St. Margaret's Church, York, was a perfect setting for Ian Pace's mesmeric recital tonight.   This converted church,(2000), is now The National Centre for Early Music; intimate and atmospheric.  On a sunny and pleasantly cool evening, I sat in the churchyard after introducing myself to Ian.  An ideal setting in which to anticipate the 20 gazes/contemplations of the recital.

I sat on a centre aisle seat. in the front row, about nine feet from the Bosendorfer keyboard and could watch all the fingering and pedal technique during the occasional longueur.   Ian performed beneath a stained glass window; twinned by King David and St Gregory.  The other two clear glass windows revealed the silhouettes of enormous oak and sycamore trees and it was magical to see the fading daylight against this backdrop, as the interior lighting increasingly favoured the concentrated stillness of the soloist; generating a range of power which was quite awesome. High definition power.  As he concluded 'The Gaze of the Heights' I thought that the keyboard would implode and the piano might  levitate. His fingers left the keyboard but the sound resonated for at least 10 seconds afterwards.   From the sheer beauty of the opening chords, I felt that I was entering an entirely individual world of sensibility.   By the end of Part 2, I felt intoxicated, although I'd only had pure orange juice at the interval.

Performer and audience were of one accord throughout.   Reminded me of the Wigmore Hall when audiences were at their best.      It was a pleasure to meet you, Ian, and a privilege to attend your recital.

     So, I've been engrossed by two consecutive Saturday evenings of Birtwistle and tonight was a very special bonus - and 'live' really was live.     Things seldom get better than this. 

Isn't it amazing how Messiaen - and Vingt Regards in particular - draws you in to his world, his soundscape, whether you're a believer or not. It sounds like that was an evening to remember. (Hoping for a national tour, he thought)

And if I may hijack the thread slightly, I'd like to say how much I also enjoyed the Ossian Ensemble performing Quartet for the End of Time in the same venue earlier in the day. Since first hearing the Quartet only a year or so ago I have been mesmerised by it and desperate to hear a live performance, and now I finally have and I was not at all disappointed. Sitting five feet away from the performers gives the music an intensity I have never felt while listening to the CD, and the sound you get from real instruments is infinitely better than on a recording. At the end, performers and audience sat in silence for several long seconds when all you could hear was a sort of deep sigh, before the applause finally broke out.

Just wanted to thank Stanley, Jonathan and IRF (and your respective partners) for coming along to the concert - it was a great pleasure to meet you all (yes, all were there, even if you didn't all spot each other), and I'm very glad you enjoyed it. The point about the sustain on the piano is very important in the context of that work, which has some extremely slow indicated metronome marks (especially in the first, fifth, fifteenth and nineteenth movements) - on few recordings are those movements played that slow, but on the other hand the recorded piano notoriously decays more quickly after having been fed through a microphone, so perhaps the movements in question would simply have thus sounded ponderous, at least when recording technology was not as sophisticated as today. But even on recordings of my own (or especially recordings of live performances) I've often known, say, moments in pieces where the performer is instructed to let the sounds decay to silence (this doesn't happen in the Messiaen, but does in various other composers' works); after doing this live, when listening to a recording, no resonance is perceptible considerably before the point of moving on, leaving only 'dead space'.

We were front row, right of the aisle. So I think there must have been me, my friend, two empty seats, the aisle, and then you! I'm sorry that we missed each other. I think we probably saw you in the churchyard, too, as we were looking for a place to sit and read the programme and remarked on the two people who were occupying the only seats! Needless to say, with my memory for faces, I will have no idea who you are if we ever pass again!