Touring a symphony orchestra is like an army manoeuvre. Touring a chamber orchestra, if it happens to be the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, is a lot simpler and more pleasant. Yet the occasions when I have joined up with the SCO in mid-tour, or said adieu to the players when I have returned home ahead of them, have not always been so easy. It’s on these occasions that I have been alone in the hands of airlines, and more aware of discomfort and of what is apt to go wrong. Though flying is infinitely safer - while no less tedious - than it has ever been, there is always the possibility, however faint, that you will find yourself on board a flight where the pilot is trying to axe his way back into the locked cockpit where his crazed co-pilot is intent on flying himself and the passengers into a mountain.
Flying by British Airways in the nineteen-eighties to what was still called Bombay, before proceeding to Hong Kong and Taiwan, where the SCO was in the midst of a series of concerts, proved simple enough, though balanced on a knife-edge of timing. Breakfast in Bombay’s transit lounge was far from bliss, but waking finally from slumber after several more hours in the air, and glancing out of the window to see the windows of tower-blocks flashing past was not the most comforting way to realise that the plane was on the notorious hairpin descent into the old Hong Kong Airport. Safely installed an hour or two later in the Hong Kong Hilton I just had time for a cup of tea before catching an underground to the “New Colonies,” as they were called, in suburban Hong Kong, where the orchestra was playing that night.
Arriving in that seething pedestrianised suburb was like stepping into a scene from the film Blade Runner. A policeman directed me through the crowds to the hall where, just before the concert, things seemed suddenly refreshingly calm. In the foyer, a small, polite Chinese boy tested his English on me by asking: “How are you? Are you keeping well?” Directed backstage, I encountered David Todd and Steve Carpenter, the orchestra’s two assistant managers sitting to left and right at the rear of the platform, David reading the New Yorker magazine, Steve playing electronic chess with himself. The orchestra was not yet on the platform. David gave me my ticket and I went in search of my seat.
These concerts in Hong Kong were an eating as well as a listening experience. James Conlon, an excellent American conductor with whom the orchestra had been making some successful appearances, was in charge and constructing his programmes around the Jupiter and other Mozart symphonies. The main auditorium in central Hong Kong, where the subsequent performances were given, had been modelled it was said on the Royal Festival Hall in London. Despite being in furthest Asia, I felt peculiarly at home.
It was the eating that differed. Sauntering through Food Street, which was clearly the place to go, was like exploring a pedestrianised encyclopaedia of Chinese cuisine, a day-to-day adventure of the choicest sort. In contrast, a fascinating trip to the clifftop abode of Run Run Shaw, the suave Chinese philanthropist by whom the orchestra was invited to lunch, was like stepping into the luxury of a James Bond novel.
Flying from Hong Kong in a thunderstorm felt even more dangerous than flying into it. But the island of Taiwan was an idyllic setting for the next portion of the tour, as a day off among its rivers and mountains revealed, even if the city of Taipei, at the time of the visit, was choked with motorbikes. There the culinary speciality - snakes alive - was a challenge most of us resisted. In other respects I found Taipei, with its exquisite botanical garden, a pleasure to visit.
But it was the Japanese tour, a year or so later, which involved me in the worst journey of my life. Flying out with the SCO on British Caledonian’s new weekly direct flight over Siberia was fine. The performances, featuring the beguiling Portuguese pianist Maria Joao Pires in Mozart concertos conducted by James Loughran, were a delight. Travelling by bullet train was sensational. But my flight home, some days before the orchestra returned, was my undoing. The long morning bus journey to Tokyo airport on teeming Japanese motorways was the most fatiguing of starts. The sight of the British Caledonian aircraft, with one of its engines gaping open, looked unpromising. Unexplained delay thereafter followed unexplained delay.
The departure lounge was claustrophobic. Throughout the day, new departure times were announced and ignored. Such hold-ups, as the writer Geoff Dyer recently remarked, are to be endured rather than enjoyed. In the end the plane was slowly towed away and we were given a choice: either to trek back to Tokyo for the night with no guarantee of a flight next day (“heaven forbid” was my silent exclamation, Tokyo by then being my least favourite city in the world) or fly to London by Japanese Airlines via Anchorage, taking off around midnight. I opted, wrongly, for the latter, but the desire to escape forever from that airport was very strong.
