Sunflowers, and Then Silence
The church at Saanen is five hundred years old and looks it: saints in faded ochre along both walls, a wooden gallery running the length of the nave, an organ painted coral and blue-green, and a date drawn on the chancel arch — 1.6.04 — that nobody has ever painted over.
At two in the afternoon it was empty. Sunflowers at the edge of the platform, five music stands, one yellow chair, and Daniel Hope in a T-shirt, working through a passage with two cellists while the water bottles stood on the pew behind them.
By evening the same room had filled the way village churches fill — slowly, from the front. The programme was Brahms's Third Piano Quartet and Schubert's String Quintet, played by Pinchas Zukerman and Daniel Hope on violins, Ryszard Groblewski on viola, Amanda Forsyth and Josephine Knight on cellos, and Simon Crawford-Phillips at the piano. The man in the T-shirt was in black now, playing with his head bent almost onto the instrument.
These twenty photographs are the distance between those two rooms. The same walls, the same sunflowers, and in between a few hundred people who came up the valley to sit very still.
A word on the photographs themselves. They were taken from a seat, on a phone, by people who had come to listen rather than to work — no press pass, no long lens, nobody photographing this evening officially. They are not what a professional would have brought back. They are what the evening looked like from where we were sitting, and we would rather show you that than nothing at all.
The Strings Society