Community Challenge Concert! (Preparing for a concert!)

There's an 'h' in 'hour'!  Although, I'm a 'Northerner' in the UK so haitches are optional - sometimes there are none and then sometimes they're like machine gun-fire!   

Sindre Skarelven Thanks Sindre.  I called the Box Office rather than booking online.  I mentioned the surgery and asked if it was at all possible to sit in the disabled section on the keyboard side at the front of the stage.  They said that we could.  The tickets are £10 each - less than half price, as the seating is moveable.  I did mention that I hoped that we had a clear view of the key board, as I didn't want to have to go on stage and dragged the piano around, not after the surgery!

Dominic Cheli Thanks Dominic.  I am amazed how quick the recovery has been.  The Paul Lewis concert last night was splendid.  I may have said before that we have an amazing concert hall about 20 minutes from our home.  The acoustic is phenomenal.  The building was provided by an anonymous benefactor at a cost of over £10 million pounds.  The story goes that the architect went to the benefactor and said, 'The acoustic would be so much better if we added another metre to the height of the hall, which would cost another million.'  The benefactor agreed, and then agreed again, and again, and then said, 'We really have to stop going up now..."  The hall is used by major London symphony orchestras as a rehearsal space, and they come to play concerts too.  It is loved by so many top flight performers.  This is where we heard Sir Andras Schiff.

Paul Lewis was asked to choose the hall's Steinway.  He played Schubert's No 7 in E flat, No 14 in A minor, and No 17 in D major.  He finished the first half with the A minor, which Schubert wrote when he had his diagnosis of syphilis in 1823, when he was only twenty six years old.  The first movement is funereal.  The piano needed to be re-tuned in the interval after the emotion that poured out of Paul Lewis.

It's so special to hear these sonatas, which have not been part of the mainstream repertoire until recently, seemingly.  This was a first time hearing for me.   This concert is one of four that are part of an interational tour lasting two years.  I hope he brings the other three to us along the way!

Roy James-Pike So glad your knee is doing better.  What a superb concert experience you had!  What is the name of your concert hall?  I was a Board member for the Atlanta Symphony for 15 years and the whole time we were trying to build a new hall.  Never got it done!

Gail Starr Hello Gail, Happy New Year and I hope your'e well.

It wasn't my knee.  It was a repair to an umbilical hernia, but thank you for your comment.  The concert hall is called Saffron Hall.  Here is the link.  It looks like you will have to copy and paste.

https://www.saffronhall.com/

The building of Saffron Hall was around the time that we moved from London into the country [30-ish miles away].

One of our 'connected activities' is dancing.  The interconnection for me started in my very early years.    The building of our village community hall coincided with our arrival in the village, which was around the time that Saffron Hall became a concert venue.  The outcome was that we moved to a rural area and had a concert hall and a dance rehearsal space provided for us on a plate!  

Our village hall is way out of proportion to the size of the village but the result is that we have a full-size dance floor because the main hall was built to house a badminton court.  Many of the villagers think the hall is a 'white elephant' because of this, but we love it!

http://manuden.org.uk/mvcc.asp

Neither of these facilities came from community money.  The funding of Saffron Hall was from a wealthy anonymous private benefactor, and the village hall was from what we call 'Section 106', which is the statutory basis for 'payments' that developers make to local communities to secure a planning permission for a high-value development, which, in this case, was very expensive residential housing. 

Roy James-Pike Thank you so much for the lovely links and excellent explanation!