Graz, which was the second stop on the SNO’s first vast European tour in 1967, was where Richard Strauss sixty years earlier conducted the Austrian premiere of Salome, with Gustav and the lovely Alma Mahler, Puccini, Schoenberg, Berg, Zemlinsky, Johann Strauss’s widow, and - it was said - a young Adolf Hitler in the audience. Along with the Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913, it remains high on my list of historic performances I have missed.
The first I learned about the charms of Graz was when, as a schoolboy, a neighbour with the memorable name of Stanley Concha advised me to go there. He had known it before the war, and loved it. When I joined The Scotsman I was on the mailing list of its opera house, so I received frequent invitations to attend performances there. The SNO’s two-day visit gave me the opportunity.
Alas, Salome was not showing but there was a dreary Madama Butterfly, sung in German by a humdrum cast and staged on a shiny black linoleum floor which has remained for ever in my mind. Though it gave me a night off from a repeat concert by the SNO, I walked out at the interval. It was the first, but certainly not the last, time I had left an opera early - a critical weapon I soon learned to use when the occasion demanded.
At the first of the SNO’s Graz concerts, Jacqueline Du Pre had been soloist in the Dvorak Cello Concerto. A convivial member of the party, she had been in the hotel foyer while I was trying to phone my review to The Scotsman from behind the glass window of the hotel’s solitary phone booth. Spotting me, she donned my hat, which I had hung on a hook outside, pressed her nose against the window and, a cherished memory, pulled funny faces at me through the glass.
After Graz, the SNO proceeded to Linz, where it performed in a large school gym beside a noisy railway branch line. Sir Georg Solti had once conducted there, and famously got the trains diverted. Alexander Gibson had no such luck and Janet Baker’s singing of Mahler’s Ruckert Lieder had to wait until Salzburg’s Festspielhaus for acceptable surroundings.
Between these two stopping points, the orchestra had a night off in a somewhat sinister fogbound mountain village where the hotel proprietor, with a huge white moustache, said threateningly “I want to welcome you to my house.” Mass-produced schnitzels for supper formed his unappetising welcome.
Before leaving in its three buses the next morning, the orchestra’s administrator Robert Ponsonby, a former officer in the Guards, held a snap parade on the village square, where he asked the unforgettable question: “Who has left his boots on his bed?” The culprit was not, I am relieved to say, the music critic of The Scotsman.
19 January 2015
I really do wonder why orchestras and their tour agents used to book concerts in halls that were clearly inappropriate. To expect a great artiste like Janet Baker - to say nothing of Alexander Gibson and the musicians of the SNO - to perform in a gym close to a railway line is desperately sad. Even more sadly, it was not all that unusual.
ReplyDeleteIn an earlier response regarding encores, I mentioned the LSO's World Tour in the early 1980s. Few orchestras visited Bangkok in those days before the excellent Thailand Cultural Centre was built. Yet orchestras did so occasionally. I am not sure where the LSO played in the city, but the building had a roof made of corrugated iron. During Mahler 1, the monsoon rains arrived with the result that a good 20 minutes of the symphony was totally lost!
I expect rain was the last thing on the mind of Tibor Rudas, the man who persuaded Pavarotti to play in arenas and made them both spectacularly rich, when he arranged for his 'client' to give a fund-raising concert for his local school in California in the early 1990s. After all it had not rained in that part of the world for almost 4 years. Accordingly, never one to spend money unless it was absolutely necessary, Tibor cut corners, no wooden planks were placed over the earth on the car park where the concert was to take place, merely a large swathe of plastic grass.
The day before the concert, the heavens opened and the rain did not cease. The rich and famous dressed in their finery had to troop through the rain and the mud and then into water nearly an inch deep in the large 6,000 seat marquee. When the overture started, the rain mercifully eased. But when Pavarotti, dressed in his tail suit covered by a raincoat was half way through his first aria, the rain restarted. It sounded like 1,000 drummers on the marquee's roof and not even Decca's senior recording engineer, James Lock, and his team could make the tenor's voice be heard!
Some years later I was involved in a recital by Jose Carreras on the river terrace of Bangkok's famed Oriental Hotel. The setting was magical. Thanks to the presence of the Queen, it had not been difficult to arrange for river traffic to be stopped for the duration. Even the trees had all been sprayed with mosquito repellant, so thorough were the preparations! As Carreras came on stage, however, I heard a plane flying high overhead. I looked at the hotel's Executive Manager. We both mouthed at the same time, "I knew there was something we forgot!"