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David
McGuinness's diary Wednesday 28 August 2002 Well, Saturday's concert seemed to go OK. I don't play solo gigs very often, as mentally it's a completely different experience from sharing a stage even with one other person. It was good to have to prepare for it in so little time: I played handfuls of wrong notes in the first half, but it felt as though they were a result of being unused to the mental responsibility for holding the whole show, rather than a lack of digital dexterity. Alison and I have an ongoing debate about the value of practising which has reached precious few conclusions: her most recent word on the subject was 'playing is more useful than practice', which certainly makes sense here. It's the experience of making music on my own to an audience that I need to practise, not the notes. Anyway, in the second half, I seemed to hit a groove and it all went swimmingly after that. I finished with the big B minor Couperin Passacaille, which is a monumental piece (if not particularly difficult), and is about as deadly serious as harpsichord music ever gets. When I came off I thought 'what a dismal way to end a concert', and fortunately the audience were enthusiastic enough to get me an encore to lighten the mood. Still, if I couldn't make an impression playing French music on a spectacular instrument like the 1769 Taskin, there would be something seriously wrong ... Our flyers for the US have come back from the printers (Marie's sending them off today) , and last night I built a couple of concert programmes to go with them. So now we sit tight and hope the promoters bite. Wednesday 21 August 2002 I've been having a mercifully quiet week or two, concentrating on essential pursuits like sitting in the garden with my daughter (summer finally arrived this week). Then today at lunchtime I got offered a solo concert this Saturday (covering a cancellation) playing on probably the most famous harpsichord in the world, the 1769 green Taskin from Edinburgh University's Russell Collection in St Cecilia's Hall. Opportunities to get an instrument like that to yourself in front of an audience don't come along often, so I'd better organise the baby-sitting, pick a programme, and do some frantic practising. I think the audience is going to be largely made up of the British Clavichord Society, so they'll be knowledgeable to boot. Marie and I are meeting Steve Cappello this afternoon to look at the final proofs for our American flyers, then I have to conjure up some programmes to go with them and we'll get those sent off by early next week. By a strange act of providence I've come into possession of a DCC machine, digital compact cassette being the digital audio format that never really took off. The DCC part is pretty useless, but it also plays normal analog cassettes very well and has a digital output, so I've been up to the attic, and have dug out all sorts of old recordings to transfer to CD via my computer. There's everything from student concerts, including a Mozart sonata with added piano part by Grieg and ridiculous added percussion parts by me, to endless Anniesland Occasionals recordings dating from schooldays onwards. With no editing facilities, everything was recorded in single takes, and the screw-ups are often the most entertaining bits, and have since resulted in 20 year-old in-jokes (much like any other band I suppose). I was rolling around on the floor helpless with laughter more than once, hearing the original occurrences of such gems as 'cut it ya bam, we've finished' and 'shmizh me mov mov', phrases which mean nothing to anyone, except those who were there at the time. Friday 9 August 2002 We've been staying out at a suburban hotel near Ravinia, where the place names are all things like Highland Park and Glencoe, but the place is completely flat. Today's flight doesn't take off until evening, so I suggested that a few of us get up in the morning and take the train into Chicago. We only had three hours in the Windy City, but it's a very beautiful place and I liked it a lot: May and I went to the Navy Pier, Greg went off downtown to buy cowboy boots, and Ursula sought out a favourite painting at the Art Institute. Ah the touring life. We'd just come off the Ferris wheel, when May said 'Exactly a week ago, we were in Aberdour Castle at a barbecue'... Thursday 8 August 2002 Now in the air above Lake Erie on the way to Chicago. Tuesday was kind of memorable: a nice train journey to Washington DC, and then Chris picked me up at Union Station with his harmonium in the back of the station wagon, and off we went to the studio for a day of harmonium and melodica overdubs. After the discipline of playing Mahler arranged Schoenberg the previous night at the Lincoln Center, it was strangely liberating (if a bit scary) to be winging it all day, and have the results wind up on an album.
