Will you still need me? Will you still feed me?

I’m feeling very old this weekend. This is due to a number of factors. Firstly, it is my birthday next month and I shall be 38. I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up either, so I’d better get my skates on. The other reason is that this tour schedule is punishing at the moment. Its a funny thing touring as we often have to go away for long periods which is difficult, but the short tours of 2 to 3 days are often just as tiring. For instance, we have just returned from whistle stop trip to Vienna. Well, I say Vienna, we actually played outside in Grafenegg. Well, thats not strictly true either, we were supposed to play outside but it rained, so we played inside, outside of Vienna. Are you with me so far? Fortunately, as well as an outdoor venue they also have a spare concert hall at the back of the garden in case of rain. We ended up doing both the concerts inside this weekend.

Getting there was the tiring thing which made me feel all 37.9 of my years. Firstly, it was the day after the kids went back to school, so chaos was rampant in Chateau Davies and secondly I had to get up at 5.30am to leave. This is of course impossible to do without waking up my kids and guarantees bad temperaments all day long for my wife to deal with. Anyway, I rolled my case down to the station which woke up everyone else’s kids too. I then caught a train and then a bus and then did the check in thing which fortunately is easy for us with Mario and Mark organising.  However even their skills can’t prevent us being delayed by an hour and a half because of a warning light and smell of burning in the plane. To be honest,I was quite happy to wait for them to fix that one!

We eventually arrived late in Vienna and had to get on buses for an hour and a half to the venue. They very kindly had provided us with ham and cheese sandwiches to please carnivores and vegetarians alike, and we then had a few minutes before the rehearsal with Sir Colin. I was knackered already which was made worse by the fact I realised I had become an older member of the band who could tell long rambling stories about long dead conductors and composers to the young generation and watch them glaze over and pretend to go to sleep.

I sat next to Phil Cobb on the bus, who I pleased to say didn’t fall asleep and he is still speaking to me, so maybe I wasn’t too dull. In case you missed it, Phil is our new Principal Trumpet player who has taken over from the legendary Maurice Murphy. A very big seat to fill. When we appointed him, he was 21 years old. Apparently he is now 22 but this really doesn’t make me feel better. At his tender years (I’m old enough to use this cliché now) he already has a fabulous sound and despite the age gap with, well, everybody, he is already fitting in well. The concert on Saturday was his first as a member and he informs me that he was in the first half and had to play d and a. This is not a euphemism or secret code for musicians, it is simply that he had two notes in the whole concert. I didn’t ask what length they were, it seemed rude. As we were talking I did some maths in my head and realised that he is only 9 years older than my eldest son. I have been in the LSO for 10 years. You can see why I am starting to feel old.

To make matters worse, any day now we will have another Principal Flute player to join our ranks which is great news for me. After 5 years of doing just about everything, I can share the workload.
He is 21 as well and doesn’t turn 22 until Christmas. Oh dear.

Anyway, we came to the concert last night where we were playing the amazing Nielsen 5 and I couldn’t help notice that Phil was looking a little green around the gills. To be honest the first concert you do with the LSO is terrifying and I have seen plenty of interesting shades of players before concerts-many of them in the mirror. We all know what it is like, however on this occasion he was being violently sick and had to go to hospital. Sadly he couldn’t play yesterday and had to go back to the hotel (he’s fine now by the way!). It was one of those moments where I’m glad I’m in this band as we not only have the brave new world of Mr Cobb, but due to his condition Rod Franks simply moved up and played the piece in the concert on no rehearsal. There aren’t many people who can do this with the incredible ease with which Rod does. Many people didn’t even notice. We are indeed very fortunate indeed to have Phil and Rod playing for us. I spoke to him afterwards and commented on his nerve. “Well you’ve just got to do it haven’t you?” he said in his typically understated way.

Well, yes Rod, but you do it so well! I asked him if he’d played the Nielsen before.

“Oh yes, of course. The last time I played it was in 1979.”

That’ll be about 8 years before Phil was born then.

I take my hat off once again to my colleagues and look forward to hearing them both over the coming years.

Incidentally, there were many theories as to why Phil was ill. Some said it was appendicitis as he is so young, some said food poisoning as he is new to international jet set travelling.

After realising he was born in a year I quite clearly remember, I have a feeling he is still having a few flu like symptoms from his MMR.

I shan’t be mentioning his age from now on, its been good for a blog, but now its down to serious work. As somebody once said, if you’re good enough, you’re old enough.

Eurovision

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.

