Piece work

For a trainee music critic in Scotland, the days between May and October in the 1950s were dull ones, without much happening apart from the three weeks of the Edinburgh Festival,  a beacon of light that recharged your batteries before the 49 weeks of darkness, as the newspapers were prone to  put it, descended again all too soon.  

Before that time, things were worse.  The Scottish Orchestra (later to become the Scottish National Orchestra and eventually the Royal Scottish National Orchestra) used to be disbanded each summer, which left the poorly-paid players “free” to seek part-time jobs in bands and seaside orchestras around Britain.  The Scottish Chamber Orchstra, Scottish (Baroque) Ensemble, and Scottish Opera did not yet exist, and the BBC Scottish (now the BBC SSO)  was strictly a Glasgow studio outfit living in fear of being laid off. 

Music was supplied mostly by touring groups and opera companies, and by  wandering recitalists with names like Waldo Channon, a celebrated violinist of the day,  or the pianist Kendal Taylor, famed exponent of Grieg, who passed through each year with a dossier of sonatas and popular trifles. There would also be the occasional international star, including Baniamino Gigli, who would sing Santa Lucia in a packed Usher Hall before being slotted into Glasgow’s now much-missed St Andrew’s Hall amid its summer schedule of boxing natches.

Not until the founding of Scottish Opera in 1962 did the gap begin to be filled. with short but exhilarating annual seasons in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, providing much-needed work for the SNO in the pit. In the end, when these events began to include Wagner, with the orchestra sprawling into the body of the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, the players lost patience with it, despite the splendour of what they were performing, and chose to opt out of the operatic commitments which earlier had seemed so sorely needed.

It was, I thought, a hasty decision which many of them came seriously to regret, wishing that the relationship could be restored. But too late!  The opera company had begun to have other ideas in the form of the new-minted  Scottish Chamber Orchestra, which in the end also opted out of its obligations.  But in the meantime the symphonic expertise of the RSNO was no longer essential. 

Yet in its operatic heyday, in works such as Tristan and Isolde and Der Rosenkavalier, the SNO  had been a glorious sight as well as sound, prompting Desmond Shawe-Taylor of the Sunday Times, gazing down from the front row of the circle, to nudge me and say, “Whaur’s your Covent Garden noo?”

Could these days return? Many German opera companies still employ symphony orchestras in the pit, and the Vienna Philharmonic continues famously to divide its time between concert-hall and theatre. When, in the 1970s, Sir Alexander Gibson, conductor of both Scottish Opera and the SNO,  proposed enlarging the orchestra to make the same thing    happen here, the SNO would have none of it. Yet it was a thoroughly practical plan, which could have solved many later problems.

3 June 2014