A week of jaunts around live concerts and opera

I never expected to notch up seven live events in a single week under present circumstances (just think - if I lived in Scotland, which in so many ways I'd like to do, the indoor total would still have been zero). The fate of live concerts and opera still hangs in the balance, but on the basis of making hay while the sun shines - as it still does in what now amounts to 11 days of Indian Summer, starting with our Norfolk Churches Walk of which I owe a big account to come - I'll have last week to live off in the memory for a long while to come. Plus a barrage of reviews to help remember chapter and verse: I've linked to them here as the days unfold.

The Wigmore Hall finally opened its doors to a limited audience: all smoothly run, with handwash and temperature-taking from the friendly folk at the door, and then perfect placing of punters. There were two seats between me and Fiona Maddocks at Monday's lunchtime concert, but we still managed to have a good chat before Alban Gerhardt and Markus Becker took flight.

With very little pressure workwise on Monday, I left the Wiggers on a long central London meander to reclaim my bike, which I'd left at Victoria Station the previous week. Coffee and a bun from Ole and Steen first, then a falafel wrap sitting outside in a spookily quiet Old Compton Street opposite the Admiral Duncan (closed) and Algerian Coffee Store (open - my objective for passing that way, being able to buy my usual).

I'd hoped to pop in on Michelle and co at Maison Bertaux but it was firmly shut, if baking daily - the extra wing was boarded up.

Trafalgar Square was as quiet as when I last saw it - on the last day of National Gallery opening before lockdown - but the NG had put tables, chairs and brollies out to make an attractive cafe. I was also unprepared for the latest artwork on the Fourth Plinth, Heather Phillipson's THE END (no explanation given where I looked, and perhaps none needed).

St James's Park was alive with a richer than usual variety of ducks and geese. I won't bore you with the ones I don't recognise - must send them to our ornithological expert Freddie Wilkinson - but no doubt they have something to do with migratory resting points at this time of year. At any rate it was pleasing to see white and black swans in close proximity

while the pelicans who normally hang out on a rock at the east end of the lack were to be found nearer to Buckingham Palace, on the shore. How prehistoric they look.

Tuesday evening saw a very regretful farewell to the magnificent Battersea Park Bandstand's Chamber Music Festival, so brilliantly co-ordinated by clarinettist Anthony Friend (who participated in the third of the concerts). The Mayor of Wandsworth and (I presume) her lady as well as less attentive councillors were present for the young and brilliant Hill Quartet's exquisite finale (this is some time before the start, as I enjoyed the salad prepared by friend Clare).

Nacreous sky at the start

and specially added lighting for nightfall, which made the bandstand look a bit like a fairy palace.

Cycling to and from Igor Levit's stupendous Beethoven sonatas recital the following evening has passed unrecorded, and Thursday evening was a night off. But Friday was eventful. We went for lunch to the Stockwell home of our friends Katharina and Jamie. Katharina produced a jar of honey from her hive at the end of the garden which has turned out to be one of the best and most complext I've ever tasted,

while lunch was enriched by tomatos from Jamie's project in the neighbouring square (I assume he doesn't mind my posting this pic, though I've refrained from the lunch a quatre because my own spouse requests that I avoid images on here wherever possible).

Heading to and from their road via a grand crescent, I admired fruiting on the way

and a very large spider (though not larger than a couple I've seen in the yard recently) on the way back.

At 4 sharp I left to get to Marylebone for a train to High Wycombe and thence, through the services of a very friendly cab company, to Garsington for a Fidelio which advertised itself as a concert performance but in fact was far more vivid in every way than the Royal Opera one before lockdown. And there was the bonus of the garden at the side of the award-winning pavilion at sunset

as well as the view across to the wooded opposite slope of this Chilterns nook.

Saturday was far more exclusively urban, though St Mary Abbots, Kensington, where Sheku Kanneh-Mason tried out his first Dvořák Cello Concerto with his contemporaries in the Fantasia Orchestra, had glittering allure. And Kensington Gardens feels rural by the round pond, with more ducks 

as well as starlings bathing

until you get to further lofty glories by the Albert Memorial, with its imperialistic take on other continents (but splendid sculpture).