I finished off the blurb for the Concerto Caledonia flyers at about 1am last night and faxed it to Marie. Conversation overheard by Ursula Leveaux in NY hotel elevator between two airline pilots: "What you gonna do tonight?" "Uh, dunno, I think I'll just crash." [later] I've just come off stage at Ravinia, and the audience are listening to Schubert 3 being relayed over nice quality speakers into the darkened park, sitting on blankets and surrounded by bottles of wine and insect-repelling candles. The harmonium behaved itself tonight, I managed some subtle phrasing occasionally, but the last 4 bars (the quietest part of the whole piece) were completely wrecked by someone's mobile phone playing a very intricate and jolly tune - it sounded like a passing ice-cream van. Joseph's face was a picture of confusion and frustration. I've been moaning all week that we'd never actually rehearsed the piece properly, partly because Wolfgang Holzmair doesn't like singing on concert days until the gig. Today we actually spent 30 minutes on it, in which I managed to make a complete pig's ear of everything, playing wrong notes, too loudly, out of time, and generally being crap. At the end of the rehearsal, a member of the orchestra who shall remain nameless said to me (in all innocence) 'Have you never played one of these before?' I wandered off to sulk on a park bench for a while. Just before going on stage, I mentioned to Ursula that I'd completely screwed up the entire rehearsal, and she said 'That's what rehearsals are for.' Ah yes. Then I went on and did not a bad job if I say so myself. Wednesday 7 August 2002 I'm sitting under the stars in the 'Leonard Bernstein Artists' Pavilion' at Tanglewood in Massachusetts, while the SCO finish their concert with Schubert's 3rd Symphony, and I'm trying to write the copy for our Concerto Caledonia flyers. I'll write about yesterday later, but the most remarkable thing about today has been the founding of the Nude Harmonium Players' Society, an august institution which may well come to nothing. Earlier on, as the outdoor part of the audience were gathering on the grass (the Seiji Ozawa hall has a removable back wall) Peter Evans dared me to play Onward Christian Soldiers at full blast on the harmonium to entertain them. It had no effect whatsoever. Now if I'd done it Terry Jones style ... Monday 5 August 2002 "It says Wisdom on my toothbrush, Revelation on my bag" (Peter Blegvad) Park Central Hotel, New York (on tour with the SCO, playing the harmonium). As before on trips to the US, I'm awake far too early, but today I don't really mind as tomorrow I have to be on the 0605 train to Washington for Chris Norman's recording session at 10. I had a reasonably eventful journey over here: within 30 seconds of setting foot in Heathrow's Terminal 3, a kind lady ran her baggage trolley into my foot, and scraped a fair quantity of skin off the heel, leaving it bleeding all over the floor. Serves me right for wearing sandals, I thought I was bring practical. Fortunately Boots was a short hop away. Then on the flight I was sat in front of a very sweet but extremely active little boy who couldn't help himself from continually kicking the back of my chair, dropping his tray table and screaming at his sister. I thought 'I can handle this', had a drink, put some loud music on my walkman, and then an hour later thought, 'no I can't, I have to get some rest'. At this point I spotted Michael Stirling's cello a couple of rows ahead. So eventually after a bit of negotiating with the flight attendant, the cello got upgraded to first class (well, it's a Strad, it's worth more than I am), and I got to talk to him about working with Fred Frith in the Ensemble Modern. Yesterday I had three hours to myself with a harmonium in the chorus room of the Avery Fisher Hall at the Lincoln Center. It's a nice French instrument from around 1880, well-maintained but still a little temperamental, with the odd sticky note, a register not set up properly, and squeaky pedals. I bumped into Joseph Swensen (who's conducting) back at the hotel, and he said 'this should not be your problem, all you should have to do is play the music'. This is not a scenario I'm familiar with. I brought loads of CDs with me but all that I'm actually listening to in spare moments is an old favourite which I would happily write about at great length but will spare you: Robert Wyatt's incredible 1974 record Rock Bottom, with occasional outbreaks of the wonderful new CD of Lou Harrison's music for harpsichord, fortepiano and tack piano in different tunings by Linda Burman-Hall. I met Lou Harrison when I was a student, and thought he looked like he had far too much fun to be a serious composer ... Similarly, I brought a pile of books but have only
managed to open and devour Richard James Burgess's The Art of Music
Production, which is about as entertaining and enlightening a book about the
music business as you'll read. Very funny, and a whole chapter on
lawyers. Stuck on the tarmac at Heathrow, not yet en route to New York. In Glasgow the weather finally brightened up for the day on Thursday, so that we could have a picnic in my back garden between rehearsals (see the gallery page for a previous instance of this), and last night's gig in Aberdour was great fun. The monsoon conditions in Scotland earlier in the week (one month's rainfall in one day on Tuesday) meant that by Wednesday the festival had already decided to go for the indoor option in St Fillan's Kirk next door to the castle, a wonderfully asymmetric medieval church sunk down into the churchyard. Acoustically it's rather nice, if a bit bass-heavy, but it's also extremely damp, so little details like playing in tune or for that matter playing quietly were a bit hit and miss. Gut strings soak up all the moisture they can, and even the paper the music was printed on felt like a packet of Wet Ones by the end of the afternoon. But every now and again everything came into focus and we played really well, and Jamie was his usually endlessly entertaining self, singing the Urbani songs and the final encore with finesse. The pre-concert barbecue and picnics in the grounds of the castle were a real bonus and lightened the atmosphere nicely, and the church itself was crammed, with the audience filling every corner and right up against us: Alison even had people reading the music over her shoulder. After several calls and an encore Alison, Iona and I
