Mission Impossible

The lovely June and her teapot. My favourite person in Daytona Beach

Tom and Malcolm during Mozart rehearsal

Mozart’s Letters in Deland

Daytona Speedway Rehearsal!!

After a very welcome day off where I personally did very little except move from pool to beach, the second free day saw a lot of us whizzing around at high speed. The organisers of the festival had very kindly organised for us to visit the Daytona NASCAR racing track. Being used to the kind of motorsport we see in Britain, with its turns and tight tracks, I was intrigued to see what makes a sport where the cars go around a huge banked oval track, so popular. Like everything in America, the track was huge. It is 2.5 miles long with a couple of grandstands which hold a couple of hundred thousand people. Two of the three banked corners are at an angle of 31 degrees which means you have to go fast otherwise the car slips off the track.

The best thing about our visit was that we all got to go round the track in a pace car at about 140 mph. Four lucky members climbed in the window of a real racing car and deafened us all with an even faster lap. I’m not sure which was louder though, the exhaust of Sylvain’s screaming! What a fantastic experience-I can only imagine the thrill as fifty of these cars race at 200mph, three abreast. Now I see what all the fuss is about!

I had to make a swift exit, as I had another chamber concert, Mozart’s Letters, over in Deland. Tom, Malcolm, Rebecca, Mathew and I played a concert where some of the letters Mozart wrote to his friends and family were woven in between some of his chamber music. We had the pleasure of playing in the refurbished Athens Theatre, an old vaudeville hall which had a great acoustic and a great audience. To be honest, as soon as Matt opened his mouth and his boomy English accent came out, we couldn’t really lose! After the show, we had a reception out on the street and met some lovely people who all commented that it was so nice to see us obviously enjoying ourselves. Well, whats the point in looking miserable just because you play classical music? Great theatre, great music, great audience,what’s not to smile about? We also were happy as we stayed in Deland after the show and went to a new Indian restaurant called Cress and had a fantastic curry! What a great day.

The following day, we had rehearsals for the last couple of concerts and a free evening. This was just as well as the next day went on forever.

After several of June’s cups of tea, we began with a rehearsal for the family and community concert where we were joined by a group of very enthusiastic young Floridian musicians. They were members of the AT&T youth ensemble and had been working with LSO players all week-finally they played on stage with us. Paul Rismann led the concert, which was conducted by Mike Francis, through a fast paced tour of the Enigma variations and various other pieces. By the volume of the response of the audience, I could tell they liked it!

We had a short break to get some lunch before we began the rehearsal with Lalo Schifrin for the evening show. Its always great for the LSO to let its hair down, but the skill of Lalo’s orchestration and composition means that we aren’t simply a backing band. The orchestral writing in soundtracks like Bullit, Mission Impossible and Dirty Harry are full of power and instantly take you back to the films. He once wrote a score for the Exorcist which wasn’t used in the end – the rumour is that is was too scary – seriously!! I had the chance to put a few questions to him and his wonderful band in a pre concert talk. His CV is so varied and astonishing, just reading it makes me feel like an incompetent musician. He studied classical composition in Paris with none other than Messiaen (who didn’t like him doing Jazz), and whilst playing in a bar was approached by Dizzy Gillespie to join his band. Even Alex Acuna, the drummer in Lalo’s band has god like status – he was the drummer in Weather Report and even played with Elvis Presley! However, the star of the night for many was the multi instrumentalist James Morrison. He played trombone, trumpet and flugal horn brilliantly. I can’t possibly describe what he does, you simply have to hear it, but at several points in the evening he had the LSO laughing at his sheer virtuosity and skill-this man can get higher up than I can!

On the trombone!

At one point he was doing a call and response solo by holding his trombone in his left hand and trumpet in his right and swapping between the two-unbelievable. Please do search him out, you won’t be disappointed.

In the pre concert talk, someone asked how much they practice. There were various answers as you would expect. James however said that he never practiced-he played so many instruments, how would he know which one to practice. He wasn’t joking.

A fantastic night with some truly remarkable musicians. In fact a rather humbling night to be in the company of such versatile and talented men.

I am off to practice.

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.

Chez mon ou?

