Sunday April 4th 2010

I'd like to share a few thoughts re Bach. Last Wed (31st March) went with friends to a performance of St Matthew's Passion at Bath Abbey, with table booked at Tilley's Bistro for interval.

"Lucky sod", I hear some of you say, and to an extent you'd be right. Lovely friends, smashing meal but I was left wondering whether anyone really enjoys what went with it. I must be honest; for years this group has attended the Christmas performance of Handel's Messiah. Last December I gave it a miss. I really was suffering from culture fatigue. I have counted the stained glass windows in the Abbey so many times that I thought there might be new non-cultural experiences awaiting me. I won't tell you how many there are, windows not experiences, but it is good exercise for the idling brain and, because one cannot see all from any one seat, it needs an imaginative architectural bent to predict repeating patterns in unseen places. Anyway, the Bach excursion has topped up my culture tank for a few years or so.

At a couple of places in the performance there was an opportunity for audience participation. Whether this was in Bach's mind I cannot say, but what a cunning ruse. Who is going to complain about a concert in which one took part, however uncomfortable the seats and impaired the view?

I also learned the origin of the phrase, 'Going to the Wall'. For those who don't know, a lady sitting on the side stone ledge, in answer to my 'How do you come to be in the cheap seats?' jibe, explained that the poor would be seated in church or wherever after toffs had taken theirs, and would be guided to these side stalls. Hence, I took it, 'Going to the wall' meant being or becoming poor.

I gathered from the programme that meddling Mendelssohn was responsible for my pleasure that night. Bach had died many years before this piece became a favourite and it was Mendy, not unlike our own Mandy, who spun it into a show-stopper. Let sleeping dogs lie, I would have recommended.

I did wonder whether, had Bach had the benefit of our modern past-times - TV, ten pin bowling, binge drinking etc., we may have been saved centuries of person hours spent deceiving each other as to the pleasure we were gaining from Johann's particular genius.