If love be the food of music . . .
Fiona Maddocks
THE ORCHESTRA by Danny Danziger HarperCollins, £16.99, pp. 213 It puts you in mind of coarse fishing, for the effect of reading this dispiriting volume is like staring into a bucket of writhing maggots. And it's a miserable sight. A series of flimsy, Sunday-supplement-style interviews in the first person, strung together between hard covers, it purports to be a portrait of a great orchestra, the London Philharmonic, seen through the eyes of its players. Instead, it's a thinly disguised exposé of what happens when 100 or so people are jammed together in close proximity, often bored, underpaid and terminally unappreciated.
You scarcely need a book any more than you need a psychotherapist to guess the answer. They have affairs, sneak on their colleagues, take up strange hobbies such as inventing devices to trap cooking fat or memorising train timetables, and blame their mothers. But then it scarcely is a book. Thirty-eight out of 213 pages are blank — designer padding run riot — and several are less than half a page long, which at least makes it easy to read at traffic lights. Even the cover, a Dufy lookalike, is a visual dupe. At £16.99 you'd be better off buying the CD (of the music of the orches- tra of the book) or, freakish though it sounds, going to one of their excellent concerts.
Of the 55 players interviewed, all but a handful are dissatisfied with their jobs. Several wish they could give up, but are thwarted by mortgages and family or ex- family responsibilities. They despise the orchestra's management (since changed) and most of the conductors who work with them. Solti is written off as 'poison'. Tennstedt, now a sick man, is alone in winning plaudits. Morale is low, and several take the opportunity to air festering views on their hapless colleagues. Little wonder that the London Philhatimonic, an orchestra currently jinxed beyond its due, reportedly tried to halt publication. Or that some of the players, those who haven't already left, have protested they thought they were talking off the record. Under- standable in the circumstances.
What desperate opportunism can have driven the orchestra into the arms of this catastrophe? Even an apprentice fortune- teller would have wagered her last crystal ball on it ending in tears. And what can
Surfers Asleep
Somewhere, far from our shore, the breaker We shall ride is beginning to gather.
Turbulence of wind, maybe, is the maker Of good waves; the moon, else, or some other God. Something swells, where humans cannot see. Perhaps a floating pelican will lift, And fall, and lift again unfretfully, As a wavelet alters its restful drift.
We shift in our sleep, dreaming how the foam Collects, to flick onto some albatross Running on water, how a sudsy spume Is flown through by a flying fish across Our wave-crest, into a deepening trough. We'll come at dawn, watch our roller strengthen Far out still, but forming the arching stuff Of one, ribbed, glorious wave to lengthen Along our two-mile beach. We'll paddle out Aboard our puny Malibus, nervously laugh, Precariously stand, too briefly ride, shout, Collapse into one huge, deafening surf.
Ted Walker
these players have been thinking, talking so freely to a journalist known for his ability (in a long-running column in the Indepen- dent) to draw intimate revelations from his willing subjects? Surely they were not so gullible as to imagine that their views on rampant key changes in Mahler's Tenth would be of more interest than their equal- ly rampant back-desk and post-concert romps. Those who come off best are the ones who say least.
On musical issues, the players are seen in no better a light. The viola player who describes a Shostakovich symphony as 'very Shostakovichy' could have been helped towards a more enlightening explication, as could another who tells us that when you get to the end of Mahler's Eighth Sympho- ny, 'there is nothing else. That is it. The end' — worth bearing in mind if you're wondering whether to clap when next you hear that work. And even if the principal cellist really wanted to be quoted calling Bruckner's music 'Great big Gothic turds', does the reader need to be insulted with this banal apex-en?
The worst aspect of this book is its laziness. Errors of fact are countless, attributable to guess work in the process of transcription. How else could Sawallish turn into Cervalish? What is the Harmonic Orchestra? Even the name of the former managing director, John Willan, is mis- spelt. But never mind. You can read all about an affair between the leader and a rank-and-file violinist, which player went to a party with a bra on his head and whose photograph, of her naked in the jacuzzi, was passed round the orchestra and signed as a birthday jape. That is, if you haven't already read about it in the press, which has suddenly fixed on orchestral life as a goldmine of titillation.
Beneath all this was the makings of a good book. Had it been fully researched, with background history to the London Philharmonic (despatched in a 200-word preface) and had conveyed what it is really like to play in an orchestra — why second violins are so important, the pressures of playing a solo instrument, the nerves which drive so many players to take beta-blockers — all else would have been justified. The sagas of wrecked private lives and job dis- satisfaction would have earned their place.
There is also, buried here, the heart-warming story of the tradition of peripatetic music teaching in this country, now threatened with extinction. British orchestras are alone in depending on just such people, from ordinary backgrounds, who grew up with few privileges and stumbled upon a dedicated local music teacher. These should be success stories of fine musicians. But here, having laid themselves bare, they are presented as the flotsam and jetsam of the musical world, failed soloists destined to be washed up for ever in the rank-and-file of life. It's a pathetic tale. A much better and truer one could be written. But would it sell?
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