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.  

20.3.69 Some catch up stuff

20.3.69

Dear Mum, there are so many odd fragments of news I thought I’d better write again to you. I’ve sent off the two foreign newspapers to Dale, but heaven knows when she’ll get them. They’ve both got news of the space men in them. [Not sure who Dale is, though it could be a second cousin.]

(As you can see I’ve finally been given one of these new type air letters: but I see that they don’t have on the outside where to cut them open except on one side; I almost invariably make a mess of one of these and cut them everywhere but where they’re supposed to be cut! Think I’ll put a wee note on the outside.) [These ‘new type air letters’ had only about two-thirds as much room to write on, which must have been frustrating for yours truly.] 

I’m finally getting my tax thing away too, but I’m sending it to you if you don’t mind, because I quite honestly am not sure of completing it from such a distance, and I thought perhaps if you were to give it straight to Des, it might not get lost in the rush of the end of the year. Anyway, it’ll take a while yet. [Presumably my tax return for 1968/9. Des was one of my uncles, who worked in the Inland Revenue in Dunedin; this was in the days when you could go into the office, speak to a human being and get them to help you fill out your tax return. In fact, you could go in and ask for your uncle is you so desired.]

I’m sure I’ve got dozens of other things to say, now what are they all? I know: on Tuesday, I’d been informed that I’d got to go to a rehearsal at 5.30 in the evening, and so said to myself that I’d fill the day in on my own. When I finally arrived at the Opera Centre, the rehearsal had been shifted forward into the early afternoon, and I’d missed it entirely and the two pianists from the other show had had to do it. They’d tried to ring me here at the flat, by phoning upstairs, but of course D was out all the time. We can’t be expected to know they’re going to change their minds like this at the last minute all the time. It’s very poor organisation and quite a number of the singers have been complaining about it too.

Anyway, on the same morning I’d rung up George Bamford to see if he had any more stuff for me to check, and he said he still wouldn’t be ready until that night, and so I said all right then I’d call around in the late afternoon. He also said, of course you don’t do copying do you, he said, I could do with help on that more than anything else. Well, like the twit that I am, I said, No, I don’t, because he’s never sounded keen on my doing it before. Anyway, after I’d rung off, I thought to myself, well, perhaps I could force his hand a little, since he was in such an awkward position as far as time went, and go in and say would it be any use if I did do some copying for him. Well, I did go in, and he, without too much apparent second thoughting, said all right, he’d let me have a go. (He offered one other time to give me some pointers on the business, but never did.) So I sat down eventually, and got started, and apart from his scrubbing the very first thing I did ˗ actually it was a bit of a mess, the pen I’d started to use had scratched on the paper and ink dots had gone everywhere! Also I seemed to be picking up dirty marks from the pen all the time. So finally I went off and washed my hands, and started again, with a not too efficient blotter ˗ it was doing most of the mucking-up of things, I discovered ˗ and using the exiled piece of paper to cover up the page until I actually used it [wrote on it] each time, I got on all right. Didn’t do very much in the end ˗ he said he’d prefer that I went a little slower than not (I thought I was going slow!) and even though the place is away from the mainstream of things, there are a lot of people coming and going, and George and his wife talk a lot, always apparently starting a conversation up without informing the other who or what they’re talking about! And Mrs B made me a couple of ham sandwiches and an enormous cup of coffee, and this delayed things a little too.

Anyway that was that and I then went to the OC. Well, I felt a bit put out at not having anything to do, so in the end David Gorringe, and Hazel and I went to the pictures (a local cinema where it’s cheaper, but where the audience seems always to consist of morons ˗ they don’t laugh or do anything.)  We went to Finian’s Rainbow ˗ a Monica-taking picture, if it hasn’t already been to Dunedin. [Presumably meaning my mother should take my aunt Monica to see it. She was the wife of my uncle Des mentioned above.] It is full of marvellous lines, with a lot of very clever jokes on racial problems in the South of America. But it all went over the heads of the people here ˗ they really are thick, you know. [Oh, dear, what a bumptious know-all this guy is!] (The same day I went down to our post office in Blackheath to get our mail delivered to our doorstep instead of the flats upstairs, and the first bit of mail arrived this morning ˗ Upstairs!). Heaven knows what’ll happen when they get decimal coinage. I think most of them will just give up!

Yesterday, I got up early and went in to get seats for the Dance of Death with Olivier. Got three quite decent seats, without having to queue with a very big crowd ˗ a dozen perhaps, and then since I had 3 hours to fill in before going down to East Croydon where the rehearsal are being held just now (the local art school is doing the designing of the show) I went to the cinema in Waterloo Station where they were showing On the Waterfront with Brando. Fabulous. A very moving story, with a priest who was a priest in it, instead of the usual wishy washy characters you get, and Brando is superb.

Last night Mike and a friend of his he found in a pub recently called John from Ohio (he’s here for an indefinite time, and very pleasant) and I went to D of D. It’s a rather rubbishy play though the first act is at least several times better than the second, but it was great to see Olivier in the flesh, and Geraldine McEwan, his co-star, is outstanding.

Lots of love Mike. 

