Up for it
Alex James
Brad is cool. He was clearly demonstrating his ability to retain grace under pressure and I suppose that’s what conductors get paid for. The traffic on the A40 was at a standstill at Gypsy Corner and he was due to conduct Verdi’s Il trovatore in Holland Park very shortly. I was much more scared about being late than he was. I gingerly invoked the unthinkable. ‘What’s going to happen if we’re, you know, er, not there in time?’ ‘The conductor is the one person they have to wait for,’ he said, and lit a Marlboro. ‘Have you learnt the words?’ I’m learning how to conduct as part of an experiment for television and Brad thought it would be good for me to help him out at Holland Park. The nuns sing a number offstage where they can’t see the orchestra or the conductor, so it would be a good technical exercise, he said, to surround me with singing nuns in front of a full house on the last night and see how I coped bringing them in and out of the music on time. I knew the tune now, but the words were still really hard to swallow. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to learn Italian than memorise these endless lists of gobbledygook?’ I asked him. ‘I conducted an opera in Mandarin last year,’ he said. ‘You soon get the hang of it.’ The traffic started to move and we started to sing again, like nuns.
We arrived bang on time. He knew we would. It was the third time I’d been to the production and each time it was getting more intriguing. I was getting to know some of the orchestra, the cast, the stage hands, but particularly the music. I’ve never really given much thought to any of the entire canon of classical music until now. Previously I was unaware of anything that was written before the drumkit was invented, but I’ve suddenly reached the point where I absolutely love it, all of it. It’s like oysters. You try one and you think it doesn’t taste of anything, but if you spend much time surrounded by people who love oysters, it’s not long before you try another one and once you’ve had half a dozen you find you can’t think about anything else. I’ve just never had a reason to shuck the great composers before.
Any backstage has glamour — even at the nursery-school nativity it was quite exciting lyn_spec_210608_3 6/23/08 201 behind the scenes — but opera is a huge intellectual wedding cake. Out the back, a group of first world war soldiers were playing cricket with a lump of wood and a frisbee, nuns stood around laughing and smoking while gypsies chatted on mobiles. Everyone was willing and up for it. They knew I was making a debut of sorts and they were up for it. Did I mention they were up for it? They were really up for it. ‘We don’t say good luck, it’s unlucky. We say toi, toi. So, “Toi Toi”. And Good Luck,’ said a nurse. About 20 people had said good luck by accident by the time we were all assembled in position.
I’d been standing by for a while, watching the entrances and exits. There was a
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kerfuffle just before the soprano went on for her big number. I sped off to the toilet to grab her a tissue. ‘Oh, my darling, you have saved. My life. Toi, toi, toi.’ The music seemed louder than usual. They were having a really great night. They were up for it. The soprano nailed her top D flat like a steamhammer and brought the house down.
Then I was quite terrified. A sea of fit nuns’ faces, some holding bibles, some holding candles, all with a twinkle in their eye. I could see Brad on the monitor and the tenor was finishing his number, the one that calls for nuns. ‘Adir ... Andiam ... Adir,’ sang the good guy, and Brad gave me his conductor’s gimlet stare over the camera. Time flew out the window and I was completely in the music. I’d been singing the song quite a lot to learn it, but that’s quite different from hearing 20 warmed-up, up-for-it altos, mezzos and sopranos doing it in three-part harmony. It killed me and I was too shaky to make myself a coffee afterwards.
Then it was the interval. ‘You got the shuffle! You got the shuffle from the orchestra! Did you hear it?’ said Joley, the hot-stuff cellist. Orchestras can’t clap, as they’re all holding something in one or both their hands, so they rub their feet on the floor when they’re particularly pleased about something.
But then it was over. The tenor disappeared on his bicycle, the leading ladies in their helicopters, the chorus on the Tube, and there was silence in Holland Park, but it was the silence of up-for-it nuns, and that’s a special kind of peace and quiet.
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