Maxim Vengerov bears a disturbing resemblance to BBC presenter Jools Holland. So when I saw the great Russian for the first time at the National Concert Hall on Saturday night, I half expected him to sit down at a piano and play swamp boogie. But there was no piano, of course, as Vengerov is a violinist. And after 45 minutes of listening to him, I could understand why many consider him the finest string player alive.
First he breezed through Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D Major (Opus 35) – a piece so famously difficult that some of the 19th-century masters to whom it was offered shirked the honour. Then, after that had earned a prolonged standing ovation, Vengerov played Massenet's Meditation – six minutes of the sort of sublime music you might expect to accompany you on a chariot to heaven. Another standing ovation followed.
The Massenet piece is too perfect to discuss, so I’ll go back to Tchaikovsky’s composition, which in any case has a more interesting story. It might have been an early example of what, 100 years later, we would call the “classic divorce album”. Except that the marriage from which the composer was recovering at the time had nothing to do with love, being designed instead as a cover for his homosexuality, and was an immediate disaster.
There is a theory that the unfortunate Antonina Miliukova misunderstood the hints her future husband may have dropped about the limited nature of their nuptial contract, simply because homosexuality was beyond her social education. Tchaikovsky’s brother put the problem more unkindly, calling her a “crazed half-wit”. The marriage ended after two months, whereupon the composer fled to Switzerland, and while recovering there wrote the concerto.
Technical difficulties aside, it wasn’t an immediate success. An influential Viennese critic of the time found it “hideous”, suggesting Tchaikovsky had transcended the usual precesses by creating music that offended the nose as well as ears. “We plainly see the savage faces, we hear curses, we smell vodka . . .” he railed. Happily, as Ian Fox wrote in the programme notes, “rapid public acclaim soon replaced this ridiculous opinion”.
Saturday’s concert was designed to commemorate another held 150 years ago this month at the same venue, during the “Great Exhibition” of 1865– one of the many large-scale industrial and scientific expos so beloved of the 19th-century world.
Not the least remarkable thing about those temporary exhibitions was the permanent structures they left behind. Paris owes the Eiffel Tower to one such show, the 1889 World’s Fair. As for the Dublin event, even after the glass pavilions were dismantled and shipped to London, the city retained the building that became first the Royal University of Ireland, then UCD, and finally the NCH, which is now housed in the original “large concert hall” of 1865.
The Great Exhibition’s legacy extends to the Iveagh Gardens, behind the NCH, where the leftovers include statues, a miniature maze, and a waterfall. And 1865 also explains a feature of those grounds about which I had long wondered.
The Iveagh Gardens are still a secret to many Dubliners. But they were one of the first city parks I ever frequented, because I once worked just across the road from them, in the Office of the Collector General on Earlsfort Terrace. That was a six-story building, and it became a thing during my time there for us to organise inter-floor football matches, not as part of a formal league, just for general vaingloriousness and bragging rights.
Although our floor (the third) had less playing talent than some of the others, we made up for it, as the more modest teams must, with organisation, hard work, and thuggery. My memory – a bit hazy now – is that we went through the series unbeaten. We certainly lowered the colours of the much-vaunted sixth floor, and of the fancy dans on the fifth, who looked down on us in more ways than one. I also recall scoring the winning goal against the hated second floor – beating the keeper with an unstoppable drive from two yards.
The games took place in a mysterious sunken grass rectangle, which lent the venue a bear-pit quality. I now know this to have been the remains of an archery garden from 1865. It was sunken for safety reasons, presumably, to minimise the possibilities of passersby being skewered by arrows. But it worked well for football – being perfectly tailored to our team’s game plan, which was to drag the opposition down to our level.
@FrankmcnallyIT