South to Sicily

I first visited Sicily to write about some concerts the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was giving there with Barry Tuckwell as hornist and conductor. It was not a major tour but more the sort of event where things go wrong, which makes them interesting to write about. So I accepted the invitation, hoping to find something to say.

There was nothing special about the playing, other than a professional amount of polish. But it was an invitation it might have seemed churlish to turn down.  Palermo, for me as for most of the players, was somewhere new.

There were things to could do between concerts. It was a good city for walking.  Tall, narrow streets were topped, southern style, by lines of washing and cleavages of blue sky. A  restaurant associated with Prince Giuseppe di Lampedusa, distinguished author of Sicily’s historical novel The Leopard, had a mushroom menu it was impossible to  resist, with one course of wild funghi after another, cooked in various inviting ways.  And there were, before going there, the strains of Tuckwell playing Mozart. For a music critic who was also a food scribe, things looked not unpromising.

But yes, things also went wrong or failed to materialise . The vast Teatro Massimo, where the Mafia reputedly wielded power and whose opera company had given Peter Diamand a rough time when he invited it to the Edinburgh Festival, was temporarily closed, with nothing to offer musical visitors on a night off.

Messina, next stop on the tour, remained scarred by the memory of vast earthquake and tsunami in 1908 when, both there and on mainland Italy, up to 200,000 people were killed between Mount Etna in one direction and Stromboli in the other.  

Even the orchestra’s arrival in Palermo had been disrupted by the loss in transit of evening clothes, necessitating the opening concert being performed in jeans. And my penthouse hotel room, as I discovered, had been booked by a local pop group for rehearsals and was filled with equipment. Not for another ten years would I see Sicily again, in very different circumstances. It was a long wait.

1 October 2016