18.3.69 - Finally feeling better

18.3.69

Dear Mum, I’m going to answer your first question on the letter I received this morning by saying ‘I feel on top of the world!’ ˗ in fact I feel so much like my old self that I’m leaping around. I’d forgotten just how energetic and cheery I normally am. Either that or I’m going Mad! ˗ I’m bouncing around like a two-year-old so much and chatting away to myself about the world in general (I’ve done that for years) that suddenly it doesn’t matter that it’s never anything but winter in England. Actually the weather has been improving ˗ it’s been that much milder lately, so I’m finding it quite pleasant. No one else seems to think it’s getting any better, but they’re a pack of moaners, the English, I think, and they’ve got so much to grumble about they naturally put something very important like the weather first! I’m now three times as busy as I’ve been ˗ must stop exaggerating! I’ve still got a touch of the cough that I had, but it seems to be vanishing slowly, and no longer bothers me.

We’re in the middle of our last week, practically, of rehearsals for our end of term double bill. I’ve actually got the day off, until 5.30, when we have a rehearsal, but George Bamford (who kept me busy all day Saturday with parts for a terrible Irish recording that is being made soon) has some more film music up his sleeve, and with a bit of luck, I’ll be able to go in later this morning and get it, and do it before and after the rehearsal.

I spent Sunday transposing two songs down for one of the students (who may pay me!) and then went off to see a film at our local cinema, on the other side of the Heath. It was ‘If...’ which I’d been trying to see in the West End for ages, but which had always been sold out at the price I was willing to pay. As it turned out it was a very disturbing film, but I don’t feel for the reasons the director intended. It’s all about a public school, and especially three of the sixth formers, who finally gun down the parents and teachers on Parents’ Day, with old 2nd World War machine guns and grenades that have been in store under the school! But this wasn’t what was disturbing; quite honestly I found the end rather silly, but it was the way all sorts of perversions and deviations from the norm were casually accepted within the film that annoyed me. Morals had vanished out the window, somewhere, and much of the film was taking up with telling you, in a roundabout way, that they had.

The previous night, I’d had to take the parts back to Bamford (he must owe me about £13 or £14 now), and this meant a trip all the way up to Kings Cross, and rather a waste of time, unless I was going to stay in the town. So I walked along to David Gorringe’s flat in Portland Place, which is only several stone’s throws away (!), on the hope that he might be interested in going out, or even just sitting round talking. I was almost put off by the fact that the front door of the flats was locked, but I could see a light on in the penthouse, and didn’t think his flatmate was back yet from an Opera for All Tour, so I chance it and rang the bell, and was answered by a voice thru the speaker at the door. It’s a most odd feeling talking to a disembodied voice in the street!

Anyway Dave was home and feeling all miserable because he didn’t know what to do with himself, and so after a bite to eat (I felt a bit awful about that, I always seem to be having snacks up there ˗ I’ll buy him lunch one of these days at the Centre) we went to the pictures ˗ even though it was getting very late, we got into a later showing of the most recent Ingmar Bergman film, called Shame, and about apathy ˗ I think! It concerned, mainly, two married people (to each other for once!) who during a war in the late 1970s, had taken up a farm to fill in the time when they couldn’t be musicians, and how in spite of the fact that the most terrible things were going on around them, they concerned themselves with their own troubles purely, and were of course shocked when the war suddenly took them over. The man, till nearly the end, when he was forced by a guerilla mob to shoot a high official of the other side, and did it because he was ashamed of his previous cowardice, and that it had turned him against his wife, or vice versa, was a very weak individual who would cry when things got too much for him, and after the shooting, he suddenly changed completely, and his wife who had been dominant up till then, became the weaker and was forced to see her husband turn into a brute. This makes it sound rather curious, but it was a fascinating film. And yet I was trouble rather less by it than by If... And it should have been the other way round.

Last Friday, John Kentish asked me if I could go down to Eltham (two train stops below Blackheath) and play for a rehearsal that night, and on the Monday. Well, I couldn’t do the Friday, but I did do last night, and it turned out they wanted a conductor, not a pianist! (And they pay over £4 for it!) So with some misgiving, I took them thru parts of Traviata, which fortunately I know reasonably well, and really enjoyed it. It was quite like being back with the old Carmen chorus at home, and just the same as far as the atmosphere went. [I presume I mean that I’d been chorus master for a local production of Carmen in Dunedin, but I don’t remember doing this at all.] Only this time I had principals as well: an Aussie leading lady, and an NZ bass (the place is running with them ˗ Sadlers Wells has little else!)  There were even the same types of people there: the woman who didn’t want to do what everyone else was doing, and the men shy of singing, but very hard working. I came home on a cloud! And once I got started they even took my cheek the same as the Dunedin crowd, and took it well, for English [people]! (Sorry to harp on these people, but Londoners can be lacking in a sense of humour ˗ you’re never quite sure if you’re on safe ground!)

 

Tomorrow I’ve got to get up rather earlier than I have the last few days, and go and get tickets for Dance of Death ˗ with Olivier!! Fabulous. [I presume this was the stage production, but since that began in 1967, I may have been talking about the film version from 1969.] I stayed the night at Dave’s on Sat, and then spent some time getting lost in Soho looking for the Catholic Church in there that Abigail and I had gone to on Ash Wed. Soho is easy to go straight thru, but difficult to track anything down in. I found it though and won’t lose it again! I was coming from the opposite direction this time, which was why it was so difficult. Actually I had been trying to find another street when I ran across it! Lots of love, Mike.