On Saturday evening in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra performed a concert of music which the programme described as “all British”. Actually it was all English – The Forgotten Rite by John Ireland, Elgar’s Sea Pictures with soloist Alice Coote, and Holst’s suite The Planets. I don’t know why the English are so reticent about the extraordinary flowering of English music that occurred during the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Talking of planets, the conductor was the most musical man on this planet – John Wilson. I noticed that the pre-concert talk was an interview between John Wilson, and the RSNO’s principal flute Katherine Bryan. I don’t normally attend pre-concert talks, but I thought that was pretty special, and went along. I’m a great fan of both. I’ve heard it said that Katherine Bryan is one of the six greatest flautists who has ever lived. How you could reach such a conclusion I’m not quite sure, but I could certainly believe it. John Wilson made his name by conducting various manifestations of the Great American Songbook at the London Proms. But his range knows no limits. And great musicians love to play for him, perhaps attracted by his meticulous attention to detail, the composer’s detail within the score, and his complete absence of pomposity.
I was amused by an exchange of anecdotes concerning Holst’s final planet, Neptune. It concludes with a wordless, offstage, female chorus, in a fade-out. Fade-outs in pop music are commonplace, or at least used to be. In the recording studio they were easily managed. The singer, or the group, would reiterate the final jingle, while the recording engineer simply turned the volume down. I always thought well of the Beatles, in that they rarely employed the fade-out technique. Their extraordinarily terse utterances had a beginning, a middle, and an end. Anyway Holst wanted a fade-put for Neptune, and that is not so easily managed in the concert hall. There are loads of tales of Neptune fade-outs going wrong. Ms Bryan and Mr Wilson recounted a few, for example, a back stage choir vanishing into the distance along a corridor, only to find that an intervening door had been locked. I myself can remember a previous performance of The Planets in Glasgow, when the gradual fade out of the choir was abruptly terminated by the sound of a door slamming. And by an odd coincidence, in an ancient tape recording of the piece I once made from a live radio performance, the tape ran out seconds from the end of Neptune, so that the choir was stopped by a sudden unscheduled descent of pitch, followed by an abrupt click. What a strange thing is the musical memory. On every subsequent occasion that I have heard this piece, I have anticipated the loss of pitch, and the click.
Mind you, prior to this weekend, the last time I attended a performance of The Planets was at a London Prom. The Prom opened with a magnificent performance of Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Antarctica, followed by an execrable performance of Xenakis’ Pleiades. And I say “execrable” not necessarily because the percussive music was awful, but simply because it was, painfully, pathologically, too loud. So I never heard the second half of that concert – The Planets. Instead I repaired to the bar, and then, in a mood, left. It was only subsequently that I learned that the day of that concert had been the day on which the conductor Vernon Handley had died. When I heard that, I regretted that I had not been able to calm my disturbed emotions, and stay on. I was a great fan of Vernon Handley, principally because he championed the music of a great hero of mine, Arnold Bax. I cherish his recordings of the seven Bax symphonies, as well as his enlightening conversation in the same box set with Radio 3’s Andrew McGregor.
I bring all this up, because this weekend formed a strange parallel with that London concert. I learned on Sunday that the distinguished conductor Sir Andrew Davis has died. A frequent visitor to Scotland, Sir Andrew also frequently conducted the Last Night of the Proms. I hope nobody takes umbrage, and to be honest I’m rather glad, that Sir Andrew conducted the Last Night in my novel of the same name. I particularly remember the fiftieth anniversary concert, in the Royal Albert Hall in 2008, of the death of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Sir Andrew conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in an all-RVW programme – the Tallis Fantasia, Serenade to Music, Job: a Masque for Dancing, and the Ninth Symphony. It was quite magnificent. Stephen Bryant, the leader of the BBC, had a huge part to play, and I remember Sir Andrew making eye contact with him at the end, as if to say, I told you you’d be wonderful!
Over the weekend I read Salman Rushdie’s memoir Knife, Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Jonathan Cape, 2024). On August 12th 2022, Salman Rushdie was attacked by a man with a knife while he was giving a lecture in upstate New York, on the importance of security and protection for writers. He nearly died. He lost the sight of one eye. The memoir deals with the incident in the context of Rushdie’s personal life at the time, the immediate aftermath, and then a long process of recovery. I expected the account to be harrowing, and indeed it was, but I was surprised by the book’s message of gratitude, optimism, and hope. It is not a book of hatred. On the contrary, it is a book of love. Rushdie takes a profoundly negative experience, and turns it into something else. I was reminded of George Orwell, who received an injury not unlike at least one of Rushdie’s, when he was shot in the neck during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell, too, wrote about his experience, with a similar analytical dispassion.
In Knife, the first responders at Chautauqua NY, and subsequently all the doctors, nurses, and health care professionals come out of the tale very well. No wonder Rushdie dedicated the book to them all.
jamescalumcampbell 