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.  

23.5.69 Birthday and mid-term shows

23.5.69

Dear Mum, glad to get your confirmation that you are okay ˗ please don’t worry about being terribly regular with letters, but I do like getting them ˗ I’m very selfish I’m afraid, and get a wee bit disappointed if I don’t get any mail for several days. Actually, so many odd things arrive me here that not many days do go past without something arriving.

Some more about the birthday. On the actual day, Hazel and I went out and had dinner at a Chinese restaurant ˗ David G was supposed to come too but got tied up with something else at the last minute. I was also allowed that morning to open something else they’d left on the day of the pre-b. (They’d given me a couple of crazy presents then.) It was a roll-collar nylon shirt, which everyone is wearing at the mo’, so I felt quite with it when I went into the Centre that day. Forgot to tell you ˗ Mike gave me two paperbacks (copies of which I’d had at home but didn’t bring!): The History of the Symphony, and Kathy gave me that terrible shocking book: Ulysses, which has just come out in paperback. Actually, there are some passages that even now seem (at least to me) a little purple, they are very down to earth, and I don’t think pornographic for their own sake ˗ they really stress just how human the characters are, and how little different any of us are from one another. Apart from these parts, the rest of the book is so fabulously written ˗ the English has to be read to be believed (!) and it really is marvellous. I don’t profess to understand all its classical references; though there is a short commentary at the back of the book, but I think it can be read without being entirely aware of them. [I’m intrigued to think that I might have actually read the book: I don’t recall doing so, and a later attempt to get into it left me unenthused after the first few pages. My comments about the book being shocking probably relate to the showing of the movie version a few years earlier: in New Zealand the audiences were segregated by sex, so concerned was the censor at some of the scenes.Which, it turned out, weren’t any worse than some of the European movies I’d seen in Dunedin.]

The Crowls gave me a cheque for £2, did I tell you? And Margaret gave me a very nice ballpoint pen. With your money ˗ or rather because it boosted the finances somewhat ˗ I went and got a copy of Der Rosenkavalier vocal score ˗ £4˗10 (!), but since we’re doing it in class for the next 3 weeks I thought I may as well have a copy.

This week we’ve had our mid-term performances on, and on the day of the first of them I felt so fed up with the clothes that I normally wear to these, that I thought ‘Blow!! I’m going to dress a bit more interestingly for a change, and decided to get myself a waistcoat and a tie. Well I had to try 3 shops before I could a cloth waistcoat (they all have wool ones) but it was worth it, and I got a very nice beige (I think it is) for £3 something. The tie took a bit of choosing, but it is rather fabulous, and some of the really natty dressers round the Centre have complimented me. It’s basically a light (but not too much) blue, with (!) black, green and orange designs. I can hear you gasping from here! Actually it isn’t anywhere near as like a neon light as that sounds ˗ the price is what will really make you faint : 30/- !!! I must admit that was rather more than I expected it to be but it is pure silk, and I like it, and it was me birthday!

I had a nice surprise in German class the other day: the teacher asked me what I was doing at the end of the term, and I said having a holiday I think!, and she said would I like to go to Switzerland! Apparently she knows a lady who has contact with the Zurich opera house, and she said if I wrote her a letter telling what I’d done she’d pass it on to this woman and see if anything would come of it. So I’ve sent it off but am not going to worry about it anymore ˗ just let things take care of themselves. She said it was because I’d worked so hard at German that she thought she’d do something for me! Actually she has also let Dave Syrus in on it, but I shouldn’t think it’ll matter ˗ I’m neither expecting to get something or not to. (If that’s possible!)