On board the plane, dinner was served promptly but was dreary even by airline standards. At dawn we landed in Alaska in a snowstorm on a runway glassy with ice. The long wait at the terminal was alleviated, though only slightly, by the sight of a fellow passenger, the clothes designer Jasper Conran, trying on scarves in the vast timbered shopping mall.
Then off we went again - still sliding, or so it felt like, on sheet ice - for London. Only it wasn’t going to be London. Somewhere over Shetland it was announced that London was fogbound and the plane would be flying to Paris instead.
Being imprisoned in a small transit lounge at Charles de Gaulle airport proved, however, to be no Parisian pleasure. Flight transfer staff informed me that I would be eventually flown to London by another airline. But I spied a ray of hope. Since my final destination was Edinburgh, could I not, I asked, take Air France’s nightly much-hyped champagne flight direct to Turnhouse? Though the absolute impossibility of this was meticulously explained to me, I won my way in the end. Clutching my boarding pass I was allowed on board to enjoy what was this time, by airline standards, a delicious French dinner with copious champagne. The following day, as I struggled to produce a column, I confessed to readers that I was beyond jet lag.
Was it, apart from its closing stage, my worst journey ever? Its only rival, again under the auspices of the SCO, was not long afterwards when, with Barry Tuckwell as conductor and solo hornist, the orchestra toured Sicily. Flying out with the players entailed changing planes in Rome, where a number of instruments and suitcases were accidentally left behind. By the time this was partially rectified the following day, the opening concert in Palermo had to be given with some players wearing t-shirts and jeans.
A bus drive along Sicily’s shimmering north coast brought us to Messina, the second stop on the tour, after which I was departing because I was scheduled to visit Amsterdam directly after returning to Edinburgh. The SCO had deftly booked me on a sleeper to Rome followed by a morning flight home. But a sudden sleeper attendants’ strike in Sicily put paid to my rail journey. Astutely the SCO booked a taxi to take me by ferry at four in the morning from Messina to Reggio Calabria in southern Italy, where I could catch an early flight to Rome. Amazingly it worked. Two days larer, after writing my report in The Scotsman office, I was en route to Amsterdam.
22 April 2015
Flying by British Airways in the nineteen-eighties to what was still called Bombay, before proceeding to Hong Kong and Taiwan, where the SCO was in the midst of a series of concerts, proved simple enough, though balanced on a knife-edge of timing. Breakfast in Bombay’s transit lounge was far from bliss, but waking finally from slumber after several more hours in the air, and glancing out of the window to see the windows of tower-blocks flashing past was not the most comforting way to realise that the plane was on the notorious hairpin descent into the old Hong Kong Airport. Safely installed an hour or two later in the Hong Kong Hilton I just had time for a cup of tea before catching an underground to the “New Colonies,” as they were called, in suburban Hong Kong, where the orchestra was playing that night.
Arriving in that seething pedestrianised suburb was like stepping into a scene from the film Blade Runner. A policeman directed me through the crowds to the hall where, just before the concert, things seemed suddenly refreshingly calm. In the foyer, a small, polite Chinese boy tested his English on me by asking: “How are you? Are you keeping well?” Directed backstage, I encountered David Todd and Steve Carpenter, the orchestra’s two assistant managers sitting to left and right at the rear of the platform, David reading the New Yorker magazine, Steve playing electronic chess with himself. The orchestra was not yet on the platform. David gave me my ticket and I went in search of my seat.
These concerts in Hong Kong were an eating as well as a listening experience. James Conlon, an excellent American conductor with whom the orchestra had been making some successful appearances, was in charge and constructing his programmes around the Jupiter and other Mozart symphonies. The main auditorium in central Hong Kong, where the subsequent performances were given, had been modelled it was said on the Royal Festival Hall in London. Despite being in furthest Asia, I felt peculiarly at home.
