25 Travels continue

Graz, which was the second stop on the SNO’s first vast European tour in 1967, was where Richard Strauss sixty years earlier conducted the Austrian premiere of Salome, with Gustav and the lovely Alma Mahler, Puccini, Schoenberg, Berg, Zemlinsky,  Johann Strauss’s widow, and - it was said - a young Adolf Hitler in the audience. Along with the Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913, it remains high  on my list of historic performances I have missed.

The first I  learned about the charms of Graz was when, as a schoolboy, a neighbour with the memorable name of Stanley Concha advised me to go there. He had known it before the war, and loved it. When I joined The Scotsman I was on the mailing list of its opera house, so I received frequent invitations to attend performances there. The SNO’s two-day visit gave me the opportunity.

 Alas, Salome was not showing but there was a dreary Madama Butterfly, sung in German by a humdrum cast and staged on a shiny black linoleum floor which has remained for ever in my mind. Though it gave me a night off from a repeat concert by the SNO, I walked out at the interval. It was the first, but certainly not the last, time I had left an opera early - a critical weapon I soon learned to use when the occasion demanded.

At the first of the SNO’s Graz concerts, Jacqueline Du Pre had been soloist in the Dvorak Cello Concerto. A convivial member of the party, she had been in the hotel foyer while I was trying to phone my review to The Scotsman from behind the glass window of the hotel’s solitary phone booth. Spotting me, she donned my hat, which I had hung on a hook outside, pressed her nose against the window and, a cherished memory, pulled funny faces at me through the glass.

After Graz, the SNO proceeded to Linz, where it performed in a large school gym beside a noisy railway branch line. Sir Georg Solti had once conducted there, and famously got the trains diverted. Alexander Gibson had no such luck and Janet Baker’s singing of Mahler’s Ruckert Lieder had to wait until Salzburg’s Festspielhaus for acceptable surroundings.

Between these two stopping points, the orchestra had a night off in a somewhat sinister fogbound mountain village where the hotel proprietor, with a huge white moustache, said threateningly “I want to welcome you to my house.” Mass-produced schnitzels for supper formed his unappetising welcome.

Before leaving in its three buses the next morning, the orchestra’s administrator Robert Ponsonby, a former officer in the Guards, held a snap parade on the village square, where he asked the unforgettable question: “Who has left his boots on his bed?” The culprit was not, I  am relieved to say,  the music critic of The Scotsman.

19 January 2015