had to run (passing a large chunk of the audience on their way out) to get to the train. We had 7 minutes to change trains at Haymarket, and Iona hatched a plan to run up to the nearest pub, get a carry-out and still make it back
in time. It's a measure of how much some musicians really need a beer after a gig that I've never seen her move so fast as when she flew up the stairs from platform 1. She was back, bottles in hand and grinning, in two minutes flat: a towering achievement. The weather's still foul: humid, wet, hot and airless. The long-range forecast isn't looking too good for the outdoor prospects of Friday's gig at Aberdour either, but it's too early to chicken out and go for the indoor option just yet. On a cheerier note, it looks like we may have another gig in October (I'll put the date on the events page in due course) courtesy of Jim O'Neil at Biggar Theatre Workshop, but right now I've got to do some practice - the luxury of a holiday has done for my finger muscles, and I've been spending far too much time lately working out travel arrangements, and not enough on matters musical ... Tuesday 23 July 2002 There was a nice plug for next Friday's concert in yesterday's Herald, calling us a 'vibrant little band' led by 'the dynamic McG, who plays classical keyboards as though he's playing stride piano, and who believes that all music is rock 'n' roll (he actually puts it more earthily than that, but this is a family newspaper)'. All completely made up of course, but welcome nonetheless. I made a couple of chance radio contacts in the last couple of days. While I was gazing hopelessly at the variety of plastic bread on offer in the supermarket at the bottom of our road, a Radio 3 producer said hi and mentioned that he and Fiona Talkington (one of the presenters of cult show Late Junction) were just about to have dinner in the restaurant next door. Fiona shares my boundless enthusiasm for Finnish music, but we've never actually met before, so I joined them for a drink and we ended up drinking Bushmills and listening to JPP into the night. It's at least a year since I last sat around listening to music with friends ... And then today another producer sidled up to me and asked me if I'd go on Jamie's Radio Scotland show Grace Notes to plug our gig next week. I'd deliberately not approached them as he's going to be singing in the concert, and it might be a bit weird: 'So David, tell me what I'm doing on Friday'. Sunday 21 July 2002 We're back from holiday, and most welcome it was too. In amongst the relaxation I did manage to fit in the odd bit of work (yeah, odd). I successfully retuned a melodica to a'=442Hz or thereabouts, only using tools that were available on the island - this involved hacksawing the end off a chainsaw file - and transcribed a few Finnish tunes off some records for future use. Managed to fit in a bit of practice in some particularly scenic locations too. And those nice people at the Scottish Arts Council lottery fund decided to give me some money to go and see David Greenberg in Canada in a couple of months. So now there are four projects occupying my time: next week's concert in Aberdour, the tour with the SCO just afterwards, the recording session with Chris Norman in the middle of all of that, and cooking up some ideas to develop with Mr Greenberg. Meanwhile I've got to get through a mountain of mail, catch up on a couple of months' worth of gardening and outdoor play activities, and do some serious amounts of work at the BBC for my 'day job'. And then on top of all of this I had a great idea this morning for a recording project based around the Scottish Psalter, but that one will just have to fester for a while ... Tuesday 2 July 2002 The weather is still unremittingly awful (see 14 June) - this stopped being funny some time ago. When I was in the Wighton Collection a few weeks ago there was a mid-19th century poster on the wall from a Dundee solicitor, advertising free passage to Canada for those who bought a few acres of land. I looked out the window at the Tay Road Bridge in the pouring rain and realised that the prospect must have seemed very attractive. Our lawn is fast becoming a meadow as there hasn't been a dry day to mow it for as long as I can remember. Still, I just checked the Bruichladdich distillery webcam and it's sunny there, so perhaps things will improve. Normally at this time of year I try to spend as much time outdoors as possible, but now I've given up. This week: grant applications (thinking of trips to Canada), refining of Zappa arrangements, writing of blurb for future concerts, melodica practice, and revisiting Earl of Kelly CD ideas and the budgets thereof. Thursday 27 June 2002 Just got back from Orkney after a few very busy days at the St Magnus Festival, working for the BBC. There were some terrific gigs this year, my favourites being Colin Currie's storming solo percussion set given in a tiny cinema on a Saturday afternoon before a noisy audience aged from about 6 months up, Ronald Brautigam pulling every possible kind of sound out of Stromness Town Hall's slightly clapped-out piano, and Carol Ann Duffy's poetry reading. Besides being a serious and completely unpretentious wordsmith, she's also an effortless master of deadpan comedy: she didn't crack a smile once, and had the audience in stitches. We got some good news while I was there: the Foundation for Sport and the Arts have given us Ł10 000 towards a recording of the music