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So what better way to finish off a world tour than two nights in Paris. The embers of the tour began with a train journey from Cologne which was beautiful – well the bits I saw when I wasn’t asleep were anyway. It was very quiet indeed, a measure of just how tired we all are – even Sue didn’t bother us with her clipboard and blackberry thing. Still, we needed our rest as we only had time for a quick lunch before a three hour rehearsal at the Salle Pleyel. A very short hour’s break and we launched into the concert. Once again, despite not being very well, Valery threw himself in to the show and we had to play two encores. The Paris audience were very enthusiastic despite it being quite a challenging programme of No 3, No 4 and the third piano concerto with the wonderful Lang Lang. I listened to his rehearsal as I wasn’t in the piece, and he was so great to listen to and watch. He really responds to the orchestra and has a fantastically delicate touch when needed.
Yesterday was the final day and for the first time in weeks, none of us had to set the alarm clock. I still woke up early and headed out for a wander and a coffee with friends which turned, inevitably, into lunch. All of a sudden it was time to go to work.
I actually felt quite emotional when we got there. I don’t know quite how we have managed it, playing all this Prokofiev, but it shows how great the music and the performances are when I tell you that I haven’t been bored once. We played the fifth symphony for the last time last night and yet again, Valery was picking out different lines that I hadn’t heard before. He had to balance the orchestra differently to our roof raising performance in NYC as the hall in Paris simply can’t take it. But what a performance. We only had the energy to play one encore and then with the cheering still ringing in our ears, we went downstairs to have a beer.
It’s been astonishing, through this world tour, I have now got a new second flute, I have blogged thousands of words and I have broken the sound barrier several times in the Classical symphony – but I’m glad to be on the train home.
We have played 16 pieces, 41 concerts, 120 players, 14 countries.
But only one conductor.
Only 17 hours after arriving home from Tallinn, I am walking out of my front door again, with a fresh set of clothes you’ll be pleased to know, going to Heathrow airport. I think so anyway. As I get in the car I have to make one last check to see that I am going to the right terminal at the right airport. I am. I have the correct passport ( I have two), my flute and my tails-its time to go.
After our tour of Serbia, Croatia, Lithuania, Estonia and Hungary last week had been so successful, I was hoping that we may have softened the accusations of block voting in the Eurovision song contest. As we were a British orchestra, playing Russian music, conducted by an Ossetian, I felt sure that our enthusiastic reception at the concerts could only help Lord Lloyd Webber and his crusade to bring the crown of pop glory home. Before that however, we had some more work to do.
I have written about Frankfurt before in this blog,(http://lsoontour.wordpress.com/2009/02/13/ich-bin-ein-frankfurter) and I must admit, I really have no idea who reads it-I only get figures not faces-unless you leave a comment of course. If you read it last time, you may remember that I loved the pre concert timing ritual where the backstage staff gave us the 15 minutes till kick off announcement which made reference to the fact that it was now 1945. Well, I think they may have read the blog last time, because at the appropriate time, we all waited in silence as the speaker crackled into life.
“ladies and gentlemen of the London Symphony Orchestra, it is a pleasure to have back, you have 15 minutes before the concert. The time is 7.45”
The room was filled with the collective groans of disappointment.
The hall is huge. Really huge, you can barely see the back. When the last whip crack of Prokofiev 5 was fired off into the hall, you could quite clearly hear it bounce back of the back wall at least a second ofter we played it. Its funny though how differently audiences around the world react to the same pieces. I was interviewed for the TV in Zagreb and the presenter asked what I was expecting from the audience. It’s a difficult question to answer. Well, I suppose clapping would be good, maybe cheering and whistling, a standing ovation is always nice-but to be honest, I never expect anything, but what I get is always different. In Daytona, the audience whooped and shouted at every opportunity, they stood up every night, sometimes when we were only half way through the show. I mean the interval of course, not in the middle of a piece-they may make more noise than other places, but they know when they hear something good. The audiences here in Germany take their music very seriously too, but like to show how serious they are by dressing up smartly and sitting very still and quietly, quite often with a quizzical tilt of the head or a rub of the chin. These are all gestures learnt by politicians and used to great effect when trying to exude gravitas, sympathy or simply writing off the £6000 trouser press on expenses. However, the audience here really does know what it is doing, I must admit to feeling nervous when we play Beethoven over here.
