26 Still travelling

The second leg of the Scottish National Orchestra’s first major European tour was a traversal of Germany from Munich to Dusseldorf, incorporating enough detours to make the players say that their agent, in planning such a trip, had folded his map the wrong way.

It was certainly more tiring, and for me less fascinating, than the first leg.  With Austria, and its final stop in Innsbruck, now behind them, and with Prokofiev’s Symphony No 5 as their running theme, the players arrived in Munich’s marmoreal Hercules Hall with nevertheless high expectations. But the polished marble interior was acoustically less friendly than it looked, and the concert never fully took wing. Dining afterwards with Sam Bor, the orchestra’s leader, and his wife Dorothie, a first violinist, I found that their feelings were the same as mine, and that, though central Munich was was exciting, neither of them was much looking forward to the more industrial cities that lay ahead.

True, there was Nuremberg, but its concert-hall turned out to be another disappointment, more like a modern conference centre, with acoustics that muffled the string tone, and an offhand audience.

And what of the detours, zigzagging around Lake Constance and the river Main? For my own part, as a critic, it was the diet of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony - a fine work in small doses - that daunted me, and I opted out of one of the performances to see Antonioni’s brilliant London-based film Blow-Up (albeit dubbed into German) for distraction.

Back on orchestral track, I was alarmed to discover that the Dusseldorf programme would be at the giant Bayer aspirin factory at nearby Leverkusen.  The conductor Alexander Gibson, anxious to get on the road again afterwards, decreed that there would be no encores after this industrial event (as such things were known in those days back home  in Scotland). This suited me fine, as I had a long review to write - my editor wanted a substantial summing-up of the German portion of the tour - but it displeased the factory authorities and indeed provoked a minor incident.

As Sam Bor was leading the players off the platform at the end, he found his way blocked by the stage manager, who ordered him back on again. Sam, irritated by this intervention, thrust forward to the exit, but it was an unpleasant moment of misunderstanding at the end of an arduous tour of a country where Sam, in 1967, still felt ill-at-ease.

Only Rotterdam’s brand-new hall, with Jacqueline Du Pre playing the Elgar Cello Concerto, lay ahead and this went without mishap in more relaxing surroundings.
20 January 2015