24.5.69 Peter Grimes and others

24.5.69

Dear Mum, you’ll never guess where I’ve just been. In the ROYAL BOX at Covent Garden. It is a great big box, with a little room behind it where we had iced champagne ˗ and coffee ˗ and which has its own private entrance, and loo. That’s about as close as I’ll ever get to royalty I think! We (the two designers of the mid-term pieces, and David Syrus) were invited to go along by John Kentish, our Director of Studies, and the producer of Manon. Don’t ask me how he happened to have the Royal Box for the occasion ˗ but it was great to see the doormen and ushers etc sort of doing slight double-takes when they realised I wasn’t one of your normal paying people! (Actually the Garden is full of snobs anyway ˗ and I’m not helping by the sound of that last sentence! ˗ especially those who are Friends of the Garden: people who support the Garden by subscriptions and by which they get preferential bookings, etc. They are frequently completely ignorant, and don’t seem to be afraid of showing the fact. God knows what they think about as they sit thru hour upon hour of singing in foreign languages. Some of them came on the last night of the mid-terms and you’d think they own the place.) [Here endeth Crowl’s ongoing inverse snobbery ˗ for the moment.] Mr Kentish couldn’t come in the end but his wife was there with two friends, a Mr and Mrs Michael Dodd, I think, and they were rather charming and not too far above us menials. (We had our own special waiter for the box too!)

Jon Vickers as Peter Grimes

The opera, after all that, was Peter Grimes: Britten, who else? And we could have spat on the conductor (according to Mrs Kentish); it was Colin Davis, one of the most dynamic conductors around, and the tenor was Jon Vickers, who is just unbelievably great. The sort of person I’ll my grandchildren about. [But haven’t yet!] (We were closer to him in the Opera Centre canteen one day than tonight, but it was still very exciting being right on top of the orchestra, and having a close-up view of the stage. Well, of most of it. There is a certain disadvantage about a box ˗ it’s at the side of course, and so you can’t see one side of the stage at all. And all the action happened down on our side, which meant we had to strain a little to see. I don’t know how the Queen gets on! But what a fabulous opera this is. It keeps hitting you time and again, and really is probably the greatest opera Britten has written, so far as sheer drama goes. It has everything (the six big sea pictures for a start, between scene changes) [so overwhelmed, obviously, that I increased the number of the Four Sea Interludes, as they’re actually known], off-stage bands, tremendous chorus sections, storms, kids, a complete scene without orchestra, where Grimes is accompanied only by an off-stage dream chorus and a fog-horn (!) and where he goes quite mad (this was terrific!), riots, drums played by the singers. You name it! [On the night Colin Davis collapsed, in 2011, and fell from the orchestral pit podium at Covent Garden, his job as conductor for that performance was taken over by David Syrus, who had been at the Garden since leaving the Opera Centre.]

On Sunday evening David G and I went to a concert at the Festival Hall, mainly because Jennifer Vyvyan, whom he’s worked with, and likes a lot, and she was singing the solo in Britten’s Les Illuminations. Guilini was conducting, and thought the audience got up on its feet and clapped him at the end; I don’t know that I think he’s all that great. The Britten was fabulous, and but the Schubert Fifth [Symphony] that preceded it was nothing startling. (I was going to say to write home about, but that seems a little contradictory.) The last item was the rather marvellous Romeo and Juliet suite by Berlioz, and being Berlioz it was very exciting and very sentimental and full of lush orchestrations and big tunes and funny odd bits, and generally very interesting.

Yesterday, being Whit (!) Monday, David and Hazel and I went out, first to the Regent’s Park Zoo, tho’ it wasn’t anything startling, and then later to Fiddler on the Roof (which I’d seen, but liked very much, in Sydney). This is a rather marvellous musical but the cast here has been doing it so long (it’s in its third year I think (that the whole thing didn’t quite have the magic of the previous occasion. [The Sydney production had been a real eye-opener, with a brilliant Hayes Gordon in the leading role; Alfie Bass played the lead in London, and was a real disappointment.]

[Handwritten] This is terrible ˗ I started this letter over a week ago and just keep not finishing it, and since then I’ve seen Peter Grimes again. Oh, it is fabulous. I’ve put my name down to usher for the 2 concerts in St Paul’s celebrating the Berlioz anniversary and that is going on in the next 2 nights.

On Saturday last I went to what I thought was a very good production of Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Old Vic ˗ marvellously costumed and moved (Laurence Olivier producted it). But other opinions have said that it wrecked the play by making it funny in the wrong places.

On Sunday I went to the last Boulez concert at the Festival Hall where they played more Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. It was a great concert and much more easy to take than the previous one I went to. They were all earlier works and still vaguely in the late Romantic type of sound.

Well, I better close here ˗ I’ve got to get home to do some work ˗ I’m at the Centre at the moment. I’m glad to hear you liked your present ˗ I thought the palette knife (is it?) was the thing you mightn’t use! Give my love to Fred, Mike.  