There snow business…

Its snowing once again. The roads are gritted and clear and life continues as normal in Munich. The pavements have so much salt on them I can feel my blood pressure rising just by walking on them. To be honest there is so much grit that despite the fact that I am walking on snow, it looks like ice cream full of chocolate chunks and has a unnerving grippy surface. Walking back from the restaurant, Chi, Tom and I try to skid along the main platz but are unsuccessful. These clever Germans have managed to take all the fun out of the snow. I think they may have used all of our grit supplies as well. In the main Rathausplatz, there is more of the stuff in a small area than Boris managed to find for the whole of Greater London. Where I live, on a hill in Surrey, the council never salted our roads, so to get to work we had to borrow some Maldon from the neighbours darling.

Anyway, it does look very pretty here; the beautiful buildings in the centre of town look like the icing sugar dusted cakes in the bakery and the warm and inviting cellars with their vaulted ceilings, roaring fires and local food and beer look especially tempting today. However, on this whistlestop tour of Germany, there isn’t enough time today-maybe after the concert…

The hall in Munich is interesting. Although it is quite reverberant, it isn’t always easy to hear what everyone else is doing on the stage-a bit of a problem. They have these plastic discs hanging above our heads which I think can change the acoustic a bit, although to be honest, I can’t hear any difference. JEG really uses these seating calls to try out different seating arrangements. Quite often, he will move the trombones from one side of the hall to the other because it sounds better. Last night he moved the horns closer to my section, and in Beethoven 4, Dave Pyatt was sat right next to me! I enjoy this aspect of working with JEG. He’ll often start the rehearsal with the overture and then jump down off the stage to walk around the hall to listen. Then he’ll jump back up and ask Andrew Haveron to jump down and have a listen. He hasn’t asked me to jump down yet though. When he is happy with the arrangement, we will often just play through a few bits that didn’t go as well as we would have liked and then we go off to get changed.

On this occasion I trot off down the road to the nearest Irish pub with Alan, our Irish stage manager to watch Wales (hopefully) beat the English. Being half Welsh and half English, I can’t really lose, but in all honesty, my shirt is always red. Its incredible how many rugby matches we end up watching abroad, I remember a very memorable match we watched at 2am in Beijing a few years ago. Alan and I have already planned to watch the final match of the 6 nations at midnight in a bar in Chicago-but today we are both singing from the same hymn sheet. Frustratingly, I have to leave 10 minutes into the second half when the outcome is far from decided, but I do really need to be on stage for the overture. I am promised the final score by text message as soon as it happens.

The hall is full, and I spot Anne Sophie Mutter in the audience and also Madge from neighbours, although it could just be her doppelganger. But its definitely Anne Sophie-better play well. After a quick chat with JEG about appogiaturas and stuff we take to the stage and launch into the overture and then No.4. This is one of my favourites although it has a terrifying opening where the woodwind and horns have to hold a unison B flat very quietly for what seems like hours. All goes very well and the audience really enjoy the energy produced in the performance. I really enjoy the text message that confirms the Welsh victory. JEG remarks that I now have a smile on my face and he now doesn’t! I guess the other half of his family doesn’t come from Wales then.

The second half of the show is our last performance of No.5 and the orchestra really goes for it. Next stop Leipzig.

Leipzig, when we arrive on the train still shows a lot of its East German past. The hotel looks like its in the middle of a building site, but the welcome is very warm. Just as well as its snowing again. The Gewandhaus is a modern concert hall with a long tradition and I really like the sound we can make. The concert is sold out and when i walk onto the stage it seems that everyone is wearing a grey suit. It is quite an intimidating hall as the audience is seated all around the orchestra. There are about 10 rows of seats to the side and behind, I feel a little like we are about to be fed to the lions. There is a little light relief however when Alan and Dan have a little trouble with the conductors rostrum. There followed a brief Laural and Hardy homage as they both struggled to get the safety bar from JEG’s box-he’s such a risk taker- and eventually they give up and Alan slams it back down onto the stage. The audience laugh and applaud them both and the tension is broken. There is a slightly tense atmosphere before we start the piano concerto as earlier in th rehearsal we discovered that it had been tuned to 444 which is much higher in pitch than we play. So much hand wringing and handbag bashing ensues and finally the tuner is made to bring it down to pitch! Its not until the end of the long first tutti when she comes in that we discover if he has done it or not. I feel like Han solo waiting to see if Obi Wan has managed to disable the tractor beam in Star Wars.

He did.

Anyway, for us the tour is over. We are now sitting in a very snowy Berlin airport for our plane which is already 2 hours delayed. I don’t know what time I’ll get home and tomorrow I have to be at the US embassy at 8am for my visa appointment and then the concert at the barbican. Maybe I’ll see you there, I hope you enjoy the Beethoven as much as I have.

