DAY 3 (Sun 16 Oct): Carmen Lavin

Bloomsbury Festival – Day 3
Writer In Residence: Carmen Lavin

Looking up through the leaves of the great Brunswick Square plane tree, spreading high and wide out of its 1790 roots, we take breaths of air on this Bloomsbury Festival morning. We’ve set out from Bloom’s Café with a guide who takes us, wonderfully, through histories and light in squares and hospitals (even the Horse Hospital, place of care for all those animals who pulled carriages and Hanson cans, carts and omnibuses, through these streets).

In Great Ormond Street there is a music room in Alec Forshaw’s 1686 house. Waves of sound dance over the Steinway piano keys as José Songel expands Bach’s depths and richnesses and Liszt’s monumental passion.

In this same room, later, in the early evening, the voice of Nellie, Virginia Woolf’s maid, lights up larks and loves and lives and struggles of the free spirits of the Bloomsbury group, punctuated by the piano, too.

A day in the Festival moves to its end. In Woolf’s words, ‘night folds itself to sleep’.

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