27.1.69 Flat-hunting, Verdi, and Schoenberg

27.1.69

Dear Mum, how our fortunes change within the space of hours almost! It seems an age since I last wrote though I know it’s not, and equally, the last week seems to have been one of the longest (and funnily enough also the shortest) I’ve ever known. Sorry about this curious start: explains: When I last wrote it was a happily confidant little lad who thought that the subject of the flat was all settled. However David Syrus decided that he was really better off where he was and so left me with a whole flat to myself. I tried Kurt Gänzl, because I knew he wasn’t too well off, flat-wise, but he had other complications and that wrecked that idea. I asked another guy too, but he has complications too. 

So! what to do? I really didn’t and still don’t feel like moving, despite the disadvantages of this place, and I feel in a bit of a mess. Today I thought that well, it could turn out for the best and so I went off to the place that I’d gone to before, to see what they could turn up for me. I’d also discussed the problem with Reg over the weekend and he’d said he’d get onto his contacts and see what might turn up. I tried two places tonight; the same young man who served me before was my aid again, and even gave me a lift up to Stamford Hill, where the first place was. He’s a very pleasant bloke: his landlady is a New Zealander (!); and he lives up that way anyway. The first place (I’m looking for a bedsit) was a very small room with only a gas ring to cook on, and utensils consisting of three different knives, up on the second floor of a house, and while it may have been quite cosy, it didn’t seem to be me. The bloke, his name is Atkins (his first name begins with A too, but the only thing that comes to mind is Arty, and that doesn’t seem right) then gave me a lift down to Seven Sisters Road, where I then walked up to the next place. This was a basement room in another large house, but there were no utensils there and the electricity included was only the lighting. It also looked cold, but the room was larger, and the woman who was fairly deaf, seemed anti-everything. So neither of those seemed much good. I was able however to get a bus right to the door of this place from there which was some consolation, but my hints to Mr and Mrs Marshall that I’d like to stay but couldn’t afford the rent came to nothing  – though they were very sympathetic and seemed to think they’d be as sorry to lose me as I would be to go!

Went out to ring Reg, who incidentally had a cyst taken off his eyelid today, about the same time as I was doing my audition for Opera for All, which seemed to go reasonably well – I was happy anyway, tho I don’t really know what they thought. He hadn’t been able to do anything from his end because his phone had gone on the blink! However he’s not giving up.

When I came back from ringing him, Mr M came up the stairs and said would I like to stay on £4 a week until I could find someone to share the place! I said that that was very nice, thank you, but I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to manage to stay on, as I didn’t see much hope of getting anyone to share the place. (I wonder if I should advertise? for someone, I mean?) Mr M said well, they didn’t expect me to be tied down to staying on, and he seemed to not mind if I went off after having only paid him that much for a time so that is something anyway. But I don’t know if it puts me in an awkward spot or not! But it’s nice to know I’m a reasonable sort of tenant anyway! That’s a review of the situation up to date.

On the weekend I went up to the Crowls and they had been given tickets to an amateur performance of an opera by Verdi, which is never done: Luisa Miller. Maurice Coombs supplied the tickets – we went to his place on Boxing Day – and it turned out his wife Phyllis was in the chorus – she’s Mavis and Nina’s little sister (about 45!). The production and acting and even a lot of the musical performance was very amateur – these people should see some of our local stuff [ie, productions in Dunedin] – they’d never believe it – but Verdi shone through everything in sight. He can’t be put down, that man. Even when the singers seem incapable of doing the thing properly or with the proper amount of passion, the fact that they had to sing it at all made them do it at least half-way decently. His music is fabulous, and it was a treat to hear something really unknown to me.

We’ve had fabulous weather here the last few days: it’s actually been in the fifties! [I assume this is a Fahrenheit temperature, since this was mid-winter, though even 50 degrees Fahrenheit hardly seems anything to crow about.] And very mild. People are going around without coats even. Overcoats, I mean. (Although I saw one fellow in shirt-sleeves and one idiot in his singlet!)

Jane Manning

During the last week I went to a performance of modern works: arrangements by Berg and Webern (the former’s life story I’ve just finished) and a performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, first without reciter, so that we could just hear the music, and then with reciter – Jane Manning, who was also in The Growing Castle a while back. This person doesn’t sing, but speaks on the notes written down; the effect can be fantastic, and can also be less impressive than either speech or singing. She was super-excellent, anyway, ploughing her way thru some horribly difficult things with ease. And so did the chamber ensemble. I had a score of the Lunaire, so knew just how difficult some of it was. Most of it, in fact.

For the record, at my audition, I played a chunk of Boheme, tho not all I intended, and a duet (between Anna and Ottavio) [from Don Giovanni] but they didn’t let me finish that either. and because they were pressed for time, I didn’t play the piano piece I’d prepared. The sightreading was from Verdi’s Falstaff, and seemed to me to be easy, but perhaps I was mistaken!

Last Wednesday we went to a general rehearsal of the last act of the Meistersingers, but it seemed only partially good. the Sadlers Wells version had seemed just as good, in fact. On Thursday Mike got us into a premiere of Buona Sera Mrs Campbell, a very funny and rather moving comedy, with Gina Lollobrigida, and several other very good actors.