In Cologne, last night, you can see the audience as it is a smaller hall and the lights are kept on throughout the show. We played the Classical symphony (the last one-hurray!), and as I looked out, I could see people sat in hard concentration looking, to be honest, a bit miserable after America. However as we sprinted to the end of the symphony, they erupted in applause and smiles and called Valery back on three times. It just goes to show that you can’t judge by appearances. By the time we had played No. 5, they stood up and we ended up playing two encores and I’m sure if we had had anymore to play they would have gladly stayed for more.
In my elation at having managed to play all of the Classical Symphonies without spreading it all over the ceiling or dropping the music I had completely forgotten about the tradition in Cologne of providing free beer for the orchestra after the concert! I guess they thought we had worked very hard as there was a young lady with a tray of beers standing right next to the door from the stage. I had finished my first one before my flute was cold and in its case. Marvellous.
As you can imagine, I was itching to know if our musical influence in the Baltics had extended to giving the British entry for the Eurovision a lift up the scoreboard. I arrived back at he hotel to find the dregs of the competition being shown on a gigantic television screen. There was no sign of Andrew Lloyd Webber though. I was greeted by Audun, our guest principal bassoon this week who seemed in remarkably high spirits.
I ordered a drink and said, “Did we win then?”
“Yes we did” replied Auden.
I felt a warm glow of patriotic fervour. I’ve watched Wales and England lose so many matches whilst I’ve been away from home which somehow seems to make it worse. So on this occasion, it was nice to have something to celebrate. I turned to Tom at the bar and expressed amazement at winning-he looked at me quizzically
“I don’t think we did mate”
I looked at Audun, “We won”, he said again.
Oh yes, our guest principal bassoon.
He’s Norwegian. It appears I may have overestimated our cultural impact.
I’ve never actually bought a brand new car, I mean one of those ones where the plastic is still on the seats and the odometer has the delivery mileage only. Being a financially challenged musician and father of 3, the newest car I have ever bought was a year old. It still had that new car smell and I enjoyed it immensely as my previous car had blown up on the A3 and I hadn’t been able to afford a new one for about 6 months. I had to borrow my mother’s car and call in a lot of lifts from friends.
The eagle eyed amongst you will have spotted that the wonderful Martin Parry, 2nd flute in the LSO retired around a year ago. He had a very long and distinguished career as a flautist, before joining us, he was principal in the LPO and the BBC and studied with the great Rampal and Moyse. When I was a fresh faced young player joining the LSO, he was a constantly reassuring presence at my side, totally experienced, totally unflappable- in fact he most definitely in my mind is a classic car, with the twinkle in his eye, probably an Aston Martin.
So over the last year we have had several flute players on trial with us, as you may have noticed. I wouldn’t dream of alluding to which cars they were, it would be rude, but of course some are more reliable than others. However, if you have been watching closely, you will have noticed that we have a new model in the LSO garage. Siobhan Grealy officially started with us as second flute this week, and I am pleased to say that she is turning out to be a bit of a Porsche. Reliable, stylish but exciting with the ability to put her foot down. She’s probably very expensive too and a future classic. It also means that I am now outnumbered by women in the section by 50%. There are however, worse things in life, at least I can escape to a different dressing room!
I always thought you were supposed to run cars in gently, but this tour has been a baptism of fire. I am writing this on a plane, again, as we briefly return home before leaving again in the morning to finish off the tour. We have done 5 concerts in 5 countries with 5 different sets of banknotes. At times I have tried to pay with the wrong notes, (better than playing the wrong notes, which of course, I never do) and at least twice this week, I have tried to get into the wrong hotel room because it was the room number of the previous hotel. So I am very glad to be able to get home to see the family, however briefly, I think we have travelled even more than Valery himself this week. But probably not.
It was a bit of a shock to visit Tallinn yesterday. It is a lot further north than the other places we visited, in fact I think its as far north as the Orkneys and the temperature dropped considerably, whereas the hours of daylight increased. Tallinn is one of the most beautiful places I have been to and it’s a real shame that we were on such a tight schedule. The hall itself was quite small, only 993 seats so John Lawley tells me, which was a huge difference to Zagreb! It felt very intimate last night with the people in the balcony being directly above some of the basses, I imagine that their seats were vibrating wildly in sympathy. During the rehearsal, the local television station were filming for the news, they wanted some footage of the orchestra rehearsing with Valery. The thing is he hasn’t been too well this week, a touch of bronchitis, but of course he has insisted on doing the shows, but some of the rehearsals had been shortened. By the time we reach this stage of a tour, we have played the same pieces several times and a lot of the balance rehearsal is for…er… well balancing. So on this occasion whilst the cameras waited for Valery to take the stage, Andrew stood up and we launched into the Stravinsky. There were a lot of puzzled looks on the cameramen’s faces, they started gesticulating in Estonian, which seems to be similar to English. We played for a few minutes while they filmed the seemingly driverless juggernaut. When we all stopped playing, this Russian voice boomed out from the darkness of the stalls,
“Brass, please give 20% less and then the balance will be perfect. Please play from figure 36, I need quiet music now”
It was of course Valery. He is one of the few conductors who actually does use the balance rehearsal for balancing the sound of the orchestra. In this hall, the reverberant acoustic meant that we had to ease off at the back so that we didn’t overwhelm the strings. This was completely the opposite of the night before in Vilnius when we had to move the brass closer to the front and ask them to play louder! You just never know.
