairobi, he had been more or less obliged to take up the instrument at the age of three. He studied music at prestigious schools in London and eventually joined (by invitation) the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, where he played for ten years.

But then he decided that he wanted to make a little money. So he joined Nicola Horlick and made, in his own words, hundreds of times more than he ever could from music. Hs initial passion, however, never deserted him and in time he decided that money could only go so far. He returned to the violin.

Meanwhile, Stephanie Waite had done something not dissimilar. She had played the violin from the age of two. At eighteen, she went to Cambridge to study English literature and moved into teaching after graduating, including several years teaching English and Music at Pentonville prison.

One night, however, she attended a string quartet concert at London’s Wigmore Hall. She remembers neither who was playing nor what they played. Her principal recollection of that evening was the overwhelming feeling that this was what she wanted to be doing. She had to get back into music.

By different routes, both Enrico and Stephanie found themselves playing in one of the major orchestras, she with the violins, he as first viola. The orchestra was too big for them to meet but, by what turned out to be a happy coincidence, they got to know each other on the homebound train. Soon after, they were married and since then they have frequently given violin duo concerts together.

Stephanie and Enrico: wonderfully performing glorious music
in the beautiful setting of Wardown House

One of those concerts was in Wardown House, which is where we met them.

Two odd and serendipitous paths to that place. Where, by further serendipity, we listened to them at just a time when we most needed the balm they provided.

Life, as my mother’s experience shows, often gets things badly wrong. Sometimes it does them exactly right. And this was one of those occasions.

For that, at least, I’m grateful.

Fiddling for Spring

Not for the first time, we went to Wardown House, in Wardown Park, perhaps Luton’s most attractive spot, for a concert at the weekend.

I made the mistake of telling my granddaughter we were going to a concert, and she responded with some enthusiasm, ‘oh! Who are you going to see?’ That left her crestfallen when we replied that it was classical music. I have to keep reminding myself that ‘concert’ doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing to different people.

This one was given by a violinist, Joanne Davis, who started off by apologising for having brought along a ‘box’ with her so she could playing backing music to her pieces. She couldn’t, she assured us, bring “the Berlin Phil” with her as there wasn’t enough space.

At least, I think she said “the Berlin Phil”, meaning the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, for which there certainly wouldn’t have been room. Note even for the orchestra, let alone an audience as well. On the other hand, she might have just said “Berlin Phil”. That, presumably, would have been an enormous man with an odd nickname, as well as extraordinary talents enabling him to play rather a lot of instruments all at the same time.

The concert was enjoyable, in a lovely setting. The rather small room (too little for her friend Berlin Phil) is attractively and tastefully laid out and decorated. It’s from the middle of the nineteenth century – what I still think of as ‘the last century’, but that only betrays my age – though the ceiling with its delicate mouldings, I couldn’t help feeling, seemed to be harking back to something rather older: the start of the century or possibly even the late eighteenth.

Wardown House Ceiling
Designed to be old-fashioned?

That would suggest that the owners of the house chose to decorate it in what was already an old-fashioned style. Suggesting that there’s nothing so old or so persistent as conservatism. Still, that’s hardly a surprising observation, is it?

The music included two pieces focusing on spring – the movement by that name from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and the Beethoven Spring Sonata. As Ms Davis pointed out, her choices perhaps reflected wishful thinking: it was still cold outside and, while there were odd moments of clear sky, they were interspersed with more rain, the tail end (we hoped) of the infernally long winter we’ve been struggling through.

Joanne Davis fiddling for spring
The hat in the foreground shows at least one member of
the audience thought winter was still here (even indoors)

Well, if the music was aspirational, it worked. Because in the next couple of days spring finally arrived, and with a real flourish. The trees that had been holding back and holding back suddenly burst out. Trunks and branches that had been bare for months covered themselves in green in a matter of forty-eight hours: one could feel the impatience of nature to make up for all that wasted time.

I’m so pleased we went to that concert. Not just because it was pleasant, but because I’m sure our being there contributed to the aspirational effect it produced. In other words, I’m putting down the arrival of spring to Ms Davis having played her fiddle pieces on the season, and our being there to hear them.

And I challenge any of you to prove me wrong.

On the way to Wardown Park
Spring bursting out at last