We had an official tour of our building project in Burlington Gardens in advance of our monthly project board meeting. For the first time, there are the beginnings of new construction alongside the extensive demolition.
The lecture theatre space is open for a full three floors:-
We went to what turned out to be the first performance (actually, a play-through) of a new piece by Jonathan Dove called Catching Fire, due to be played for the first time at the Cheltenham Festival this Saturday. But before playing it, Melvyn Tan said rather casually that he would do ‘109’ Beethoven’s 109th. piano sonata, performed fortissimo in the small space of his studio. Jonathan introduced his piece as a work-out for Melvyn. It was indeed – a piece of nearly impossible brilliance and virtuosity as well as complex musicality which involved, so far as I could tell, at least three fingers on a single key: what someone in the audience described graphically, if inelegantly, as a mind fuck. Afterwards, the composer commented in detail on precise aspects of the performance, praising Melvyn for developing his own interpretation and saying, rather astonishingly, that part could have been played more flashily. Then, there was much discussion of the use or otherwise of the middle pedal:-
In walking down Salmon Lane this morning, I was reminded of the Chinese restaurant Good Friends which was a great attraction of the street and brought people out from the west end, including, I’ve discovered, Fay Maschler’s parents in the 1960s (although it only opened in 1967). Even better, from our perspective, as well as cheaper, was a restaurant called The Peking, which disappeared once West India Dock Road was widened, had a large fish tank from which one could select one’s dinner, and was presided over by a magnificent woman who was half-Chinese, a representative of the local Chinese community which was still in evidence in the early 1980s, but now may have gone.
Since it was such a spectacularly beautiful morning, I decided to potter round some of my old haunts in Limehouse where we used to live. I got a good view of 5, Newell Street which was, and remains, a monument to early post-modernism, designed by Tom Brent in 1977 when he bought the whole of Nelson’s Wharf as an experiment in semi-communal living:-
I walked down the Regent’s Canal and was struck by how hugely beneficial it is that, whether because of poverty or ecology, Tower Hamlets has allowed the verges of Mile End Park to run wild, so that Canary Wharf pops up out of an overgrown meadow:-
We went back to the new Tate Modern to get a better sense of it without the opening crowds. It felt better being able to navigate it on one’s own. We liked the view from outside the new south entrance:-
Kader Attia’s table reconstructing the ancient city of Ghardaïa out of couscous:-
The launch of Jean-Michel’s festschrift was held in the chapel at King’s:-
I went to have a quick look at the installation of the Rubens (plain black benches have been added to soften the gap between the choir and the ashlar where the seventeenth-century choirstalls used to be):-
I went to the launch of the festschrift for Jean Michel Massing, who is retiring as a Professor of Art History at Cambridge after nearly forty years on the teaching staff, hired the year after I graduated. It was an extraordinarily impressive occasion with paper after paper by his former students, exhibiting the formidable range of his learning, above all on the transmission of ideas through the medium of prints and the relationship of western to non-western art, including the image of the black and Oceania. More than his own work, he is interested in his extended influence on the work of his students in a way which is wholly admirable:-
I have just been to a talk by the landscape historian, Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, about the layout of the gardens in Regent’s Park. The argument was that Nash, who worked in partnership with the landscape designer, Humphrey Repton for eight years in the 1790s, was so immersed in the literature and ways of looking of the picturesque and the writings of Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price, that he always thought about buildings not just on their own, but how they would be viewed from a distance from within the park as part of a visual and scenographic composition. Now, Todd is recommending that the Crown Estate Paving Commission, which has had responsibility for the gardens since it was first established in 1824, should go back as far as possible to the original scheme of planting:-
I was encouraged to go and visit the Factum Arte booth at Masterpiece. It shows the work they are doing in the highest quality digital reproduction of major works of art. A putative Grinling Gibbons frame reproduced for Strawberry Hill:-
A head of Jacob Rothschild taken on a new technology called Veronica, which makes him look uncannily like the Emperor Claudius:-
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