For the mid-term shows we’ve been doing two operas: a bad re-hash of Manon by Massenet, called Portrait of Manon, which was either not written by Massenet or else just started by him, and finished by some hack. It has both a terrible plot and no climax ˗ just peters out. The other piece: Fiesta, by Milhaud, was written about 1958, and is very dissonant ˗ if you don’t know it (and still pretty dissonant if you do) but is rather exciting and horrible and atmospheric (tho’ less so with only piano accompaniment), and has been very well produced. The other piece gets there but hasn’t had such a competent man on it, and only just works. I’m playing for the Manon, and putting in odd notes in the bass for the Fiesta. And playing a bell for four bars!

There is also a demonstration of movement by the singers, and on the first night we found that there was a great gap in the timing while some of them got ready for Fiesta, so Alistair and I on the second night played a duet version of The Thieving Magpie overture! We’d been filling in time with it the previous day ˗ playing just for fun, and had to do quite a lot of work on it to tidy it up. (Secretly, we’ve been told it’s the hit of the show!) After we had done it the first night, Robertson came up to us and said that he didn’t think it was quite right it didn’t fit in with Fiesta straight after, but I said that that was because they’d started Fiesta too soon after it, and it had sounded as though David was playing wrong notes! He said not to do it again, but because he is away rehearsing Aida (and was last night) the stage managers went to Mr Kentish and asked him if we could do it again ˗ and so we did! Generally the shows have been going very well, tho’ last night wasn’t too hot and in a way I’ll be sorry to see them finished. Love Mike [I assume that I mean what I wrote, rather than that I wouldn’t be sorry to see them finished.]

P.S. I still have got over £200. I don’t believe it! Thank the Stokes for the card and cash, please. 

P.S. I wrote to Prof Platt ˗ finally ˗ hope he can follow it!

P.S.S. Go and see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang if it hasn’t already gone by.

20.10.68 The Magic Flute & a long walk home

20/10/68

Dear Mum, I can’t recall when I last wrote whether Ella Gerber had arrived or not, but she came on Wednesday, and promptly set the place in disorder, by rearranging all the schedules that had been worked out for her, and never keeping to her own time-tables either. And though she may do the students a lot of good in acting – she would make a marvellous play producer, she seems to know very little about music at all, and consequently it’s very hard to make her appreciate points that are necessary to the productions from the singers point of view. 

Anyway, enough of her. We went to see The Magic Flute on Friday morning.  (Also saw the Opera for All version of Manon – it wasn’t bad, although I think the production has some very bad moments, and Ann Gordon who is doing Manon, is really very good, but the thing rather requires a huge chorus and stage, to hide the faults that promptly turn up when done this way.  Never mind, it was quite enjoyable and the third act is excellent.)  The Flute is a delight.  It’s sheer pantomime, anyway, but has the added advantage of a good bloke on the musical side – Mozart!  The whole thing is done on a sort of raised stage with an infinite variety of squares set into it. It is only after the first scene that one appreciates the fact that the entire floor is full of trap-doors and throughout the piece, people suddenly vanish through the floor or appear unexpectedly in a cloud of smoke, or props rise out of it, etc. Fascinating. The dragon in the first scene is a little tame – he hangs in mid-air, snorting a bit but not really threatening the hero. But when the Queen of the Night arrives a little later, the scenery at the back rolls away to thunder and lightning, and a set of stars appear to reveal her slowly gliding forward on a platform.  The girl who is playing her – a Dutch lady – has so remarkable a voice it almost ceases to be human in sound.  When she sings at first it doesn’t sound like much, but once she starts her coloratura you wonder how such perfection can exist in a human being.  Every single note is clear – there’s practically a definite click between them, and she hits top Ds and Es etc as though it were as easy as eating.  [This was Christina Deutekom – rest of the cast listed here.]  The rest of the cast are equally good: the tenor is the right shape, and sings well, the soprano heroine is gorgeous in every way, the bass is like a singing statue but the sound is magnificent, and the women who play the three ladies, even though they have some tricky ensemble work, have such clear enunciation that you wonder if you’re really hearing it right. And the Papageno, though his voice is not to my liking, is very funny.  But the whole thing is full of delightful ideas – the animals (about twenty children) who appear when Tamino plays his flute, the chorus of baddies who dance away when Papageno plays his magic bells, the three boys (who sing very well) and invariably appear in a floating chariot type thing that swings slowly and gracefully across, up, down and around the stage, the lighting effects throughout: lamps that appear to have no source, but which quietly flicker away in a kind of non-existent breeze, a huge cyc (pronounced syke) [short for cyclorama] or plain backcloth that at one part turns from a daylight blue slowly through every blue in existence, carpets that don’t just roll straight forward, but which have a bias in them and roll round at an angle, so that they look like they are vanishing over the horizon (like the yellow brick road in Oz) and so on and so on.  It’s surely one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen on stage, and I really wish you too could see this particular show.  [I’d seen the NZ Opera Company’s Magic Flute a few years before this, and had been charmed out of my socks by their production, so this must have been good. I can still visualise the Queen of the Night’s entrance, in fact.]