of the Earl of Kelly. So now I have to sit down with a spreadsheet sometime and figure out how much of Kelly's music you can get for Ł10k. I came home to huge pile of mail, including a bright green melodica (whose sound production techniques my daughter mastered immediately, much to my annoyance), and a schedule and CD from Chris Norman for our recording in August in Washington DC. So I've been looking at Amtrak timetables and trying to figure out how to get there ... Thursday 20 June 2002 I've got an afternoon set aside to set to preparing an assortment of publicity material - photos and blurb for forthcoming concerts, and for a couple of brochures: one for Scottish music clubs and one for North American promoters. I'm useless at writing this sort of stuff so I tend to put it off for as long as possible. At this week's board meeting Christine Hamilton bravely agreed to read anything we put out in print and offer helpful advice. We decided against the name change in the end, for the time being anyway. I've got into the habit of apologising for our name, partly because it's difficult to say, and partly because for someone not versed in early or classical music, the word 'concerto' is a bit off-putting and doesn't convey what we do. If you already know that there's a load of early music groups called Concerto Köln, Concerto Rococo, Concerto Largs (OK, I made the last one up), it's not a problem, but how many people do ? If you think we have a lousy name (or a great one!), write and tell us ! I started playing through the Adam Craig harpsichord book the other day - it's bizarre that there was someone in Glasgow in 1730 playing Scots tunes in the style of French harpsichord music. Some will find its way into our October concerts and subsequent recording, I'm sure. Speaking of recordings, our online CD ordering page is up and running, and it's here. Go shop! Friday 14 June 2002 On the bus home from Dundee: I had another two RSNO gigs there today, but I had the afternoon off, so I spent it at the Wighton Collection in front of a microfilm printer, and now have copies of some more Earl of Kelly material, a fascinating Glasgow book of Scots tunes arranged for harpsichord in 1730 by Adam Craig, and some other bits and pieces, including the Caledonian Muse arrangements of The Gentle Shepherd. I also bought Janice Galloway's new novel about Clara Schumann, which judging by the first 40 pages is completely absorbing. If my eyes were less tired I would be reading it now. Jamie was presenting this evening's concert, so we had time for dinner beforehand. Incidentally, the Caird Hall's Steinway was beautifully polished on the outside, but the keyboard itself was absolutely filthy, as though whoever played it last had been simultaneously servicing their car. I set to it with some toilet roll and soap before playing a note. Well, here in the south of Scotland the past week's been characterised by unremittingly foul, wet and heavy weather. It feels like October. Monday was the worst - it was as though everyone you met had their own personal black cloud hovering over them. Of course Monday was the only day I had free to deal with my computer hardware problems: I spent a whole afternoon on three visits to the shop and various adventures with a screwdriver. On Monday morning Marie and I had a strategy meeting - a bit of long-term planning never hurts once in a while, and since then I've been working on the technical and musical arrangements for our open-air gig in August (now on the events page at last), and refining and circulating the plans for Roots in Suits, which now include Andrew Lawrence-King's wonderful group The Harp Consort. Mr McFall's Chamber are going to lend us their Accusound clip-on mics for the upper strings in August, but I still have to purloin some lit music stands from somewhere. Oh yes, and we might be about to change our name: I'm sick and tired of apologising for the cumbersome and frankly forgettable name we have at the moment. But I'm not telling you its possible replacement yet. Marie has kindly gifted me her vinyl collection, or rather allowed me to intercept it and swipe the best bits en route to the Oxfam shop, and it includes many great treasures: some of my favourite 1970s early music records, and the first 35 volumes of the Teldec Bach cantata series with Leonhardt and Harnoncourt. I don't know where I'm going to put them all though: my own vinyl is still in crates in the back porch. On Wednesday night I had a genuinely unforgettable concert experience at Brian Wilson's gig at the Edinburgh Playhouse. He was on stage for nearly 3 hours with interval, played songs from every part of his career, including wonderful sequences of Smile material (a perfectly re-structured Heroes and Villians), and of course the entire Pet Sounds album in sequence. Then as an encore they all came back on, played 'Darlin' to get warmed up, and then stormed through all the classic Beach Boys hits: Help Me Rhonda, Fun, Fun, Fun, Surfin' USA, I Get Around ... , as if to say 'OK, we've done the serious stuff, this is what Brian could do with a 2-minute pop song'. It was a bit like being hit very hard by someone's genius over and over again. As I left, I was thinking, 'no-one can have written that many absolute killer tunes, as well as all the clever stuff': the emotional range of the evening was enormous. Then I realised 'No, that's Brian Wilson, he did it, and all by the time he was 24'. The fact that his personal life's been such a catalogue of disaster, and he has what you might call developmental delays in communication, just makes it all the more remarkable that he's there on the stage enjoying his own music. The guy sitting next to me turned round at the end with a look of astonishment on his face and said 'I've seen them all, I've seen Dylan 3 times, Neil Young ... [I'll omit the list as I've forgotten it] ... but that was ...' and he couldn't finish the sentence. Well I'm too tired