Welcome to the first instalment of the Music Box Wealden blog! Having never written a blog before, I’m looking forward to the chance of sharing our experiences as we take the Music Box project forward and also to talking about the performers, the music and very possibly the state of the arts in general. 

When I was in my 20s and 30s, I used to try to hear as many of the world’s great pianists as I could and one of the greatest was the Russian virtuoso Sviatoslav Richter – he was actually born and brought up in modern-day Ukraine, then of course part of the Soviet Russian empire.  I vividly remember a concert in which he played Schubert’s great, late G major sonata (D. 894).  He took the first movement at such a shockingly slow speed that the exposition seemed to go on for ever – and when he reached the end of it, blowed if he didn’t go back and repeat the whole thing.  Reading a biography of him recently, I discovered that he was obsessed with always playing every repeat and was horrified when musicians omitted them. 

Last Saturday, the Wealden Trio performed Schubert’s trio in B flat major (D.898) at Alfriston Church and while we were rehearsing, we hummed and hawed about whether to play the exposition repeat in the first movement.  On the one hand, Schubert no doubt intended it – it was Robert Schumann who coined the term ‘heavenly length’ to describe the first movement of Schubert’s C major Symphony, and lots of the late works have very long first movements.  On the other hand, we didn’t want to exhaust the patience of our audience – coming in at just over 40 minutes it’s quite a long listen.  In the end we decided not to do the repeat – sorry Sviatoslav – but we did do the shorter repeat in the beautiful slow movement which, we all felt worked well. 

The other work on the programme was the Ravel trio, which was hard work for us to learn and rehearse – but the reaction from our audience made it all worthwhile!

Our next concert is a new departure for us – an audio-visual experience at the Hailsham Pavilion featuring the Modulus Quartet in a performance of Gagarin Quartets by Nicholas de Carlo, inspired by Yuri Gagarin’s inaugural space voyage in 1961.  We’re hoping that our first experiment in presenting innovative, contemporary, multi-media work will be a success, though right now we’re a bit worried, as ticket sales are very slow indeed – so I really hope to see some of you there!  

Have a good week.

Will