Ich bin ein Frankfurter

Yet again ladies and gentlemen, I am writing this sitting on another train somewhere in Germany. I seem to spend a disproportionate amount of my time blogging on trains. I’ve finished my book and have yet to start the next one, Sue the shark is sitting with the vice chairman discussing all sorts of important stuff which I don’t understand, so I have a bit of peace and quiet. When we reached the Essen Hauptbahnhof this morning, it was snowing heavily. I guess it was my fault for complaining about the drabness of Paris, and as a Brit abroad, I feared the worst and waited for the announcements heralding mass hysteria, train cancellations and mindless statistics about snowfall. However much to my surprise, all the locals carried on as normal. There was already grit on the platform which makes me think that they actually knew in advance that it was going to snow-clever chaps these Germans. The train on the opposite platform arrived normally, and it was at this point that someone shouted that we were on the wrong platform. So all eighty or so of us had to rush down the not-slippery ramps and make a desperate dash for the train going to Frankfurt. We all managed to get on in time and provided some rush hour amusement for the Essen commuters. I held my breath though as I had already foreseen the ironic situation which I felt sure would ensue; after all the silly British people ran to get on the train, it would of course be canceled due to EXTREME WEATHER CONDITIONS!!! As the doors closed I tried to think of the one line which, despite our predicament, would reduce my colleagues to helpless laughter and forget the hardship of our situation. Imagine my astonishment when the train pulled smoothly away with absolutely no traction problems whatsoever. Doubly impressive given that before the train had arrived, I had quite clearly seen some leaves on the line. I thought that this kind of efficiency is the sort of thing that normally only happens in Japan, but it seems that German efficiency is also second to none…so sadly my hilarious quip had to be saved for another day of travel chaos. All I could think of saying was Vorsprung Durch Technik from those car adverts about efficiency. Roughly translated it means- You call that snow? You should see January in Mannheim.

Roughly.

Anyway, last nights concert went well. That is after we found the scores. Just as Carina was about to put JEG’s scores on, she couldn’t find them. JEG thought that he might have left them in his hotel, so superfit stage manager Alan ran to retrieve them. Thank goodness he is so fast. The hall in Essen is nice, but its another one where they leave the house lights on and we stare at you and you stare at us. I thought that the audience looked bored all the way through. It made me try and play even better, but they still looked bored. However as soon as we finished No 5 they all cheered and stood up to applaud. I guess they had a look of intense concentration on their faces and weren’t bored at all-they loved it. It is always a bit scary playing Beethoven in these parts though-long tradition you see.

The hall in Frankfurt is one of my favourites (I seem to say that a lot).Its a grand looking building which makes every concert feel like a real event. The foyers front of house are very ornate with big sweeping staircases and velvet curtains which exude faded glamour from a bygone era. Backstage there is a cafe for performers which has one of the most scary women in Germany serving. She can only communicate by shouting, Ja very loudly and to be honest, unless I am very hungry I use the chocolate machine in the corner. Its more sympathetic. As we finish the rehearsal, ushers shoo us off the stage even though we have finished early. They want to open the doors to let the audience in. So we all trundle off to the dressing rooms to get changed. Despite avoiding scary cafe lady and the stage sweepers, in the relative calm of the dressing room, every once in a while a very loud voice comes over the tannoy to let you know how far away the concert is.

“Ladies and gentlemen of ze orchestra, it is now 1915”

Concert starts at 8, so I’ve got plenty of time to get changed and buy some chocolate. A short while and one cufflink later, another earsplitting announcement.

“Ladies and gentlemen of ze orchestra, it is now 1930”

It may seem a bit arty, but most people like a bit of peace and quiet before the show. However with all this efficiency, there was no way we were going to miss the show with all these announcements going on. I was starting to think that I may have mistranslated Vorsprung durch wassisname. This was confirmed by the hoots of laughter at the final announcement before you go on stage.

“Ladies and Gentlemen of ze orchestra. It is now 1945”

Phew, thats a relief! The men in the bandroom cheered.

Basil Fawlty is alive and well.

Back on the blog

Although I am in Basingstoke today, I shall not be filling you in on backstage gossip as it isn’t really a tour. However we travel to Paris on Monday with Sir John Eliot Gardiner. Visit the site for regular blogs. If you are suffering from blog addiction then you might be interested to know that a few players and staff are now on twitter. Members will be tweeting on twitter all the time, not just whilst on tour. If you don’t know what it is go to twitter.com and search for us. Sign up and impress your friends with your intimate knowledge of the LSO, or just impress your younger friends with your techno savvy ability. But sleep safely in the knowledge that I will continue to provide you with my usual highbrow musical dissertations and discourse combined with pretentious musical analysis. Now where is my travel adaptor…