29 My Week in Warsaw

After the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s successful trip to Eastern Europe in 1978, the Scottish National Orchestra was quick to follow suit with an appearance at the Warsaw Autumn  Festival along with concerts elsewhere in Poland.

Of all the journeys I have made with Scottish performers, this was by far the most dispiriting. More than thirty years after the Second World War, Poland still seemed a country which had been trampled upon, and which was still victimised. It was not a place at ease with itself. Warsaw’s Old Town, though handsomely rebuilt, looked unnervingly like a film set, leaving you constantly conscious of what lay just below the surface (see Wajda’s searing trilogy)  Shops were devoid of basic essentials. Having accidentally left my toothpaste at home, I found myself unable to buy more.

But Eric Mackay, by then Alastair Dunnett’s successor as editor of The Scotsman, rightly saw it as a trip worth going on and immediately said yes when I was invited to chronicle the experience.  Since Malcolm Rayment of The Herald, a music critic with Poland among his specialisms, would be flying there ahead of the orchestra and staying on after the players had departed for the luxury of Vienna and a concert at the Musikverein featuring a theatrical new horn concerto by the Edinburgh-born Thea Musgrave, Mackay saw the point of The Scotsman taking a different approach from its Scottish rival.  My aim was to track the whole tour and assess the contrasts between East and West.

In Warsaw the featured composer was to be Andrzej Panufnik, who had escaped from his Communist overlords and settled in Birmingham after the Second World War, thereby becoming persona non grata in occupied Poland. The SNO, it was hoped, would help to re-establish him with a performance (for which special permission had to be sought) of his passionate Sinfonia Sacra under Sir Alexander Gibson, along with the Polish premiere of Peter Maxwell Davies’s atmospheric Orkney masterpiece Stone Litany and  of Michael Tippett’s ebullient Fourth Symphony. The days of the SNO going abroad to play Tchaikovsky appeared to be over.

Musically, at least, there was nothing depressing about the visit.  Travelling with the players by LOT Airlines, Poland’s then somewhat uncomfortable national carrier, I found myself immediately separated from them on arrival  and transported to a different hotel, the famous old Bristol on the banks of the Vistula, which seemed a promising enough destination, even though it had been reputedly Gestapo headquarters  during the Second World War. On entering it, however, I was shaken to encounter fierce spotlights in the lobby and what appeared to be Nazi SS officers in the corridors. But I had not, as I feared, entered a surrealistic  time warp. A film was being made, which explained everything.  But, after surrendering my passport at reception, the drabness of my slit of a bedroom, with its filthy curtains and rusty sink, prompted me to flee to the security of the newly-opened Intercontinental Hotel, where the orchestra was staying and where I found a room awaiting me - there had been, it seems, an administrative bungle.

Though the Bristol has now been modernised, the Intercontinental seemed like a little island of American comfort in a cheerless city. Yet it, too, had its drawbacks at the time.  Was it right to eat lavishly available food in a hotel restaurant which few local people could afford to enter? The furtiveness with which the hotel staff illegally sought to exchange zlotys for dollars under the watchful eyes of what may have been disguised security officials was constantly alarming.

But I, as a visiting journalist, had a small risk of my own to take before departing for the joys of modern Vienna. Back home in Edinburgh, a member of The Scotsman’s political staff had asked me if I would deliver a book for him to an old friend in Warsaw. The book was Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope, banned at the time by the Communist regime. As an innocent music critic I agreed to go with it - though what, I now wonder, would Eric Mackay have said had he known? (his fury was limitless when some members of his features staff went on a private parachute jump in Perthshire and broke their legs).

More apprehensive than I pretended to be, I got the book safely through airport security and out to Warsaw’s dispiriting suburbs. But at the apartment block to which I was to take it there turned out to be  nobody at home. A dog growled softly behind the door. I placed the book beneath a dustbin and headed back to town to hear Panufnik.

Two weeks later Eric Mackay received a visit from a pair of bureaucratic Poles. I had written too disparagingly, they said, about flying with LOT Airlines and what was he going to do about it? I wrote disparagingly about many things, he replied with a mirthless grin, and he proposed to do nothing at all. It was pleasant to be  back in Scotland.
24 March 2015