24 More travels

My most elaborate trip as music critic of The Scotsman began in 1967 as a week at the Berlin Festival and continued as a daily report of the Scottish National Orchestra’s first European tour, which took the players and their conductor, Alexander Gibson, from Vienna to Rotterdam, with Jacqueline Du Pre and Janet Baker as soloists.

By the time my career on the paper had run its lengthy course, tours by Scottish orchestras had become commonplace, but this one was the first of its kind and thus very special. My editor Alastair Dunnett agreed that I should go along, too, and chronicle the orchestra’s travels in detail. For the paper it was a considerable expense, but Dunnett valiantly footed the bill. Not until years later would Scottish orchestras start subsidising critics to travel with them abroad, in the  expectation of getting reviews back home.

Berlin - West Berlin at that time - was the easy bit of the trip,  entirely paid for by the festival. I had been there before, and knew my way around to the extent that not even Checkpoint Charlie proved much a problem when I wanted to attend a wonderful performance of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Komische Oper in the East. Only Magnus Magnusson, in his days as a Scotsman reporter, had preceded me to Berlin and he failed to make it across the border to the East.

In my own case, my Critics’ Circle membership card served as my pass - the only time it was ever of use to me. “They will be very impressed when you show it to them,” Horst Koegler, a distinguished West German critic, said to me beforehand. His prediction was correct, and so I got my first taste of the Komische Oper, a short walk through deserted streets  from the Wall. The only oddity about the glittering production of the Britten was that the role of Oberon was sung by a baritone, because counter-tenors at the time were frowned upon in East Germany, thus depriving the work of a bit of its sparkle.

From Berlin onwards, however, I was financially on my own. My flight from Berlin to Vienna via Munich was already paid for by The Scotsman, and so was my bill at the Intercontinental Hotel. Arriving there a day ahead of the SNO, I reviewed Josef Krips conducting Fidelio at the Vienna Opera, a showy but humdrum production with an enormous Karajan-style prisoners scene - it was he who had originally conducted it.

Then, back at the hotel, I transmitted my review - a tiresome and expensive task in the days before laptops, requiring the assistance of the hotel’s teleprinter department and a guarantee from The Scotsman that the transmission would be paid for at the other end. This was the nerve-racking procedure - which entailed “waiting for a line,” sometimes for more than an hour - I had to endure daily for three whole weeks.

The orchestra, when it flew in from Glasgow, was in churlish mood, not at all excited.  The players disliked the hotel, and found no joy in the great Musikverein hall - scene of the annual New Year’s Day concert - where they were to perform the following night. But the concert, with the doomed Jacqueline Du Pre as soloist, went well, even though no encore had been planned and the scherzo of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony had to be repeated instead.

At the end, the vibration of the playing caused one of the organ pipes to fall to the platform and crumple amid the players - a mishap less dangerous than it  looked, because the pipe was obviously very light. But it was a shock that caused a gasp from the large audience.  By the night of the second Viennese concert, Berlioz’s Corsaire overture was at the ready as an encore, the mood was happier, and the tour had properly begun.  Graz,  Linz, Salzburg, Munich, Nurnberg, Dusseldorf, Rotterdam and elsewhere lay ahead, but reminiscences must wait for another instalment of this blog.
13 January 2015