to write any more, so it's time to reach for my Walkman. The two CDs I bought this week are both retreads of records I have already (why am I so unadventurous?). One is the stereo version of Pet Sounds, and the other a newly released CD of John Zorn's Naked City playing live in 1989, with most of the tunes (tunes??) from their first album, one of my all-time favourite cheer-up records. The extreme virtuosity and devastating musicianship put to occasionally childish use, still thrill me every time I turn it up loud. Saturday 8 June 2002 On the Edinburgh-Glasgow train: I only seem to write diary entries in transit ... We had some good news this week: an agent in New York wants us to do a US tour in the season 2003/04. I suspect there a few more hurdles to jump before it becomes a firm reality in the concert diary, but it's a great encouragement nonetheless. After hearing about this on Thursday, Marie and I were back at the Scottish Arts Council to talk about what kind of projects they might or might not support that same year. Their entire system of music funding is about to be shaken up, but no-one knows how, until the Scottish Executive make some decisions about how much money they have to spend. So it's a frustrating and rather confusing process right now for all concerned, the SAC included. It seems like musicians everywhere in Britain are talking about last weekend's rock gig at the Palace: for the record my favourite bits were ... Joe Cocker, the Abbey Road medley, Cliff (honestly - it was great to see him surrounded by musicians rather than showbiz people), Ozzy, Dame Edna telling the TV floor manager where to shove it on air while introducing Macca, and the grin on the cameraman's face on the palace roof as Brian May played the national anthem in front of him. But most moving was Brian Wilson clearly enjoying himself with his band of expert musos. Mark Fisher has kindly got us tickets for Wilson's gig in Edinburgh next week, and I've been preparing for the experience by downloading mp3s of the great unfinished Beach Boys album, Smile - lots of little musical fragments that give a tantalising glimpse of what might have been, if Mr Wilson had just stopped being stoned out of his box for long enough to work out how to finish it! A warning to all those who think that getting spliffed up helps them to be creative: it's fine if you want to spend your entire income on unnecessary studio time ... Anyway, I've just done yet another RSNO gig with Petrushka. It was straight on with no rehearsal today, which was pretty scary, particularly in the Usher Hall where it's quite hard to hear what's happening elsewhere on the stage. In those circumstances you have to learn to pick out sounds from the wash of orchestral noise very quickly: it's a skill that impresses PA operators, who are used to, and generally tired of, people demanding very specific levels of every instrument in their monitors. When you've got used to interpreting the mush that comes across the stage of an acoustic concert hall, having anything at all coming out of a speaker at your feet is sheer luxury. I may have been interpreting the mush wrongly, but it didn't feel like a particularly good gig, and I made a complete arse of the solo in the Dance Russe (an Eric Morecambe: the right notes, but in the wrong order). As I came off I said to Garry the conductor 'Sorry, I just went for it and it was nowhere' - 'Don't worry,' he said 'I did this piece with Peter Donohoe and he was nowhere too'. Funnily enough even on Donohoe's recording with Simon Rattle he doesn't manage to get all the notes ... I've just been out in the garden - at 10.30pm there's still enough to daylight to sit under a tree and enjoy some peace and quiet. So there I was minding my own business, when a fox trotted past minding his. 'Hello' I said, at which he stopped, arched his back, and tried to work out what to do next. When he eventually went back through the hole in the hedge, I looked over the fence to see him and his two mates, patiently watching and waiting for me to go away so that they could use our garden as a thoroughfare east. I wonder where they're going. Sunday 2 June 2002 Yet another diary entry written on the train - en route to Edinburgh this time for yet another RSNO gig. This one is an unashamedly tacky 'Jubilee' open air bash in Princes Street Gardens with Bryn Terfel singing songs from the shows, and Evelyn Glennie playing the pipes. And although I thought this would make me want to throw up, the rehearsal yesterday was great fun. When you're delivering an 'entertainment' rather than an 'art' product, things are so much simpler: you don't waste time getting hung up about style (does this sound Russian/18th century/folky enough ?) you just play it and stick it all together. My favourite bit is definitely the massacre of Holst's Jupiter into 'World in Union' where I get to play a bit of gospel piano. Walking through the park to get to rehearsal yesterday was very civilised too: in the hazy sunshine, a brass quartet were playing, some wedding photos were being taken, there was a jazz guitarist playing to himself under a tree, and two star-crossed lovers rehearsing Shakespeare on top of the hill. A happy holiday atmosphere all round, and great to be able to ignore all the royalist nonsense. I watched a bit of the 'Prom from the Palace' on telly last night as I was answering emails: when Kiri te Kanawa came on to murder 'Summertime' (it was gruesome) I did a bit of a double take, as some years ago when her awful Gershwin record came out, Private Eye ran a spoof advert for 'Kiri sings the Sex Pistols'. I thought for a moment she was going to come on and do the Pistols' 'God Save the Queen'. I spent most of Friday in the car, doing a short tour of Fife castles. I was in Fife for the site meeting for our open air ConCal gig at Aberdour Castle in August (details coming on the events page in due course), and thought I'd hop over to Kellie