The Wintle Blog

I didn’t know until a day or so ago that Margaret Howell, the upmarket shirt shop in Wigmore Street, used to be the Bechstein piano emporium. Nor did I know that the Wigmore Hall, when it opened in 1901, was called the Bechstein Hall, and had been paid for by the neighbouring importer of German uprights and grands. My third heretofore unknown fact was that in 1916, around the time Dame Nellie Melba was savaged by “patriots” for having a Bechstein to accompany her as she sang “Land of Hope and Glory”, the British government confiscated shop, hall and the contents of both on the pretext that they were enemy property. I discovered these things while poking about the web after visiting the Wigmore Hall for the first time this week to see our friends’ daughter play violin in the superb Pro Corda Chamber Champions Concert. It would have made more sense had I already known the previously unknowns when, listening in the first half to Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio in D Minor , I began to get spooke...

As we UK citizens surfaced through the ice into 2010, British politicians began wheeling out and firing their heavy artillery. Actually, that’s how they want to make it seem, but isn’t really the case. What’s happening is, the politicians wheel out big, gun-shaped tubes of cardboard and the media take turns to shout “bang!” Then you get a long shrapnel crackle of voters jabbering on the radio phone-in shows. Can we stand four months (or more) of this? Of Punch Brown and Judy Cameron stertorously and inanely claiming and counter-claiming, maligning and counter-maligning, with intermittent yaps from Toby Clegg? Four months (or more) in which the media collude and pretend that all this meaningless vapour is real smoke and ordnance in a textbook case of what Jay Rosen memorably described as the “lame formula” of “ he said, she said journalism ” – as opposed to reporters and commentators saying “look, the economy is prone and blue, so it doesn’t matter who says what or who wins, because wha...