27 To Italy

Holland’s handsome modern concert  hall - the Doelen in Rotterdam - gave the Scottish National Orchestra the closing success of its first long European tour. Back home in Glasgow, nobody appeared to notice that the players had ever been away, but there was a reason for this which greatly pleased my editor Alastair Dunnett. The fact was that Glasgow’s newspaper, the Herald, had failed to chronicle the tour because its newly appointed music critic, Malcolm  Rayment, was forbidden to go. In newspaper terms, this was a coup for The Scotsman, sensationally confirmed when the orchestra strode triumphantly  on to the Usher Hall platform  to perform its first concert after its return from abroad.

 The audience gave the players a huge welcome, and at the end of the evening Alexander Gibson rewarded his listeners with an encore - something unheard of at what would otherwise have been a standard winter season concert (and which, let me add, did not happen  when the same programme was performed in Glasgow). Suddenly re-raising his baton, Gibson unleashed the final fugue from Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, a work that had been played in its entirety more than once in the course of the tour. It was an apt and exhilarating moment as the players entered the performance  section by section, and the audience went wild at the end.

Though my reports had cost the paper what was said to be a fortune, they were reckoned by Dunnett to have been worthwhile and they paved the way for more to follow. Next time, less than a year later, it was Scottish Opera which made its first foreign trip, with Italy as its destination and Britten’s Albert Herring as the work it premiered at the annual Maggio Musicale in Florence’s historic Pergola Theatre, where The Marriage of Figaro had had its first Italian performance and  Verdi’s Macbeth was unveiled in 1847.

With around 1500 seats on five levels, the auditorium had a charming intimacy which suited Britten’s comedy to perfection and I had no difficulty getting my editor’s permission to attend - not least because Scottish Opera agreed to meet all my expenses (unlike the SNO, whose administrator Robert Ponsonby had billed Dunnett even for my bus journeys with the orchestra). Yet once again the Herald missed its opportunity by refusing to let Malcolm Rayment go along, though times were to change later when he joined me on many such trips.

Arriving in Italy in the midst of a torrential thunderstorm soon after the Florentine floods of 1966, when the River Arno broke its banks and thousands of works of art were damaged or destroyed, the opera company thought itself lucky to find the Pergola Theatre running as normal and fully renovated. With Roderick Brydon, Scottish Opera’s Britten specialist, as conductor, the performances won rave reviews from the leading Italian critics, who were seeing the work for the first time.

Here in Britain the Sunday Times previewed the production with words of which the company, as it now stands, should take heed. Pointing out that Jon Vickers had already appeared that year in Verdi’s Otello and that Joan Sutherland had starred in Rossini’s Semiramide, the paper declared: “But it’s  to Scottish Opera that the real honours go. That company, started seven years ago with two works and one week in Glasgow, will give two performances in Florence of its much-praised Albert Herring. And you can’t establish yourself in this field much faster than that.”

Representing Scottish Opera in Florence was its chairman, Robin Orr, who took me out to lunch in the first luscious pizzeria either of us had ever eaten in - which gave me an extra topic to write about. But it was the company’s first experience of a real opera house that mattered. For all its snugness, the backstage was big enough to hold  the scenery for the company’s entire repertoire - whereas in Glasgow, Wotan’s mighty ash tree in Die Walkure had been so big that it had to be stored in the street outside the stage-door of the King’s Theatre.
22 January 2015