We began with a walk across a windy Waterloo bridge with Kitty at the end of it:
This beautiful bridge, designed by the architect of Liverpool Anglican cathedral, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, is also known as the Lady’s bridge as it was built largely by women during the Second World War since so much of the male labour force was involved in military service.
A passageway at the end of the bridge leads to Somerset House’s river terrace. This noble edifice, designed by Royal Academician Sir William Chambers as a riposte to criticism that London lacked a contemporary building worthy of its status, was formerly a government office but is now happily given over to cultural and social pursuits.
In the House’s expansive Italianate cortile a part was occupied by Zheng Bo’s bamboo installation. Coming from an area of the world (Bagni di Lucca) where bamboo groves abound what I saw seemed a little underwhelming but nevertheless it was pleasant to sit among the plants and do what the artist has asked visitors to do: take a piece of paper and a pen (both supplied), draw bamboo leaves and chill out.
Somerset House contains one of the world’s great private art collections: the Courtauld gallery. Here we were able to view an immensely powerful series of largely charcoal portraits by Frank Auerbach. Now well into his nineties the artist was one of those lucky children of Jewish decent who managed to escape the concentration camp by being smuggled out via Kinder transport. Many great artists seem to wage an apocalyptic battle with their medium. Beethoven with his last wonderful quartets and Michaelangelo with his titanic sculptures come to mind. Auerbach fights too, stabbing his paper with the charcoal, then patching things up, then obliterating what was drawn. It’s a cosmic struggle to get into the heart of his subjects, some of whom had to fight just to survive the dark forces of the war years.
Impressionists at the Courtauld are the glory of the collection. How that lucky family, who once lived near us at Eltham Palace, managed to find such amazing examples is anyone’s guess. I particularly like the Pisarro showing the train stopping at the former station of Lordship Lane. At the top of the hill to the right, since built upon, is the house where I once lived.
The Courtauld gallery also contains a marvellous collection of paintings ranging from Italian primitives to Goya.
Some of the gallery’s ceilings have elegant decorations by Gianbattista Cipriani, my wife’s ancestor.
We exited from Somerset House onto a fully pedestrianised Strand. It was a very pleasant surprise! It’s so much better when cars are banned from some of our city streets. Here it works really well. St-Mary-le-Strand, the elegant church by eighteenth century architect Gibbs, so long regarded as a mere traffic roundabout now fully emerges as the flower it is. An absolutely appropriate transformation!
Our evening of ballet at Covent Garden’s Opera house was preceded by a walk round the former fruit and veg market, now a lively promenade with its shops and street performers who continue a tradition going back centuries. Here, for instance, Samuel Pepys recorded the first Punch and Judy show he’d ever seen.
It was a triple at the Garden celebrating that doyen of coreographers Kenneth Macmillan, son of a Scottish labourer. First were the Dances Concertantes set to some of Stravinsky’s wittiest music. This was followed by ”Different Drummers’, a harrowing tale based on Buchner’s ‘Wozzeck’ and with music by Webern and Schoenberg from their earliest and most palatable period. The conclusion was ‘Requiem’ set to Faure’s own wonderful Requiem mass.
i would have been happy to have heard just one item from the evening’s programme. I wish I had the emotional strength to have fully appreciated all three. It was just too much! I felt sad that I could not have concentrated more on the supreme movements of this finest of ballet corps but at the end of a day, the warmest London day so far this year, already filled with emotion, I found I was sinking fast in a tristanesque swoon. All the same, what a great day out!