These have been trying times for itinerant musicians. Anybody who had already built up a dislike for the way airport staff are entitled to treat their customers would have found the recent situation testing to the point of phobia. To be fair, my fellow-citizens showed remarkable good humour in those endless and often directionless queues at Heathrow (our plane to Chicago took off six hours after I first presented myself at the terminal the other day); the staff were less accommodating, buffeted by conflicting and sometimes unjustifiable instructions, obliged to be inflexible and inclined to be stony-faced.
The restrictions on hand-luggage didn’t inconvenience us as much as some, since singers’ instruments go into the cabin whether the authorities like it or not. For instrumentalists the restrictions were sometimes disastrous. I read with sympathy of the plight of a Russian orchestra which had to return home days late by train because the insurance on their instruments required the players to keep them in sight at all times. There were so many stories about the unsuitableness of priceless instruments meeting lumpish baggage-handlers that I started to collect them.
A not-quite typical one ran as follows: ‘This has been a huge problem for bagpipers around the world. Thousands of us are travelling to Glasgow this August for the World Pipe Band Championships. Pipers normally carry their pipes on-board for the instrument’s safety. Some of these bagpipes are antique and very valuable. African Blackwood is prone to cracking with varying levels of moisture and temperature, not to mention mishandling by airport workers.’ In fact the level of respect which anything put into the hold of an aircraft might receive was the idée fixe of preference with most of these correspondents, more than the possibility of the instrument freezing or cracking or being jostled once there.
Perhaps out of frustration at this assumption ‘Laura of Middlesex’ wrote on a website: ‘I am a security guard at Heathrow. If you don’t like it, don’t fly. This is happening for a reason and you’re quick to forget it. If we were not doing this and a bomb did get on a plane, you would be quick to complain that nothing was being done about it. Get real, there is more to life than music.’
Personally I didn’t find this very reassuring. The prospect of hassle at the airport, early starts made yet earlier, and then nothing to read for hours and hours tested my commitment to giving concerts like nothing before, and nowhere more than when going to give them in the United States. Journeying there involves far more trouble than to anywhere else, and for good reason. But in the end, on a recent short tour of the summer festivals in Ravinia, New York and Tanglewood, I’m relieved to report that the music eventually triumphed.
The Americans know how to do summer festivals. They assume the weather is going to be good and build concert halls which are both inside and outside. In Ravinia, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra plays on a stage which is enclosed and the auditorium roofed, but where there are no side walls. Fourteen thousand people can sit picnicking in the garden which surrounds that stage, the music conveyed to the further reaches by amplification, in addition to the 2,000 who may fill the actual seats. I was told that an audience of 16,000 was not uncommon (we sang in a more conventional hall). The Albert Hall cannot hold half that number.
Tanglewood is even better. The new Seiji Ozawa Hall is an astonishing building. Looking almost Japanese in its use of wood and carved balustrades, it is rigidly rectangular so that the end wall can be removed. This means that those who like lying under the stars while listening to music can do so and still be part of the audience. The opening doesn’t do a lot for the acoustics or the air-conditioning — and it lets in mosquitoes, which, once in, tend to head for the bright lights and sweaty bodies — but it is a most inspiring sight from the stage, the huge auditorium fading into the night where grass and lights and bodies become faintly discernible.
It is not often these days that we walk out before an audience and find our hearts missing a beat. I have experienced this in the Albert Hall, in the Sydney Opera House, in the nave of York Minster; but it is a rare feeling, often not particularly helpful, since there is a fine line between thrill and fear. To leave the dressing-room anticipating some gentle, even rather private music-making and then in a split-second to look out on thousands of faces in a fairyland setting is as daunting as it is beautiful. But at Tanglewood there is an excitement which very few symphony halls can claim: partly from the knowledge that one is following in the footsteps of some very great conductors of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, partly because the design is so mesmerising.
After a minute or two of catching my breath, it seemed as though every gesture I made had acquired extra fluency and meaning, and the singing flew along on gossamer wings. I’ll get up as early as you like, anytime, to experience that.
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