Thence I walked down Exhibition Road, livelier now the museums have re-opened, to hop on the District line to Victoria, and from there to Peckham Rye, where I walked up and down in search of decent coffee (not easy, even though it's become a hipster hangout which sits a bit uneasily alongside the long-term residents). I still love the stylish grunge of Bold Tendencies' set-up on the two top floors of the Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park. Goddaughter Rosie May joined me, posed by an artwork on the roof terrace (fabulous views over the city and further)

and she loved Samson Tsoy's recital, though had to go off and work so she didn't catch the equally wonderful playing of Samson's partner Pavel Kolesnikov both in a duo extra and with his (Pavel's) Trio Aventure. The shot at the very top is of the view west, with a Jeremy Deller on the left (we have a perspex Smiley of his at home), while an ironic comment on Victoriana frames the sunset view here.

Snow and Fauré

Since the major snow flurries were just around the corner when I attended Tuesday's lunchtime concert at St Martin-in-the-Fields, it's pure fancy after the event to see some of Fauré's inspirations as delicate flowers that bloom out of bitter cold, which seems to be the case with the slow movement of his First Violin Sonata. It could not have been played with more exquisite, cultured tone and phrasing than by young Maria Włoszczowska with my good friend Sophia Rahman as her equally sensitive and nuanced pianist. Here they are after the event.

After the wonderful recital of Estonian music by the Ruubel twins Triin and Kärt in Berlin a week ago, this was an equal joy - and more of a surprise, since I hadn't heard Włoszczowska before. Though currently taking an Artist Diploma course at the Guildhall School with András Keller, she has already recorded Mozart's Church Sonatas with Maxim Vengerov, so that should give you some idea of her level. The communication shows in her features, too - that aspect shouldn't be underestimated, since it's rare to see a violinist take visible pleasure in the music - and she somehow combines the culture with a big sound; Sophia's mastery of Fauré's more turbulent writing could afford to let rip and never swamp her duo partner. I'm kicking myself for missing the Ysaÿe Sonata in the first half of the concert, but I was cycling with two heavy panniers of sheet music and LPs to hand over to friend Clare, who also came, as well as battling the east wind, and it took me 20 minutes longer than it usually does. Thighs now like tugboats.

I could afford to take my time on the way back as I was working at home in the evening. And after I'd helped Clare to Leicester Square tube with her load, the first big snowstorm began. I dived into Bagariet, the superlative Swedish bakery in Rose Street, and felt all mysigt (that's hygge to the north) with my espresso and cake watching the flakes fall outside the window. The brilliant sunshine and sharp blue skies that followed meant I became a tourist wandering round Trafalgar Square with its semi-frozen fountains

and dusting of snow on lions

and water-deities.

I was making my way to have a late lunch with J round the corner from Europe House, but realised I had to go via St James's Park where the daffodils were now trying to hold their heads above the snow,

the London planes glowed in the light before the next flurry

and tress by the water's edge had begun their budding.

Pink and white fur here from this lady exercising her handsome dog.

Birds were generally more eager than ever to come close in the hope of food, including moorhens

and patient herons,

but black and white swans seemed more keen to keep warm down by the water's edge

and the pelicans, as usual, appeared perfectly indifferent, albeit feeling the cold, on their rock.

Refreshed at Itsu, I pedalled slowly home, despite being relieved of my pannier-burdens, admiring the blossoming in Paultons Square

and just catching a glimpse of distant snow-clouds mountainously massing beyond Brompton Cemetery.

I needn't have been in such a hurry to catch the snow scene - yesterday morning everything was covered and the view out of one back window in the early morning light

caught the prunus's premature flowerings.

Snow lay heavy on tentative vegetation

and more came in droves.

Not so much fun last night: my attempts to get to English Touring Opera's Marriage of Figaro at the Hackney Empire were aborted, despite timetables showing no imminent delays; first we were thrown off the on-time London Overground train at Willesden Junction, standing for ten minutes in another blizzard (kinda fun in its bleak awfulness), and then told that the next train and all its successors would only be going as far as Camden Road because of damage to overhead lines. So I got off at West Hampstead, took a much quicker tube journey home and spent a hygge/mysigt evening with J watching two episodes of Homeland's slow-burn but gripping Season Six.

Under and over the Thames

It started as a very special 'exclusive': an invitation to see the Guildhall School of Music and Drama's sound and video work in the enormous Bascule Chamber of Tower Bridge, 100 steps down beneath the Thames (main installation photos by Paul Cochrane, courtesy of GSMD). The bonus was just as good: a chance to join the tourists and look down from the walkways originally constructed as a Victorian wonder for pedestrians until too many people started throwing themselves off (it's all now very much enclosed, but you still get the views). Rounded off, moreover, by the sexiest machinery I've ever seen: the Industrial Age as a thing of beauty.

