The Four Seasons

The Four Seasons, Saturday, 3/11. [photos: Amsterdam scene, Jakob van Ruisdael; London Soloists at St. Martin-in-the-Fields.] Signs are up warning us that streets will be closed tomorrow for parades, and they are setting up booths in Trafalgar Square for a week-long Irish festival leading to St. Patrick’s Day. What with drunken soccer fans and Irish parades, tomorrow looks like a good day to be somewhere else.

But today we went to the van Ruisdael (rhymes with ‘Drysdale’) exhibition at the Royal Academy. It’s quite a show, including his most famous one, The Mill at Wijk-something-or-other. The audio guide told us that in Holland this painting is as familiar to people as Constable’s The Haywain is in England. Alice’s favorite was a view of Amsterdam and mine was a tiny one of sand-dunes facing the sea in a strong wind. In case you’re interested, the exhibition was a joint venture with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (!) so I guess we could have waited.

Next we went back to the National Gallery, had tea in their café, and focused on the East Wing (1700-1900). Lo and behold, there was The Haywain, and you could easily see the links between Constable and van Ruisdael. Alice’s favorite was a vase of flowers by Gauguin, and some Pissaro landscapes. We both liked a country snow scene by Pissaro which turned out to be done near London. My favorite tends to be whatever’s on by Turner, but I was impressed by the life-size portrait of Whistlejack, an Arabian stallion. Only the horse is there – no background at all. I can’t remember the artist, unfortunately, and have no Internet access to research it. This horse, unlike many others in, for instance, Stubbs’ work, had a properly-proportioned head. We saw somewhere in the museum that it was sometimes the style in full-length human portraits to make the heads slightly undersized to give the sitter a more majestic impression. Stubb’s horses all seem to have very tiny heads, and it always made the horses look idiotic. Hmm.

Speaking of changing ideas, we also saw the famous van Eyck painting known as the Arnolfini Marriage (1434) where the happy bride was obviously pregnant, and it took two pages just to list the symbolic details in the painting. Well now it turns out she is not pregnant, but as our guide says, “… her rotund shape conforms to contemporary ideas of female beauty.” Also, it’s not a wedding but merely a very formal portrait. Those of you with old art books should get out the Redacting Pen and remove the accusatory moral symbols from the text.

For dinner we took a chance and went to one of the many Italian restaurants (Bella Italia) in the theater district. Not so bad. Their Caesar salad was a joke (I guess you just can’t run an Italian restaurant without offering a Caesar salad) but the rest of dinner was fine. Alice had duck leg in plum sauce and I had a chicken-pesto risotto. The couple next to us ordered a huge ice cream and brownie dessert for two (the ‘Godfather’, £6.95 and a bargain) and one of the children at the table on our other side asked if we could all share it. We could have. The Brits love their ice cream; we have seen Haagen-Dazs parlors all over, still open when the temperature is barely above freezing.

After dinner we went to St. Martin-in-the-Fields church for one of their Music by Candle-light concerts. Tonight it was a group of string players, the New London Soloists, who did Bach, Purcell and Vivaldi the first half, and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons series of violin concertos in the second half. Being as we were in church, there was a Question and Response (a ‘Dismissal’ in the Anglican church) between players and the audience. Every slow movement asked the question, ‘Can the audience please be quiet?’, and the response was the traditional Creaking of the Pews. St. Martin’s was built in 1732 and the pews sound like they were purpose-built to inform the pastor whenever his sermon was running too long and people got the fidgets.

The place was nearly full – we had to get seats one behind the other – and very enthusiastic. People clapped after every movement until well into the second half. I read later that these concerts were ‘tourist-oriented’. Well, it’s a nice way to get people into a classical concert and the best seats were only $32!

The band played an encore, “Oblivion” by Astor Piazolla. A tango, of course. What would George II have thought of tangos in church? It was beautiful, really showing off the solo violin, and a perfect encore to two hours of Baroque music.