Castle while I was in the kingdom of Fife. Seeing as we're planning to record a load of Thomas Erskine, the 6th Earl of Kellie's music, I figured I ought to have a look round his house. I had a quick play through one of his minuets on the huge 1829 Stodart piano while I was there. Any other free time this week has been taken up with computer trouble - I bought a new sound card for it on Monday to enable me to transfer a load of old DATs digitally to CD, and upgrade generally to 24bit/96kHz. I'd just copied enough material for my demo for the TV production company when the thing blew up (metaphorically), and after several phone calls to the helpline in Ireland, a trip back to the shop to get a replacement, which then blew as well, it's still not working. I predict that this will be something of a time-waster in the next couple of weeks. Saturday 25 May 2002 The train home from Aberdeen offers some dramatic watery sights as it travels down the east coast: waves crashing against seawalls, rivers in spate, a lifeboat heading out to sea. My attention inside the carriage moves between the newspapers and the TV thriller script I've been sent, which I keep having to put down to catch my breath. Adventures in the Music Profession vol. 361: last night's gig was a 'classical spectacular', you know the sort of thing, 'Nessun Dorma', Suppé's Light Cavalry Overture, the 1812. I was only playing in two pieces (and wasn't doing much in those), so effectively I had a day out in Aberdeen with occasional forays on stage for rehearsal or part of a concert, and rounded off by a nice hour in the pub with some personable colleagues. It was quite good fun, and reminded me of all the hanging around when I used to take walk-on work in TV shows while writing up my PhD. Playing in an orchestra pays about the same too! In fact I've just agreed to another couple of days' work with the RSNO next weekend, with a live broadcast on Radio 2 from Edinburgh's Princes Street Gardens. I feel a new career beckoning as an orchestral pianist. No I don't. For one thing I can't count bars' rest without moving my lips. And I'd get really fat: with all the hanging around there's not much to do other than eat, as I said to the bass clarinettist over tea and biscuits backstage while the rest of the orchestra were playing Elgar's Nimrod. This morning was the first of the kids/schools concerts, with another selection of barnstorming tunes along with the more challenging Petrushka which has been occupying so much of my practice time. There wasn't room on the stage for the Music Hall's big Bösendorfer, so I was playing on a little baby grand with the feel and resonance of a wet cardboard box, but the joy of being a tiny musical cog in a big machine is that you can just get on with it and not be too precious. It would be nice to get the audience closer in these sorts of concerts, but the traditional shoe-box concert hall doesn't really lend itself to informality, for all its acoustic perfection. A few enterprising parents took their kids along to the front to lean over the balcony rail, which was great. [later] Well, this year's Eurovision Song Contest
was a bit of a disappointment: not nearly enough wilful eccentricity or cheerful
displays of lack of talent. My favourites were the Greek Gary Numan
clones, the German fat bloke (why does Germany always field a middle-aged rocker
who should know better?), and the transvestite air hostesses from Slovenia,
but special mention goes to the lyrics of the Maltese song, which were hilariously atrocious:
you have to watch
the show with subtitles to catch the full horror. I'm on the train to Aberdeen for a couple of RSNO gigs: it's been a while since I wrote anything here, because I've spent every spare minute recently practising the piano. Last weekend's gig with Mhairi and Adrian was very enjoyable, the audience were responsive and appreciative, and although I played plenty of bum notes in the Brahms, Mhairi's Frauenliebe und Leben was very moving: the sense of desolation in the last song was tangible. There was a chance for a bit of jamming too, in Ade's Oswald fiddle variations. A very nice review in the Herald (scroll down a bit to find it after following the link). I had time afterwards for lunch with Nicola and her family - she was our cellist (and is playing on the Clerk CD) before deciding quite rightly that she had more vital things to do with her life! On Monday night I bumped into Michael Tumelty (who wrote the Herald review) at a careers night at Glasgow University, where a few diverse people including us had been asked to speak about how we got where we are today, wherever that is. 'Career' and 'music' are of course almost impossible to combine in the same sentence without giggling, but it was an interesting evening nonetheless. Composer Bill Sweeney and I both discovered that we'd learnt more from clarinettist Alan Hacker than anyone else, he about composition and me about fortepiano playing. Yesterday I met Rob Mackillop for lunch so that we could develop our idea of a weekend of folk-early music collaboration and experimentation. Rob came up with the title 'Roots in Suits' which I think is going to be impossible to beat. One of the things I have to do on this train journey is write up our discussion and start circulating it to interested parties, and to parties who probably aren't interested, but who I would like to be. Last night I was back at Glasgow University again for a fascinating lecture by Bartók authority László Somfai. When I lecture at the RSAMD, one of my opening gambits is to ask the students to imagine that they are learning a Bartók piano piece, and to give me reasons why they shouldn't copy what Bartók himself does on the 78s. It's a way of getting them to think about how we deal as musicians with the historical evidence presented to us about the music we play. Somfai made a stunning demonstration by simultaneously playing two recordings of the same piece