Some things never change, thank God, and Friday Night is Music Night on Radio 2 is one of them: pop classics and show tunes played by the BBC Concert Orchestra with special guests and broadcast live these days from St Luke’s in Old Street.

I went along on Friday and had a ball: Tchaikovsky, Delius, Lehar and Brahms and, suitably enough in Vaughan Williams’s fiftieth anniversay year (he died in 1958), the beautiful Fantasia on Greensleeves from his Merry Wives opera.

This is the orchestra that is subjecting itself to the humiliation of being conducted by David Soul, Bradley Walsh, Goldie, Sue Perkins and the rest in the sad television series Maestro, and our host Petroc Trelawny declared on air that tonight’s concert would therefore be conducted by Jane Asher…a few nervous titters were becalmed when Christopher Warren-Jenkins — the real conductor — obligingly bounced on to the stage, his white bouffon hair-do commanding involuntary pizzicati as he did so. 

The evening made me feel like a male super-model.  No, I’m not on the turn: it’s just that most of the free ticket wallahs were in their seventies and dressed in crimplene. But what a setting! St Luke’s is a fine Hawksmoor church that was falling down until rescued and restored and inhabited as its second home by the London Symphony Orchestra.

The interior is an inventive architectural triumph in steel and wood, preserving the historical feel of the building in modern terms. The acoustic is light and dry and the insulation against the rumbling traffic on Old Street faultless.

The special guests — apart from myself, Richard Sisson (the piano-playing Widow of Kit Hesketh-Hervey) and Irish actor Kevin Moore in the stalls — were the clarinettist Emma Johnson, wheezing and squawking her way through an immensely tedious Theme and Variations by Rossini, and 24 year-old Kiwi singing star Will Martin.

Now, Martin is someone we will be hearing lots more from. He sings like an angel and looks like a cherub. I didn’t much like what he sang — “Nature Boy” and some mush about “Going Home” set to the big tune in Dvorak’s New World Symphony — but he sang it beautifully, even though his crystalline tenor voice has not yet filled out in the lower register.

Afterwards we adjourned to a delightful hidden away hostelry and the night still seemed young when I left the lads in search of a Thai restaurant and I slipped away; unusually for a Friday night, I still had some work to finish at home.

My progress through the day had been along refreshingly different lines, starting with a visit to a library in Kilburn which was holding a DVD of Vanessa Redgrave in Mrs Dalloway for me.

In all the huffing and puffing about the decline in public services, it would be unfair to overlook the standards of help and supply in our libraries, if not the range and quality of the stock, necessarily — and the government’s free internet hour for all members. Camden has closed one or two branches, but the spanking new place on Kilburn High Road, down by Maida Vale, is a smashing destination, second only to my own nearest branch next to Keats’s house.

The big Daddy of our Camden libraries is the Swiss Cottage branch by the Hampstead Theatre, and a very fine emporium it is too, with fantastic work and research facilities and a great DVD and video cassette collection of British and foreign movies.

Still, I had never before been to  the Kilburn branch and did so via the North London overground line from my home to Brondesbury (just by the Tricycle Theatre), then a short hop on the Number 16 — a bus I used to virtually live on while commuting between an office in Victoria and my first London home in Kilburn bedsit-land thirty-five years ago — down to Maida Vale.

After checking my emails in the delightful work area of the library, I took the Bakerloo Line — does the Bakerloo Line have the highetst proportion of pretty girls eating salads, just as the Victoria Line has the highest proportion of sulky hoodlums with socially divisive i-pods at full blast? — from nearby Kilburn Park down to Oxford Circus, then on to Holborn and the Cochrane Theatre, where I caught an afternoon preview of a terrific new musical, Quest, written, designed, composed and performed by members of the DreamArts community theatre project.

Quest was an urban fable in which a pair of twins went in search of a missing father who had once been a big noise on the music scene. Billed correctly as “a street musical” it had none of the fey imperfections of the predominant school of Sondheim imitators that are flooding this field, and all the edge, noise and bustle of the sounds of the city and its ‘Oi-there yoof.   

After a quick drink with some colleagues and the ever-welcoming, always interesting Deirdre Malynn, director of the Cochrane, I nipped round the corner and took a Number 55 bus — my first ever journey on that route — all the way along Clerkenwell Road into Old Street and the gathering excitement of Friday night festivities in Shoreditch and the City. Who’d live anywhere else?  
  
 

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 30th, 2008 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.