Someone special

With the death this week of the conductor Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos, the Edirburgh Festival has lost the services of a superbly skilled but sadly infrequent visitor. The last time I heard him was during Frank Dunlop’s reign as director, when he took charge, rather late in the day, of what  had threatened to be a controversial closing concert  for which no conductor had been chosen and the orchestra had been changed. Since the concert was a Berlioz night featuring the Festival Chorus,  it was an important event.  Someone special to conduct it needed to be found.

Fruhbeck - as he was always known - was the man. A renowned exponent of nineteenth-century choral works, who in the1960s had brought Mendelssohn’s Elijah back into circulation with a sensational London performance and recording featuring the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus, he was a noted champion of Berlioz who could be relied upon to bring the festival to an impressive end, as he certainly did.

Previously he had brought the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, of which he had just been appointed music director, to Edinburgh for another concert of expert musicianship, though the omens had not been good.  Invited to hear the orchestra in Canada beforehand, I interviewed him in a snowstorm when he disclosed that his choice of a US instrumentalist for a key position in the orchestra  had been opposed by the rest of the players, who wanted to increase the number of French-Canadian personnel. 

Are we likely to encounter similar disputes here in Scotland if the yes vote succeeds in the autumn?  At any rate a Canadian  press conference, attended by the local critics along with the orchestra’s Scottish guest,  grew extremely heated. Questions steeped in ambiguity were asked, which the Spanish-German conductor, unused to such tactics, found hard to handle.

The relationsip remained prickly. Fruhbeck resigned within a year to continue his career quite successfully elsewhere. When he died at the age of 80 he was conductor emeritus of the Spanish National Orchestra and music director of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra. But when illness suddenly struck him while conducting recently in Washington, he felt it was only fair, he said, to vacate both these posts before finding himself forced to start cancelling concerts.

13 June 2014