Empty Seats

A slightly strange day. The morning was spent pootling around at home, feeling not very good because of the flu jab yesterday and also discovering that my dear friend Scharwenka is not very well at the moment.

The afternoon was a different matter. Flu reaction or no flu reaction we were determined to go to the concert at the Barbican for which we had tickets. We stopped en route to go to John Lewis Home (for a new bathmat) and Asda (for various bits of shopping), then sat in rather bad traffic going into London to get to the Barbican.

Usually we'd bound around the place like a couple of sprightly young things, take a short amble to Brick Lane and stock up on spicy delicacies etc, but I felt much too ill to do such things.

However, there was a very nice chamber concert on before the main concert. A young quartet with added double bass performed Dvorak's Quintet Op.77. Naturally, the Barbican hall wasn't filled, so I took this picture of some of the empty seats! It was a very enjoyable taster of what was to come!

The main concert was Dvorak's Violin Concerto with Anne-Sophie Mutter as soloist, which was excellent, followed by Janacek's Glagolitic Mass. I'd forgotten quite how wonderful Janacek's music is!

So, despite the fact that I was an aching, sweating wreck, we had a really good evening - much better than if we'd decided we couldn't go and spent the time curled up under a blanket on the sofa!

This is how it is sometimes!