played by Bartók, recorded a decade apart on different continents: not only were they almost in sync the whole way through, but they differed hugely from the published version of the piece in tempo, dynamic, and rhythm. So the composer's idea of the piece was clear, and clearly not the same as his own published version. There was also an intriguing look at the second violin concerto, in Bartók's working copy and the recording of the premiere, which added to my suspicion that it's only in the second half of the 20th century that classical musicians have been taught to play their instruments in such a homogenous way. You learn to play an instrument rather than to make music, and as a result, delicacies of style, groove and meaning (if you'll excuse the 'Grease' reference) get ironed out of you. But the most bizarre moment of the evening was when we all sat and listened to a field recording of a folksong that Bartók had transcribed in all its intricate detail. After hearing it once, we listened to it again played at half speed, which with all the disc noise made for a very psychedelic experience. Chill out or what ? Wednesday 15 May 2002 In the sky en route to London. I have to be at a meeting there tomorrow afternoon, but I hadn't taken into account the 25 000 Spanish and German football fans heading south after tonight's Champions League final in Glasgow, and taking every available seat on trains and planes. So here I am travelling down early, before the match finishes. This gives me a welcome excuse to stay with friends in Cambridge tonight, but deprives me of an evening's valuable practice for Saturday's recital, and the impending RSNO work. Speaking of which, I finally got the parts yesterday, hand delivered by the orchestral management, after they first sent it to my old address. Even then, half of it was missing and they had to fax me that later in the day. Not very helpful. Well, I knew Petrushka was going to be a challenge, but by the end of the afternoon I was decidedly worried and white of face. I've got a lot of work still to do before Monday's rehearsal, and not much time to do it in. I can't even do little and often because I'm not going to be at home much. The wonderful thing about continuo playing is that you can't really practise it much, because the notes you play depend hugely on what you hear around you. Apart from deciding what the chords are going to be and making sure you can negotiate the bassline, there's not much more you can do until you're in situ. So then when I turn to piano music, which is all written out, with a lot of notes, and with directions on how to play them as well, I'm suddenly faced with a mountain of preparation. It's as well the Stravinsky is fantastic music as there's a great incentive to get it all exactly right - and the piano part is very carefully laid out, apparently by Artur Rubinstein helping the composer. I was just getting to grips with this yesterday morning when the phone rang, and it was a colleague from many years ago when I wrote music for the theatre: would I be interested in pitching for the music for a new 2-hour drama for ITV? Please? Apart from the odd corporate video, I haven't written music for television for about 8 years, so I feel a bit out of it, but then I haven't had a piano lesson since I was 16 either, so what? There's no guarantee I'd get the job, as several people involved in the production have a 'pet composer' they want to do it, but I'm tempted to give it a go. On Saturday I had a day off and we went to see Holmwood House. Glasgow has one very famous dead architect already in Charles Rennie Mackintosh, so it made a pleasant change to explore the work of another, Alexander 'Greek' Thomson. I always associate the National Trust with polite tea shops in stately homes, so it was a nice surprise to find the (basic) tea shop not even open, and the house itself still very much in the process of being slowly returned to its originally designed state. It must have been ostentatious and spectacular, but at the moment it's an exciting mess, with lots of half-discovered decoration, tantalising scrapes of colour on walls, and enthusiastic guides gleefully pointing out what hasn't been done yet. The original owner was one of those enormously wealthy mid-19th century Glasgow merchants, with his paper mill at the bottom of the garden. Friday 10 May 2002 I was going to spend the last couple of days practising for next weekend's gig with Mhairi and Adrian, but yesterday was almost entirely taken up with catching up on mail, and writing a response to the SAC music strategy. Despite my reducing of the study to the bare essentials a few weeks ago, it's now full of paper, and most of it has to be dealt with one way or another. Even though I make a point of only opening the mail when standing above a waste paper bin (this saves on journey time), paper accumulates at a frightening rate. We had a very productive AGM and board meeting on Tuesday, with lots of sound advice and candid opinions flying around the table. I've put together a programme for our open air gig in August: Jamie's going to sing, and I'm just waiting for the site meeting to get fixed up, so that I can figure out what kind of stage and/or PA we'll need. And joy of joys, both McGillivrays are free for concert and recording at the end of January. I finally got to the piano today and rediscovered how wonderful Schumann is, and what big hands Brahms had (ouch). I've also agreed, subject to a decent fee of course, to spend quite a lot of time over the next few weeks playing the piano in the RSNO, the repertoire including Stravinsky's Petrushka. I'm always a bit embarrassed when people ask me to play the piano: "You do realise I'm not a real piano player", "Have you asked everyone else?", "Is it hard?" are my usual responses. The first rehearsal's a week on Monday, so I may have to learn a lot of notes quite quickly - thank heavens for digital pianos, volume