Dvorak

For some reason, I’d got it into my head that the main work in the Gringolts Quartet’s midday recital at the Edinburgh Festival was going to be Beethoven’s Quartet in C sharp minor, Op.131. No problem with that, of course; it’s exactly the sort of big serious work you’d expect a big serious international violin soloist like Ilya Gringolts to play when he forms a string quartet, and then to bring on tour to a big serious international festival like Edinburgh. Still, it’s not a piece that you can really listen to before lunch without a certain amount of mental preparation; and it was while revisiting the Festival website that

Rejoice: live music is back. Or at least, live music with a live audience, which, as Sir Simon Rattle admitted, addressing the masked and socially distanced crowd immediately before the LSO’s first full-scale public performance for 14 months, is kind of the whole point. Yes, he said, they’d streamed online concerts from the Barbican, but the silence of emptiness is a very different proposition from the silence of a hall containing 1,000 human beings. He’s right, of course. Those 14 months have tested to destruction the notion that digital platforms can offer the same sort of emotional nourishment. Once again, then — rejoice! And nobody mention the Indian variant. For