Travels with a Chorus

As a chronicling critic, I have travelled three times with the  RSNO Chorus - once to Israel  and twice to the United States - in the days when John Currie was chorus master and the schedules were  hugely ambitious.  For me, all three trips required the blessing of Eric Mackay, The Scotsman editor of the period, and he took pains to remind me on each occasion that I was not only a critic but a journalist.  Rightly he recognised that adventures involving some two hundred singers might have their dangers and it was my duty to report them if problems arose.

The tour of Israel in 1972, for example, meant landing in a heavily protected El Al aircraft at Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport, where there had recently been a massacre by Japanese terrorists. In short, I was to keep my eyes peeled even when reviewing a concert of classical music.

But the main trouble in those days was simply getting a phone line to The Scotsman and raising enough cash for the dictating of long and expensive reviews. Most of the hazards in Israel proved to be minor ones, such as attacks of food poisoning in the halls of residence where the choristers were staying or of sunstroke during a day off on the heights of Masada beside the Dead Sea. The concerts themselves, with performances of Brahms’s German Requiem with the Israel Philharmonic conducted by Daniel Barenboim as if it were a vast Mahler symphony, were in comparison trouble-free, even although Currie warned his choristers that a Barenboim performance could be very different from a Barenboim rehearsal.

Nor was there trouble on the first long American tour, a greatly intricate affair which the singers, from the start, were determined to enjoy rather than grumble about, as the RSNO itself traditionally did on such occasions.

It began in the picnic atmosphere of Hollywood Bowl and moved eastwards to Philadelphia via St Louis and a sensational flight over the Grand Canyon. Alexander Gibson, not yet knighted, conducted Belshazzar’s Feast and some Charles Ives with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Danny Kaye dropped by to direct - up to a point - one of the rehearsals. Verdi’s Requiem and Haydn’s Creation, both under Gibson, were sung in the open air in sultry St Louis, in a park beside the Mississippi.

Choristers on such tours turn every concert into a party, but danger was not averted on the next trip to America, and Currie was forewarned of it before take-off from Prestwick. Taking me aside in the departure lounge, he told me that the Cleveland Orchestra was on strike and the first week of concerts looked like being in jeopardy. With the opportunity to back out, if I so wished, I phoned Eric Mackay, who instantly rose to the occasion. Two hundred choristers adrift in America would be a news story in itself, he said, and I should have no hesitation about going.

Immediately after take-off, John Currie went to the front of the cabin in the chartered Boeing 707 to announce  that “something terrible had happened.” The choristers, fearing that  the plane was about to crash on Goat Fell, were relieved to find that nothing worse than a week of cancellations lay ahead. Nevertheless there was an occasional mugging - Cleveland, though the home of a great orchestra, was a perilous city to stay in - and even a hold-up at gunpoint to give me something to write about, even if it distressed the folks back home when they read about what had been happening to beloved relatives.

But in fact nobody was actually injured and matters  were resolved when the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with which the chorus was to appear later in the tour, offered some extra dates before the culminating concert - Carlo Maria Giulini conducting Verdi’s Four Sacred Pieces - was reached. America, in the end, had resourcefully sorted out a tour that could have been a disaster.
19 May 2015