control, and headphones. When we last moved house from a spacious high-ceilinged Victorian flat to our cosier 1920s semi, I gave my parents back our piano, and had a digital one delivered the day after we moved. Somehow I foresaw the need for late-night note-bashing. Monday 6 May 2002 Lots to do again. The ConCal board meeting and AGM is tomorrow, I've just read all 18 pages of the Scottish Arts Council's Music Strategy for 2002-2007 (which is a pretty encouraging read as these things go), I've got through a load of emails, and there is a large pile of music on the piano waiting for me to learn it: a recital at the Perth Festival in less than a fortnight with Mhairi and Adrian. A BBP gig to boot: big black piano. Adrian's chosen to play the Brahms Sonatensatz, which means lots of fat loud chords for my tiny delicate fingers to negotiate - maybe this is why I ended up a harpsichord player: I'll have to go into weight training. The weather's taken a turn for the better, so I spent a lot of the weekend in the garden recovering from the stresses of last week. Ah yes, should I write about the stresses of last week? Oh sod it, why not? Re-reading last Tuesday's diary entry is kind of revealing, as Ursula Smith (outgoing principal cellist of the SCO) turned up the following day and said to me 'you know, when I went home and thought about yesterday's rehearsal, it was really outrageous, wasn't it?'. And she was right, what I'd described as 'well-chosen attention to detail' had actually been a slow but steady blocking of our confidence and ability to communicate and make music. I'm sure it was unintentional, and the performances turned out fine - well, the second one did, it was great. The conductor expressed his really rather sound view of the piece as a whole, to the orchestra and particularly to the choir, with some efficiency and an infectious enthusiasm. But when it came to working on musical detail, he was (again I think unintentionally) rude, patronising, and musically destructive. I don't want to dwell on this too much, but the experience was a shocking one - usually if I'm playing in a performance that I'm not happy with, I can live with that (as Jimmy Carl Black said in 200 Motels "I'll do anything: I'm a professional"), but this was something more genuinely disturbing. Was it simply an unfortunate clash of personalities ? Had I not prepared well enough for the rehearsals, and had my attention distracted by frantically reading the notes ? Was it early-music-conductor syndrome, where someone with good musical ideas lacks the technical grounding to express them clearly (I'm guilty of this myself to some extent), and has to rely on the team around him to figure it out for themselves ? All or none of the above ? Whatever - by Friday I had a sore neck, and after we'd stumbled through the Thursday performance, Ursula and I decided to improve Friday's by ignoring the conductor completely, except for start cues, and trusting our musicianship instead. This takes more effort than you might think. The performance went much better, but it was an uncomfortable position to be in. Even if you know the piece quite well, playing the organ for the John Passion is quite hard work: you're playing pretty much non-stop, and it's a lot of notes and an awful lot of figures which one part of your brain is constantly deciphering. Nonetheless for the last hour of the Friday performance, I only kept going by keeping one thought in my head: that when asked to take a bow at the end I would smile sweetly and refuse. Now how petty and childish is that ?! The one tiny pathetic act of rebellion I could publicly undertake while remaining a "professional"! Anyway, Robert McFall was most amused by this afterwards, and pointed out that to the audience I must have looked terribly humble. 'Perhaps I was bearing that in mind too', I admitted ... The situation was even more depressing because it was probably my last continuo outing with Ursula, as she's leaving the orchestra later this year, and we were determined to finish with a good one. Our first gig together was the week after Concerto Caledonia's first ever concert in the Edinburgh Festival of 1992 - it was a huge concert of Scottish 18th century music, including Oswald and Kelly, which had the SCO on one side of the Usher Hall stage, and a smaller chamber group on the other. We were in both, so in between pieces we would calmly leave the stage by one door, and then run at breakneck speed round the back of the hall to re-emerge calmly at the other side. One musical discovery which was pleasurable last week (apart from the wonderful singing of the soloists in the Passion: particular honour and respect to Messrs Padmore and Chance, and Ms Sampson) was picking up a copy of Zappa's Roxy and Elsewhere in the great second-hand record store next to the Queen's Hall. To relax on Saturday, and inspired by the example of Ensemble Ambrosius, I started gradually piecing together an arrangement for trio-sonata group of 'Echidna's Arf (of You)', which might just make it into our October concerts. Yes, I know this is a very strange way to relax, but today's highlight was undoubtedly synchronised dancing across the kitchen with my four year old daughter to 'Don't You Ever Wash That Thing?'. If you know the deranged complexity of the tune, you can start to imagine just how funny this was ... © 2002 David
McGuinness |
concerto caledonia
Everyone there agreed that my green melodica is
intrinsically very ugly
(it was also suggested it looks as though I'm on a life support machine when I'm
playing it) so by the end of the day it had been decorated with a few stickers to give it some character. I took it out of my
luggage today to carry it onto the flight, in a tragic attempt to make me look more like a real member of the orchestra, and courtesy of Greg it now also has its own Connecticut name tag, inscribed 'Eric'. I'd suggested 'Nick' but that could be
misinterpreted as an imperative.