After C.S. lewis decorated my back garden last week, Paris seems rather drab. We arrived yesterday to a grey and miserable city, cloaked in a wet blanket of cloud; despite the travel nightmare which was last week in London, I began to long for the crunchy snow again. Still we are in Paris, its raining-but its lunchtime. So we head off to Chez Michel, an old haunt which my group of friends and I return to year after year. If you were to open a chain of French bistros in London and wanted every cliché in the book to make it feel suitably French, then you could do worse than copy the style of this place. It has a small menu and a killer set lunch served on small simple tables, the house wine is far better than most things you’ll find in a British restaurant. The walls are covered in old yellow prints of Paris, none of which hang straight and the the service is surly but efficient. Best of all, you can eat like a King for 30 Euros. Although in these times of apologetic bankers that doesn’t get as far as it did, its still pretty cheap. So, after depositing our luggage in the Hotel Terminus Nord we trudged to Chez Michel in the pouring rain and I began to imagine my onion soup steaming in front of me. Imagine the look of horror, dear reader, when we turned the corner and, sacre bleu, the sign said Fermé! Not a regular fermé though, it was a fermé final. The end of an era. The tables were stacked up and a pile of tablecloths lay unwashed in the corner. I don’t like to blame the financial services industry for spoiling my lunch in Paris, but it was raining, I was tired, so I did.

We did end up having a nice lunch in the end, so all was not lost, but all too quickly we were on the bus to Salle Pleyel for the rehearsal. In case you didn’t know, we are here playing Beethoven with Sir John Eliot Gardiner who I shall now refer to as JEG, time is pressing. If any of you have been to the concerts you’ll know how different the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) sounds with him on the box. I’ll be honest with you, its been a steep learning curve with JEG and the LSO over the last few years. Our first attempt at Beethoven was taxing as we were used to playing it in a particular way, lots of vibrato, plush sound and with a degree of reverence normally reserved for religious figures. JEG came along and blew all of that out of the water, he insisted that I play with no vibrato at all (although he does let me sneak in a tiny amount these days), and if he heard the slightest wobble in rehearsal, he would quite happily bellow across the room “Stop vibrating Gareth!” Thats not something thats been shouted at me very often. As well as the wobbling , the strings were asked to play starting with their bow on the string to change the sound of the attack, and the sforzandi are punched out like a championship boxer. Its all very hard work, but the results, for me at least were like a revelation. Beethoven 5, that most abused of pieces, is churned out more regularly than Only Fools and Horses at Christmas, and yet with JEG it becomes a revolutionary piece of music once again. Its like he’s taken a very dusty old painting that everybody is used to looking at and quite comfortable with, and blown the dust off to reveal details which had been forgotten about. Take for example the last movement, the piccolo makes its first entrance having sat for half an hour waiting. Normally you can’t hear its chirpy little runs, but JEG has thinned down the textures from a heavyweight to flyweight and Sharon zips through the orchestra like Ricky Hatton. Now that the sound is leaner, when there is a fortissimo or punchy accent, they really have a huge impact.

JEG gave a little speech in London about his feelings on the famous opening motif and its revolutionary content, you know the one. Da da da daaaaah. After being woken up by the tune on a mobile phone by commuting bankers (sorry guys) for years, I’d quite happily never play it again. However, the other night it was one of the most exciting things I’ve done with the orchestra for a while, and I suddenly realised what an extraordinary piece of music it is. Paris was no exception. JEG gave a speech again, in fluent French, and as he pointed out, they like a bit of revolution in France.

I feel exhausted after these concerts, they really are incredibly hard work, plus I have an ear infection and can’t really hear anything out of my left ear, which is just as well as Emanuel is coughing his lungs up and sniffing a lot. What a pair we are, his face buried in a hanky and me with a finger permanently stuck in my ear hoping that this prod will be the one that lets me hear again. I hope we make it through to the end of the tour.

As I said, its very tiring playing like this and we have had a very long day so we are very grateful when we get back to the hotel. Most people go straight to bed. Actually, some people go straight to bed. Maybe. I am persuaded to go to the restaurant under the hotel however. Its a cathartic experience really, and we go some way to laying the ghosts of Chez Michel to rest. Its got the same table cloths, the same surly service, even the same menu. As I tucked into my onion soup, I realised that after my second glass of Cote du Rhone, all of these bistros look the same anyway. We come back to Paris in May. I hope the credit crisis doesn’t deepen further, as unlike Chez Michel, this restaurant is right underneath the hotel. I didn’t even get wet.

Essen tomorrow.

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…