I went to the first concert of the 2021 Bath Mozartfest in the Assembly rooms, the Cuarteto Casals and Paul Lewis. I do enjoy Saturday morning as a time for concerts, when I’m not tired after a day’s work and the interval drink (for me anyway) is coffee – I managed to be second in the queue at the bar!
This concert managed to be memorable for extra-musical reasons. A rather ugly gantry had replaced the more elegant baldacchino of recent years, supporting lighting for streaming of the concert. However the lighting in the room provided a certain amount of inadvertent entertainment by going on and off from time to time in the first half, plunging the performers into gloom (it wasn’t a sunny day). They caught one another’s eye between movements to consult wordlessly, but carried on regardless. Meanwhile, staff could be seen diving in and out behind the curtain at the back. The problem turned out to be the fault of Western Power Distribution.
The concert opened with Mozart’s D minor quartet, then the chamber version of his piano concerto K414, which I’ve heard Paul Lewis play here before with a different quartet. After the interval we moved into the Romantic period with a selection of the Songs without Words – it is now acceptable to play these in public again – and Schumann’s string quartet no. 3 in A.
I’m afraid to say that writing this after some time has gone by, I can’t remember much detail of the performances, except that I enjoyed them. I think they got upstaged by the lights a bit.
Another account here.