Some of us go to the morning concert given by the Orlando Quartet in the Pump Room. It's most odd, at first, to be at such a formal concert attended by the usual Official Festival audience, and to see the players so serious and silent on the stage. But it's true that in such an atmosphere it's easy to concentrate, if you want to concentrate, and this is perhaps what Richard Ireland wants in his concert performing. I think all of us are struck by several things in the concert, enviable and unenviable. It's obvious, for one thing, that the players are completely free to think about the music, having emerged from their cosy hotel rooms to play to their guaranteed audience of highly cultured people. It's also obvious that the unifying factor in the quartet is the sound, which is astonishingly unanimous. Of course one can't tell, not hearing them speak or being allowed any glimpse of their personalities, whether they are also unified in social respects, but from what little I know about them I guess that this is perhaps not so important to them as it is to us. I'm also struck by the fact that they don't do anything to draw attention to themselves in their playing - only to things in the music. This is very different from our concerts, in which people frequently try to draw attention to themselves, or at any rate to demonstrate visually to the audience their delight in the ingredients of chamber music playing. None of the Orlando Quartet smiled once during the performance, whereas we smile all the time, and it's one of the thing that listeners most often comment about. Yet we, I supposed, are at least as much interested in the effect that we, specifically we, have on the interpretation, and want to alert the audience to our personal qualities and the diversity of endearing things which define the group's image. If the Orlando Quartet's bodies had disappeared, and music issued magically from the instruments alone, I don't think it would have made any difference to the way I heard them, or to my admiration of their musicianship. But if the members of Domus became invisible, I should think about thirty per cent of the attractive features of our playing would be lost. Is this good or bad? << less