[Apologies for lack of links in what follows...still trying to work out what should be simple technology on new machine!]
Terry Teachout's You Had To Be There memories are a must-read even if I'm a little late getting to them. Moments that you never forget; moments you know you are lucky to experience even as they're happening. Terry's been around slightly longer than I have and my list can't begin to compete with his, but I can boast the following top ten You Had To Be There moments:
1. Hearing Mieczyslaw Horszowski on several occasions, but most memorably at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1986, where he gave a staggeringly moving performance 0f the Franck Prelude, Chorale & Fugue. I 'got' the piece for the first time that night: its three-in-one Holy Trinity aspect shone out. Backstage afterwards with my then-boyfriend, we found Horszowski in an armchair with three people virtually sitting at his feet: Murray Perahia, Andras Schiff and Radu Lupu. Horszowski, cool as the proverbial cucumber, was reminiscing about how he had been present at the first performance of Franck's Piano Quintet at Franck's house.......... I approached to shake his hand and ask for an autograph. I was 20 and was wearing an Indian cotton dress I'd bought in Cambridge market. Horszowski's eyes lit up and he exclaimed, "What a beautiful dress!" If I could stop time, I'd have stopped it then.
2. Hearing Krystian Zimerman, aged 24, playing Brahms's F minor and Chopin's B flat minor Sonata at the RFH in London in 1980. That evening changed my life. I understood that music wasn't only about being coerced into practising: it was a gateway into another world.
3. A Royal Ballet anniversary gala at the Royal Opera House, which must have been in 1981 or 82. A programme of excerpts from their greatest hits, essentially, but the end of one section was the finale of Act 1 of Ashton's Cinderella, closing with Cinderella in her coach heading to the ball. But on board the coach were an elderly couple. A bemused whisper went around the house - then, as the audience realised who they were, the place went up in flames. People were on their feet, yelling... The culprits? Margot Fonteyn and Frederick Ashton.
4. Not exactly a performance, but something equally astonishing: a late evening at the St Nazaire 'Consonances' music festival 2004 when my husband briefly had his arm around Maya Plisetskaya.
5. Hearing Claudio Arrau in recital at a music festival somewhere in Switzerland when I was about 12. I've forgotten the venue, but still remember his tone, especially in the Liszt Dante Sonata. There was something about it that reminded me of the colour of rubies. It has stayed with me ever since.
6. The 10th birthday celebrations at Verbier a couple of years ago, in which the Bach 4 keyboards concerto was played by Argerich, Pletnev, Levine and Kissin, with an orchestra of 12 of the world's greatest string players. The results were captured on DVD...but you had to be there...especially when the strings, led by Gidon Kremer, stole the show playing variations on 'Happy Birthday'...
7. Sviatoslav Richter playing the Schubert G major Sonata at the Royal Festival Hall - the only time I heard him play live. The first note went on for about 9 seconds... and he took 40 minutes to play the first movement. Yet this, too, has stayed with me forever.
8. Mstislav Rostropovich playing three Bach suites in a 14th-century church in Ascona, Switzerland - must have been in the early 1980s. Pure magic. But what I remember most is glancing at the floor during a mesmerising Sarabande and seeing...a small scorpion scuttling around...right next to my foot...
9. Watching my favourite dancer, Anthony Dowell. Which ballet to choose? Perhaps a now almost-forgotten Hans van Manen ballet called Four Schumann Pieces (actually the A major String Quartet). It was created specially for Dowell and I drank in the sensuality of his movements, the glorious, soft plasticity of line, the sense of focus, the subtlety of emotion, the sheer, absolute beauty of the man. He was fabulous in Swan Lake, Romeo & Juliet, A Month in the Country or The Dream too, of course. But every time that Schumann quartet crosses my ears - as it does too infrequently - I glimpse him in that billowing-sleeved shir. And I am 14 all over again.
10. Becoming an unintentional extra in a Tony Palmer movie. I was invited to Sussex to report on the filming of his Chopin not-quite-biopic The Strange Case of Delfina Potocka and turned up with my notebook at the ready - only to find myself being bundled into a 19th-century crinoline and having ringlets pinned in my hair. In the film, I'm in the front row of the audience at Chopin's recital in Paris, sitting in front of George Sand.
