On the road
Peter Phillips
For some reason October this year is yielding the kind of running about the place more normally associated with the summer festivals. From Naples to St Asaph, from Paris to Evora to St Omer and back to Evora in as many days with the added excitement of a broken-down Eurostar and various throatand anklerelated incapacitations, no one in my troupe is talking about ‘the glamour’ of the touring life just now.
Yet despite, or perhaps because of, the stress of constant travelling, I am still capable of out-of-mind, serendipitous moments of delight when under pressure from schedules. Walking towards our hotel in Prestatyn, near St Asaph in Wales — which I had initially assumed was one of the drugs I was taking for my cholesterol — I suddenly realised that I was completely alone in brilliant sunshine on a beach-side road, speckled with sand, the only building in sight the eventual hotel half a mile in the distance. My colleagues had vanished and I was dressed in London clothes dragging a pile of music and CDs along behind me in a suitcase. I hadn’t any idea where I was and the only clue in sight was a sign in a language more foreign to me than any other on the European circuit. I thought I must have wandered on to the set of one of those ex-Yugoslavian movies about lost innocence.
Language can be a useful locator. On the flight between Brussels and Lisbon, which was part of the transfer from St Omer to Evora, I was jammed into a party of Flemish burghers, whose most prominent physical feature seemed to be their knees, on a jolly to the prehistoric sites of the Alentejo. They were deeply proud people, disapproving of anyone who was not capable of replicating their blunt-instrument intonations.
There is much talk in Belgium at the moment of how they and their kind are finally about to break the country in half, with the French half voting to rejoin France. That would really be something; but for the moment these people of the future object to any official word which is not in Flemish. Imagine their discontent, then, when it became clear that Brussels Airlines, a Belgian-run company, has decided to do away with the whole wretched Belgian language problem and speak only in English. The safety briefing was in English, the pilot came over in a strongly nuanced English and the food was advertised in English. For my companions, noisy with incomprehension and complaint, English is the new French.
Travelling from Evora, a Portuguese town near the Spanish border where the temperature has been 27°c, to Lille and thence to St Omer near Calais, where the temperature was 5°c and the rain unceasing, made me wonder why it was just that unbelievably depressing low-country landscape which was so fought over, and not somewhere worth possessing. Then I remembered how many of my composers were born in the mud of that featureless paysage. In St Omer alone they count Jean Mouton, Antoine de Févin and Pierre de Manchicourt: not bad for a small provincial town. The next morning I found I had to change trains (at 0710) in Mons, where Orlandus Lassus was born. I just had time to leave the station and pay my respects, before resuming the journey to Brussels airport and reflecting on the extreme oddity of Belgium as a country and culture, the fact that it may soon vanish altogether, unloved, as if it had never been, not the least of it.
Of course one gets tired, but I wager that we would all be a lot less tired if the local taxi and bus companies took us at our word about when we need to arrive at our destinations. They always know better and have a raft of reasons why it is necessary to leave much earlier: it is Monday, there are roadworks, it is likely to rain. For us this simply means hours less in bed and hours more among the living dead. The real reason is that universally these drivers care more about when they finish their day than when they start it. Leaving Evora for Lisbon airport I worked out that 0630 would be early enough to make the check-in, yet something in the air told me I wasn’t being listened to. As a precaution I unplugged the phone and put extra sound-proofing around the door. The driver arrived at 0500.
The search for concert venues and audiences will continue through the next weeks. Next up is Palestrina, a hillside town near Rome. There is a better-than-usual chance I shall have the right composer’s music in my bag for that one. ❑
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