The trip down the M80 from the Kildean Service Station at Stirling to the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall should take abut forty minutes. On the edge of Glasgow the M80 merges with the M8 and I like to time this with the Shipping Forecast on BBC Radio 4. “Dogger…Fisher…German Bite…” Then I know I will swing into Concert Square car park just after the six o’clock bongs and thus take advantage of the Saturday night reduced parking fee. However this cunning plan has been scuppered by the roadworks on Cathedral Street, where you must attempt to follow a bundle of self-contradictory diversion signs likely to propel you into a bus lane and a hefty fine. I decided on this occasion to come off the M8 at Charing Cross and approach the Concert Hall from the west.
The best laid schemes… In fact I encountered the de rigueur traffic jam, which usually starts abeam Glasgow Royal Infirmary, about twenty miles to the north east. Had there been a crash? I switched from Radio 4 to Radio nan Gàidheal in the hope of picking up a traffic report. No crash. It was simply roadworks, in the vicinity of Cumbernauld.
The trouble with the M80 is that once you are on it, there are few options to get off again. At an average speed of about 5 mph, I calculated I wasn’t going to make it, though I did notice it did wonders for the range of my electric vehicle. I would get over 300 miles on a full charge. I pulled on to the hard shoulder and made a phone call. Don’t worry if I don’t get there.
I was indeed tempted to get off, if I could, and go home. Why attend an orchestral concert when my right ear’s full of wax, and everything’s going to sound mezzo-piano? At least, I think my right ear’s full of wax. Self-diagnosis is always a dodgy pursuit. Following my recent upper respiratory infection, I reasoned, I could have a middle ear effusion. So the olive oil I’m religiously applying to the external canal might be useless. Moreover, I’ve got earache, with lancinating “stouns” of pain, we call them north of the border, keeping me awake at night. Am I being cavalier? I’ve organised to see an audiologist tomorrow morning, who might at least, with the aid of an auroscope, confirm that I’m waxy. In the meantime I feel like Beethoven, somewhat remote from my fellow man.
Anyway I stuck with the M80, motivated as much as anything by a sickly fascination as to the nature of the hold-up. There were indeed roadworks, in the region of Castlecary. They only covered a distance of about 50 metres, and indeed they occupied the opposite carriageway, but a contraflow system was in operation. The sheer volume of traffic more or less brought everything to a halt. I don’t suppose we should be surprised that an arterial route should be so compromised by, as it were, one single little atheromatous plaque.
After Castlecary, things got moving again, and the Charing Cross strategy worked well. I took my seat in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall with about two minutes to spare. Then the hall was plunged into darkness, and cellist Kian Soltani played the short “God-music” from Black Angels, by George Crumb, accompanied by twenty wine glasses whose moistened rims emanated an eerie tone.
Then, un coup de théâtre. The entire Royal Scottish National Orchestra was suddenly illuminated, exactly in time with a low pitched pedal and a thump from the tympani. And we were into Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem. I’m not generally fond of segues and attacas from one piece to another, but this seemed to work, perhaps because there was a thematic overlap. When Crumb composed Black Angels in 1970, the Vietnam War was at its height. And Britten composed his Sinfonia da Requiem under the looming shadow of the Second World War.
Next up, Kian Soltani returned to play Elgar’s Cello Concerto, and you might argue that the thematic link, the shadow of war, remained. Elgar composed it after the end of the Great War, and it is suffused in sadness.
After the interval we had another segue, between Wagner’s Prelude to Act 1 from Tristan and Isolde, and Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy. I’d noticed that during the Elgar, the audience clapped after its second movement. So we have this odd contrast in concert manners, custom and usage, in which a work, a single musical entity, can be interrupted by applause, and two works, two disparate musical entities, cannot. Strange.
Personally I’m for no applause between movements, and applause at conclusions. Call me old fashioned. The thing to do is to watch the conductor. The conductor is not simply in charge of the orchestra; he, or she, is in charge of the hall. We too, in the audience, are being conducted. Watch the stick. Maestro Patrick Hahn, for example, wanted to hold a silence at the end of the Sinfonia da Requiem, but precipitate applause denied him the opportunity. I was recently very amused by a remark of Antonio Pappano, conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. In his experience, virtually all audiences applaud at the end of the third movement of Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony, with two exceptions – the audiences in Vienna, and in Weston-super-Mare.
Re the Tchaik 6 conundrum, I’m not terribly exercised, so long as people switch their mobile phones off. I see that last week a thespian in London addressed the audience at the end of a performance to say how distracted she had been by somebody in the audience sending a text during the play. It completely destroys the suspension of disbelief, both for actors and audience. And it’s the same, the actor pointed out, for the performative arts generally – music, opera, ballet. It is surely the case that in our social-media-dominated culture people are finding it harder and harder to switch off all the white noise that surrounds us, and give themselves over, heart and soul, to a shared communal experience.
Talking of white noise, the muffling tinnitus and “stouns” of pain in my right ear continue. Fingers crossed it’s a temporary phenomenon, and I can hold off writing my Heiligenstadt Testament. I will seize fate by the throat. I’m eternally optimistic that episodes of unwellness are self-limiting. Sooner or later of course, one must encounter the pathological entity for which, as my mother used to say, “There is no betterment.”
While I was recovering from my recentest rheum, I was getting these vivid dreams. I took a taxi, and a loquacious cabby, as was his wont, said, “I had that Jacqueline du Pré in the back last night. With her cello. It’s a Strad, called David. I said, ‘Give us a tune, luv.’ So blow me, she did! Bach. It were beautiful. Then she says, ‘What’s the fare?’ and I say, ‘Jacqueline du Pré, you don’t owe me a thing.’ So she left her beloved David on the seat. Maybe she knew there was to be no betterment.”
jamescalumcampbell 