Of which Tower Bridge as a whole, constructed between 1886 and 1894 at a cost of £1,500,000, is the best representative I can imagine - and now that I know what it can reveal, I'd make sure any visitor put the paying part of it on a top five list of London sights (the Tower of London, with which I've been mildly obsessed since childhood, has to be number one).The one part the public doesn't usually get to see, other than on one day of the year (I assume during Architecture Open Weekend) or on specially-ordered private tours (which I'd recommend), is the Bascule Chamber, the operational area that houses the massive counterweights lowered when the two bascules are raised to allow big shipping through (which still happens regularly). The two towers clad in stone of Gothic design have a steel frame to support the heavy bascules, each weighing about a thousand tons.

The counterweights, if I remember what we were told correctly, amount to a couple of hundred tons, so it was quite a frisson to think of them, as well as the river water, hovering above our heads once we'd made the descent 'Down the Rabbit Hole', as the first part of the Guildhall School's live and installed work was called. Photos were allowed on the way up, so here are a couple I took, one of the dramatically lit staircases

and another of the big boiler? engine? towards the bottom. Very cold and dank down there. You could feel the temperature dropping as you descended.

The work was carried out by students from the GS's BA in Video Design for Live Performance and BA in Performance and Creative Enterprise degree courses. And a remarkable job they made of the 'happening'. We lucky few sat and donned headphones with a lively collage of music and quotations from films - most of them identifiable - while the images played with the sense of space. Back to Paul Cochrane for the next three pics.

Inevitably they were of variable quality, coming from so many different sources, but made up an imaginative journey which evoked cinematic travels to the centre of the earth with tumbling rocks, rainbows, spinning London landmarks and a projection of the underground map,

underwater sequences and giant faces.

Did the results achieve their stated objective as 'an imaginative and visual transformation of the space'? Absolutely, though it was also good to be allowed to linger and see the brickwork at closer quarters after the adventure.

As I exited, I saw tourists coming out of the lift that runs up one of the towers. and asked if I could go upwards, having been down. The staff couldn't have been more charming: a jovial Welshman escorted me up, and a nice girl I met at the top in the steel-encased upper part of the tower

told me how much she loved working there and watching people's reactions. My own was, why on earth have I never done this before? First I strolled along the east walkway, from which David Piper, in my first and still favourite big guide to London writes how 'the quintessential Thames opens up, the widening waters claim the sky and reject any further construction by bridges'.

The warehouse ghosts he writes of, though, have now been replaced by mostly undistinguished luxury housing all the way to Greenwich - and then, of course, there's Canary Wharf, undreamed of when the book was published in 1964.

Kids loved lying and taking selfies on the glass which gives way to views of the bridge and Thames below (it was half-term week and the hot, stuffy enclosure was rank with schoolroom smells).

And the information is good throughout, though there are rather too many photobooths and naff refreshments machines; whatever it takes to get extra money out of the visitors, I guess.

On the west walkway there's so much to see, familiar and yet not from this height or angle: the City Hall 'Armadillo' and the Shard,

the skyline along to St Paul's and beyond

with zoom shots of Wren's dome

and the Monument, which is higher but still surpassed by this for interest.

And of course, at the end of the walkway, there's the splendid Tower below

with a view of Traitor's Gate that's very unfamiliar

and Billingsgate Fish Market a bit further along.

I descended by the steps until I had to take a lift.

Having had my curiosity piqued by the electric machinery for the bascules which replaced the original in 1976,

I wanted to see the original hydraulic works by Armstrong-Mitchell Ltd, and was very kindly 'connected' to the last stop by another incredibly friendly attendant. I asked him if the employees had been offered a special showing of the Bascular spectacular. They hadn't; I wrote to the management to ask if that could be arranged, but never got a reply. Anyway, the glistening, repainted machinery is all worth seeing just from the aesthetic point of view. As I have no knowledge of what was pumping and turning for what (or would have been, were it still in use), I'll leave it at a parade of images.

It was one of those February days which give promise of spring, and of course the sunset was spectacular as I cycled homewards over Westminster Bridge*

with a Chinese wedding on the other side of the road.

The tourist closest to the bride has the staggered look of the bedraggled lady at the New York socialites arriving at the Met in one of Weegee's most famous images.

I decided to leave the cycle path in Hyde Park and walk with my bike along the Serpentine

where swan activity was strong, but peaceable

and a solitary Crested Grebe's head caught the last of the sun.

At times like this I enjoy both being a tourist and taking a proprietary pride in my inexhaustible city.

*23/03 Coincidental that I posted this a day before the attack. The last words above hold true more than ever.