More music for lockdown 3: two concerts from Ivana Gavrić

It’s been often remarked, how odd our experience of time is in lockdown. The days are long; the weeks disappear so quickly. It seems just a few days since I watched a hugely enjoyable concert by the painist Ivana Gavrić playing Grieg, with great warmth and humanity, in the intimate setting of a lovely drawing room. I was about to put up a link where you could subscribe to the archived recording … and it has sadly gone.

Sorry about that. However, all is not lost! For a start, you can still of course get her captivating 2013 Grieg CD (“Everything glows with affection” said the Gramophone). And even better, there are still two more concerts to come in her current online series. You can get details here (where you can buy tickets for the live stream: the concert then becomes available for a while on City Music’s archive). I’m particularly looking forward to the second of these, when Ivana Gavrić will be playing early Schubert and Janacek — I so admire her earlier recording of the Janacek, which made me fall in love with the music, and her only recording of Schubert so far is really very fine too. Two forthcoming concerts to relish, then.

2 thoughts on “More music for lockdown 3: two concerts from Ivana Gavrić”

  1. I wonder how much the experience of time in lockdown differs from person to person.

    The days don’t seem long to me, though they sometimes seem cut loose from their normal position in the week. A Thursday might feel like Sunday, for example, or not like any particular day at all. Longer units — weeks, months — seem compressed, so that things I remember seem nearer in time than they are, but that could just be the often-reported phenomenon of time seeming to pass faster as we get older; I’m not sure it’s very different for me than before the lockdowns. This lockdown, I’ve been finding it harder to connect with things, though. The Christmas period (which is normally one of my favourite times of the year) never quite felt ‘there’, for example. The spring lockdown was better.

    Anyway, I looked online for ‘lockdown experience of time’ and found this: The passage of time during the UK Covid-19 lockdown, published July 6, 2020. From the Abstract:

    The current study examined how the passage of time was distorted during the lockdown period. Using an online questionnaire, day and week passage of time judgments were collected. In addition, measures of affect, task load and satisfaction with current levels of social interaction were taken. The results show that over 80% of participants experienced distortion to the passage of time during lockdown in comparison with normal. The passage of time during the day was predicted by age, stress, task load and satisfaction with current levels of social interaction. A slowing of the passage of time was associated with increasing age, increasing stress, reduced task load and reduced satisfaction with current levels of social interaction. Only age and satisfaction with current levels of social interaction predicted passage of time across a week. Again, increasing age and reduced satisfaction with levels of social interaction were associated with a slowing of the passage of time. These findings demonstrate that significant changes to daily life have a significant impact on our experience of time, with younger, more socially satisfied people more likely to experience time as passing more quickly during the lockdown.

    1. Yes, I agree, it is difficult to know in my case too how much the compressed weeks, months, are a function of lockdown, and how much it is just (as you put it) the often-reported phenomenon of time seeming to pass faster as we get older. And for me, lockdown has meant full-on retirement too, not hanging around the maths faculty occasionally seeing friends there. It is difficult to disentangle things: but the combined result isn’t exactly welcome!

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