This weekend I didn’t go up to the Crowls as we had a rehearsal on Saturday morning, and it wasn’t due to finish till 1.00, and that’s too late to start tootling up there, though Reg suggested I come up a bit later. But I said I felt perhaps I should stay home and show Kingsley round a bit of London (as it happened he didn’t seem particularly interested when I did. He’s a funny boy in some ways: - he seems to think I’m very reserved, particularly as far as the opposite sex is concerned, [I was] and yet quite honestly, I think the boot’s entirely on the other  foot. Don’t mean I’m Don Juan, but I think I’m interested in a more general outlook on life, etc. He doesn’t drink, smoke, eat sweets or fruit, or ice-cream, doesn’t read books, aaaagh! Seems to me to be a rather narrow sphere he’s set himself.  However there’s no use forcing things on him, but thank goodness Mike’s still here, cynical and unpunctual as he may be, he’s at least on my wavelength.) [This may be a bit harsh about Kingsley: he was probably just interested in things that I wasn’t interested in!]

At 5.30 last night, I went to where Mike is at present living – Kingsley was going to Aida – and from there we went round to Kensington way somewhere where Norman and Doris McKinlay from Dunedin were staying and finished off the scraps of food and drink that they wanted to get rid of before they left today on their way home. They’ve been here about three months on a business trip. I think. [Norman McKinlay, as I recall, was involved in theatre in Dunedin, but wasn’t someone I knew well; he’d have been better acquainted with Mike.]  Mike and I had intended to go to a film at the NFT at 8.45 but we didn’t get there, and so found ourselves in Oxford St at 10 or so with nothing to do.  Well, we wandered down through Soho (which even at night is only rowdy, not dangerous or anything, rather sleazy perhaps) and called in at a pub just before closing time (11.00) and had a half of bitter (compare Coronation St!).  Mike thought that buses ran all night so we decided to go to a late film showing, and went, and got out at 1.30, to find that buses don’t run on Saturday night for some obscure reason.  So we wended our way back to his flat which is close by, and had a cup of coffee and a glass of brandy and ginger, to put some warmth into me, because I’d decided to walk home. At least a good deal of the way and then get a taxi for the last part. Well, I left Mike at 2.50 and covered something like four miles in an hour and about 20 minutes. It’s a straight, though long walk from Oxford St via Commercial Rd to Plaistow. And wound up getting a taxi for the last couple of miles and arriving home about 4.30 a little tired! But actually it was quite an enjoyable night, just relaxed, and with nothing special to do. Mike and I are like brothers now, I feel [handwritten], we accept each other’s faults because we’ve known each other so long and just enjoy what’s left of each other’s company.  Luv Mike.

[From Oxford St to Newman Rd in Plaistow, via Commercial Rd, is about seven and a half miles.  Google reckons it would take about two and a half hours walking. Perhaps I was following in Charles Dickens’ footsteps: he often went for long walks at night, anything up to twenty miles!]