Once Valery was happy, the rehearsal finished and the tv people never did get their shots, so when I switched on the news as I went to bed last night, I saw lots of close ups of the players and a little bit of a shadowy figure in the stalls. The audience loved the concert, one member of the audience, above the basses, enjoyed it so much, he punched the air wildly looking like he was about to stage dive in the rock and roll style.
He didn’t.
So as we travel back before we embark on a slightly less hectic part 2, we get to rest awhile, change our oil and fill up our tanks with premium grade. After this tour I shall be getting some new tyres and having a rest before my annual service. But for the next few days I shall be enjoying some more fantastic concerts with my new Porsche and of course the the fabulous Ferrari on piccolo.
Next stop Frankfurt.
The longer this tour lasts, the more I feel like a rock star. I should point out to my family at this early stage of my rambling metaphor that this does not extend to the sex and drugs cliche – although I did have some dessert wine last night in Budapest. I also haven’t thrown any televisions out of the window either -I couldn’t cope with the wrath of Sue Mallet, something Led Zeppelin never had to worry about. Just think how rock history may have changed.
We played in Zagreb a couple of nights ago, a fantastically beautiful town which we sadly didn’t have much time to look around. I only realised as I got my passport out again this morning that we are visiting 7 countries in 10 days, so you can imagine that there isn’t much time for sightseeing. So in Zagreb, there is a beautiful theatre from the nineteenth century. We didn’t play there. There was also a concert hall; we didn’t play in there either. No, we played in the massive sports arena with amplification, which seats 10000 people. Not exactly intimate. We had a seating call, mainly to check microphones in the cavernous hall. Lets just say that Prokofiev 5 had never sounded so loud.
When you regularly get to play in some of the best halls in the world, the thought of playing in a drafty arena isn’t great. My feelings didn’t change when we got there, the stage was tiny in the hall, with a big stack of speakers to pump out the music which we had so delicately honed and sculpted over the last few months. Oh well.
Then something really strange happened. I knew that Valery is quite well known and popular in this part of the world, but I was quite taken aback when I walked into the hall. People had been arriving for quite some time, and of course the concert started late because of the sheer size of the venue. I asked Sue if they had sold many tickets and she informed me tat it was sold out. I assumed she was being sarcastic as the hall does indeed hold 10000, and she is often sarcastic. There was quite a noise coming from in the hall and as I stepped onto the platform with the rest of the band, I was greeted with the sound of 10000 people clapping! I’m sure it must be one of the biggest audiences we’ve had-its like selling out the Barbican more than 4 times. As is often the case at times like this, the orchestra went from being a bit miserable to playing very well indeed, spurred on by the audience. After the encore, I really wanted to shout “Good night Zagreb” extremely loudly down a mike and maybe destroy the drum kit. However I decided against it and stayed on backstage where the organisers of the concert provided us with beer and food-very welcome indeed.
We also have our own personal air crew on this trip,with our own plane. I am perhaps making it sound better than you are imagining, but as we are visiting lots of places, we had to charter a plane for the week. We are very lucky to have I think, the nicest crew on board who have been looking after us. They were able to come to the concert and enjoyed it so much that this morning on the plane they brought round some chocolates for us. How lovely. I hope they come to more concerts, I rather enjoyed being served chocolates!
I couldn’t help notice as well that there were warning signs about what not to bring into the hall in Belgrade. This is quite normal of course, don’t bring drinks, cameras or audio recorders, you know the kind of thing. Except this was a picture notice so that you weren’t in any doubt as to what to bring in. No dogs, shorts, guns or flip flops. How eclectic. How rock and roll – you can record the concert but don’t shoot anyone, especially if they are wearing flip flops.
