I played Big Brownie in the Bournemouth scouts’ Gang Show at the Pavilion Theatre when I was 12 years old. That was the first time I had a dressing room. I must have spent a vast amount of time in dressing rooms from Greenland to New South Wales since then, countless hours and not so much as a moment’s anxiety about performing. But I’ve never dressed so carefully as I did on Thursday. I was terrified. I am quite at ease in my own comfort zone — playing loud and fast and hard — but orchestras are different. They are like stately homes, relics from a nobler age that nobody really knows what to do with. I suppose that’s why I get to have a go.
Actually, the dressing rooms at the Albert Hall, where last week I attentively polished my shoes and tucked my shirt in twice and once again to make sure, were not dissimilar to the ones at the Bournemouth Pavilion: Victorian, solid, subterranean, small, hot and as full of pipes as an engine. I suppose all dressing rooms are quite similar — even the ones in Portakabins and tents in muddy fields at Glastonbury aren’t much different from those underneath Kensington Gore. They are never much to look at, even when full of flowers and champagne. But the sense of allure and expectation backstage on a show day is enough to make the rest of the world seem dull by comparison, and the most rational of people clamour and fight to get inside.
Even when it was empty, the glamour, the suggestion of an expectant audience was all over the Albert Hall by about mid-afternoon last Thursday, prior to a night of orchestral extravaganza with huge choir, Coldstream Guards, fireworks, cannons, guest stars and visiting conductors galore.
The orchestra was mine for ten minutes in the first half, for a chunk of the ballet Spartacus. It’s an exquisitely layered, subtle piece of music. It was good to have a reason to look at it really closely: that’s the best thing about conducting, becoming intimate with a particular bit of music and all its nuances. I think studying anything, anything at all, thoroughly is useful — even a lump of cheese, a dandelion or a puddle considered carefully for two weeks would yield all kinds of positive benefits, I’m sure. I’d been rehearsing all week with a pianist, working up my moves and thrashing her to bits with gestures at the Royal College of Music, just behind the Albert Hall, and I was just beginning to feel I had an understanding of the piece but could happily have spent another month wallowing in its layers.
It’s funny, but I think the Royal College of Music is the only building in London where nobody recognises me. I wonder where these brilliant students come from: far beyond the deep-fried fast-food world of pop culture, that’s for sure. Some of them even had surprisingly good hair. It’s a Hogwarts of a birdcage of a building, full of jingling Steinways, wobbling harps and reverberating tubas. It was so invigorating to walk through those doors, more than those of the Albert Hall, somehow. Oh, how I wish I’d gone there to study. How I’d like to be there today, asking questions.
Well, the pianist and I had our last rehearsal, me standing on a chair wafting my big air guitar and then I wandered over the road to the Albert Hall. Things were warming up already, the orchestra with Bruch’s violin concerto, and The Priests had arrived. It’s impossible to encounter these multimillion-selling miracle men without feeling blessed somehow. They are so patient and kind — well, they are priests — but they’ve sold more records than Madonna this year. Very cool: nicest band I’ve ever met.
I shared a dressing room with Karl Jenkins, the other guest conductor, a lion of a Welshman who was so calm and stately it rubbed off on me a bit. I was supposed to get 15 minutes’ rehearsal with the band, but things overran and in the end I was lucky to have got ten. The piece is eight minutes’ long, so there really wasn’t much time to correct mistakes. The leader had been to the dressing room to say hello and check I was OK with everything. He too was a man possessed of almost supernatural charisma and calm. Of course, the orchestra can play without a conductor — they can follow the leader if necessary — but, still, it was my Albert Hall debut and I wanted it to be fantastic. Well, I don’t think they’ve ever played it that fast, but it was all fine — of course, it always is.
Comments