It was the eating that differed. Sauntering through Food Street, which was clearly the place to go, was like exploring a pedestrianised encyclopaedia of Chinese cuisine, a day-to-day adventure of the choicest sort. In contrast, a fascinating trip to the clifftop abode of Run Run Shaw, the suave Chinese philanthropist by whom the orchestra was invited to lunch, was like stepping into the luxury of a James Bond novel.
Flying from Hong Kong in a thunderstorm felt even more dangerous than flying into it. But the island of Taiwan was an idyllic setting for the next portion of the tour, as a day off among its rivers and mountains revealed, even if the city of Taipei, at the time of the visit, was choked with motorbikes. There the culinary speciality - snakes alive - was a challenge most of us resisted. In other respects I found Taipei, with its exquisite botanical garden, a pleasure to visit.
But it was the Japanese tour, a year or so later, which involved me in the worst journey of my life. Flying out with the SCO on British Caledonian’s new weekly direct flight over Siberia was fine. The performances, featuring the beguiling Portuguese pianist Maria Joao Pires in Mozart concertos conducted by James Loughran, were a delight. Travelling by bullet train was sensational. But my flight home, some days before the orchestra returned, was my undoing. The long morning bus journey to Tokyo airport on teeming Japanese motorways was the most fatiguing of starts. The sight of the British Caledonian aircraft, with one of its engines gaping open, looked unpromising. Unexplained delay thereafter followed unexplained delay.
The departure lounge was claustrophobic. Throughout the day, new departure times were announced and ignored. Such hold-ups, as the writer Geoff Dyer recently remarked, are to be endured rather than enjoyed. In the end the plane was slowly towed away and we were given a choice: either to trek back to Tokyo for the night with no guarantee of a flight next day (“heaven forbid” was my silent exclamation, Tokyo by then being my least favourite city in the world) or fly to London by Japanese Airlines via Anchorage, taking off around midnight. I opted, wrongly, for the latter, but the desire to escape forever from that airport was very strong.
On board the plane, dinner was served promptly but was dreary even by airline standards. At dawn we landed in Alaska in a snowstorm on a runway glassy with ice. The long wait at the terminal was alleviated, though only slightly, by the sight of a fellow passenger, the clothes designer Jasper Conran, trying on scarves in the vast timbered shopping mall.
Then off we went again - still sliding, or so it felt like, on sheet ice - for London. Only it wasn’t going to be London. Somewhere over Shetland it was announced that London was fogbound and the plane would be flying to Paris instead.
Being imprisoned in a small transit lounge at Charles de Gaulle airport proved, however, to be no Parisian pleasure. Flight transfer staff informed me that I would be eventually flown to London by another airline. But I spied a ray of hope. Since my final destination was Edinburgh, could I not, I asked, take Air France’s nightly much-hyped champagne flight direct to Turnhouse? Though the absolute impossibility of this was meticulously explained to me, I won my way in the end. Clutching my boarding pass I was allowed on board to enjoy what was this time, by airline standards, a delicious French dinner with copious champagne. The following day, as I struggled to produce a column, I confessed to readers that I was beyond jet lag.
Was it, apart from its closing stage, my worst journey ever? Its only rival, again under the auspices of the SCO, was not long afterwards when, with Barry Tuckwell as conductor and solo hornist, the orchestra toured Sicily. Flying out with the players entailed changing planes in Rome, where a number of instruments and suitcases were accidentally left behind. By the time this was partially rectified the following day, the opening concert in Palermo had to be given with some players wearing t-shirts and jeans.
A bus drive along Sicily’s shimmering north coast brought us to Messina, the second stop on the tour, after which I was departing because I was scheduled to visit Amsterdam directly after returning to Edinburgh. The SCO had deftly booked me on a sleeper to Rome followed by a morning flight home. But a sudden sleeper attendants’ strike in Sicily put paid to my rail journey. Astutely the SCO booked a taxi to take me by ferry at four in the morning from Messina to Reggio Calabria in southern Italy, where I could catch an early flight to Rome. Amazingly it worked. Two days larer, after writing my report in The Scotsman office, I was en route to Amsterdam.
22 April 2015
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