I must sign off as we are about to start the rehearsal in Vilnius. I am feeling a little nervous, we have a world premiere of a new piece by Shchedrin. To make matters worse, Sharon is wearing flip flops.
I hope they searched her bag on the way in. Rock and Roll
By the way, you may have noticed the pictures of our private jet and lovely crew! Thanks guys, you were great!
I trust, ladies and gentlemen, that you are familiar with the theory behind method acting? Roughly speaking (and I’m no expert) rather than simply imagining you are a criminal gangster and acting in a film, you actually rob a bank as part of your research and stay in character throughout the duration of filming. Or something like that anyway. Robert De Niro famously trained as a boxer for his role in Raging Bull and gained the appropriate physique and skills associated with the pugilistic art. This of course made his performance more realistic and is a landmark in method acting. I haven’t actually seen one of his other famous films, Taxi Driver, but I imagine he did a fair amount of minicabbing around Brooklyn for that one. Probably. Back to that later.
Of course in 21st century classical music, its no longer enough to simply do concerts, you know, an overture, a concerto, a symphony plus interval drinks. Now we all have to have marketing to keep up with other more fashionable art forms. I don’t think that this is a bad thing-if you are passionate about something and want to tell people about it, then its a busy world out there with lots of other distractions. You have to shout about it these days. Its not a new idea, but we often have themes, like many arts organisations. Of course we have always had concert series devoted to the works of one composer. Over the last few seasons, we have had Mahler with Valery and Beethoven with Haitink. Those of you who visit the LSO website will have noticed the various themes, like “Love Brahms?”-well, yes, as you asked.
If you were at the concerts in the Barbican last week, you will have noticed the Emigre series where we programme works of composers who left their homelands. It was a fascinating evening with the Stravinsky symphony in 3 movements and the Scheonjberg Violin Concerto played magnificently by Nicolaij Zneider. The second half of the concert was Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances. I had a chat with Valery the other day about the emigre series and it was very interesting to hear him talk at length about the way leaving your homeland can affect you. In case you were wondering, this wasn’t a random conversation in the corridor, it was a lunchtime talk in St Lukes. Of course all three of the composers had very different experiences and all of them ended up living fairly close to one another in Hollywood funnily enough. However Rachmaninov left a pre revolutionary Russia whilst Stravinsky left a rather different homeland and you can hear the difference in the pieces in the concert.
We played last night in Belgrade, not as part of the emigre series, but the Rachmaninov was played none the less along with… yes, Prokofiev 5. Whilst Prokofiev wasn’t an emigre, he certainly travelled around a lot in his time-at least until his passport wasn’t renewed. Now if you have been reading my blogs over the last 6 months, you will have noticed that they have been popping up with alarming regularity. You will also notice that I often divert from descriptions of the concerts as it is very hard to think up yet more ways of describing how terrifying the Classical symphony is. Only 3 more by the way-boy are we going to have a drink after those! Anyway, I digress again. The reason there are so many blogs, so many sentences and so many words is that there have been so many tours! As my long suffering, patient and beautiful wife pointed out as I unpacked one case and packed another, I have spent more time out of the country than in it in the last 2 months. Which is where we get back to method acting or in our case method music. What better ensemble could you ask for to play the music of emigres, than an orchestra made up of people from every corner of the globe who spend a huge amount of time away from home. Music can make you feel a lot of things, but when you play those searing bitter sweet lines of Prokofiev and Rachmaninov on tour, and you long to be at home with your family, they take on an extra depth. It’s hard on us, but quite something for you.
When I spoke to Valery, I asked him if he thought that Rachmaninov had an idealistic vision of an old Russia which no longer existed. A Russia which he saw through rose, rather than red tinted spectacles, and did he think that this came through in his music? And did he think that Stravinsky had a more realistic view because of his different experience in Russia, and did this come through in his music?
Valery paused and thought for a while. I then expanded my theory. I explained that my father left a small mining village in Wales in the 1960’s. There wasn’t really any work, the mines were closing and he moved to England. I often wonder when he expresses a fleeting thought that one day he might move back home, whether he would be disappointed to find a very different place from the Wales of his childhood. I wonder whether this meant that he had an idealised view of a past which was no longer there. Did Valery think that this was a similar kind of thing which some of his Russian emigre composers had been through?
Valery paused again and then roared with laughter. I asked him why he was laughing. He said
“I love that you compare the suffering of the Russian emigre composers with your father having to move from Wales to live in England!! That is so funny!”
I thought about it and realised how stupid I had been.
Rachmaninov had it easy.
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