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Yvonne came to stay and we thought we'd go for a drink at the Uxbridge Arms off Notting Hill Gate. But the nearby fish restaurant, Geale's, now in up-market hands, was celebrating its reopening with a string of Jags and Porsches lining the narrow streets and there was nowhere to park.
So we moved on to Campden Hill, ditched the Peugeot, and found ourselves in Wycombe Square, a fabulous new quartier for billionaires where the traditional London house has been reinvented for the twenty-first century.
A few steps later and we were embosomed in wisteria and lilac from the mature gardens of this once-artists' district. There was Aubrey House, brooding Miss Havisham-like behind great gates, the erstwhile home of the Alexanders whose daughter was famously painted by Whistler. In the half-light of old gas
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lamps, we chanced by St George's Church - mad Victorian gothic - and looked pensively through its glass entrance.
Under a light a man in evening dress was playing guitar on a stool, flanked by white flowers. We pushed open the door, several heads turned, we sat at the back. He was into the second half. The music of Albeniz rippled, rose and fell in interlaced melodies, brilliant, tranquil, bewitching. At the end there was applause from all nine of us in the audience.
This turned out to be a recital by the famous Swiss guitarist, Christoph Denoth (left). He'd almost fled when confronted by how few had turned up. An Italian woman persuaded him to go ahead. It was astonishingly beautiful. We felt renewed. We told him so.
Everyone was happy. Next week he's at the Philharmonie in Berlin. 
FIRST POSTED MAY 23, 2007 |
