Hope you enjoyed that all-star Munich outdoor opera concert t'other day. I've been having a chuckle over Amanda Holloway's piece over at Sinfinimusic.com about the highs and lows of summer spectaculars, from "extreme page-turning" to dive-bombing herons, so delved into my archive to find something I wrote for the Independent a few years ago on a similar topic. As the clouds are gathering today, it seems worth rerunning.
At the Waldbuhne, of course, they seem to have a way of getting it right, sparklers and all...but closer to home, it's low-flying Smarties and birdshit in the harp...
......What could be nicer than a classical summer spectacular? To
the audience, it’s the perfect night out: take some friends, a picnic and a
bottle of wine and enjoy some beautiful music in the leafy open air. Maybe the
evening will finish with a thrilling firework display. But be warned: the duck
noises you hear during the slow movement of the symphony may not actually
emerge from a duck. It could just as easily be a disgruntled musician lurking
behind the scenes with a quack machine, bent on sabotage.
At their best, outdoor summer concerts are fun for
everybody, including the musicians in the orchestra. At their worst, though,
the conditions in which the players have to operate, combined with awkward
journeys, long, difficult programmes often catastrophically under-rehearsed,
all for payment that’s little better than an insult, can mean that
disgruntlement is the best they can hope for. A “rank-and-file” musician is
usually paid a flat fee of £80 for such a day, including the performance, one
three-hour rehearsal and the time it takes to travel to often out-of-the-way
venues. These concerts are known in the profession as “muddy field gigs”. But
the freelance musicians I spoke to were so anxious about complaining of the way
they’re treated that they asked me to change their names, citing the risk that
“we might never work again”.
The biggest hazard – which will come as no surprise – is the
British “summer” weather. We’ve all shivered our way through such concerts
under umbrellas. Jane, a harpist, recounts, “You spend a lot of time leaping
around after the sheets of your music as it blows away! One time it rained so
hard that a lake formed in front of the stage and outside buses were turning
over in the mud.” Michael, a violinist, recounts stories of driving rain across
the platform during Rossini’s William Tell Overture (“Never had the storm music
seemed so appropriate!”) and doing gigs “wearing long-johns and jeans under my
concert suit”.
Jane faces all kinds of extra problems in transporting her
instrument: harps are large, expensive and heavy. “I always try to drive the
harp up to the stage’s back entrance and once I drove over the central power
cable and all the electricity went off! I often have to be towed back to the
road afterwards because otherwise I get stuck in the mud with the car wheels
going round and round. And if you’re on a beach you have to watch out for the
tides.” Worse, “a few weeks ago a bird shat on my harp. Right into the
mechanism. It’s almost impossible to clean it out.”
Indignities don’t only come from birds. One violinist
recalled a “Last Night of the Proms” programme during which his valuable
Italian instrument was damaged by some flying Smarties from the audience.
Another musician had just experienced an outdoor concert in the north of
England at which an excessively jingoistic presenter, clad in Union Jack outfit
and hat, had found it amusing “not only to make quips slagging off ‘frogs’ but
also to pick out members of the orchestra to humiliate. He was saying to the
audience things like, ‘This is Mary, she got her roots done just in time for
this evening’ or ‘This is Lizzie, she’s pregnant – ooh, we know what you’ve been doing!’ Nobody ever asks if
a presenter peddling racist attitudes and personal insults is OK with us and
there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.”
So much for the compères – what about the star turns? A
big-name singer earns thousands or upwards for a big outdoor gig, while the
orchestra plays for peanuts. That’s fine, says Jane – as long as those soloists
really can sing. “I did a concert with one famous singer who actually couldn’t.
He’d had to have some of the music transposed down because he couldn’t reach
the high notes. We started off laughing, but by the end he was so bad, and
being paid so much, that it stopped being funny. He was kind to us in the band,
but at one point in the rehearsal he declared, ‘Sorry, I’ve got some technical
problems,’ and the first horn called out, ‘We all know that, mate!’”
All the players were keen to stress that “muddy field gigs” can be useful and, on a good day, enjoyable. They’re an excellent way for young musicians to jump in the deep end, learn the repertoire and perform it on minimal rehearsal (“after which anything seems easy,” comments one musician). “You never know which the good gigs are going to be,” Michael remarks. “The ones that sound the most glamorous are frequently the worst, while ones that you might think will be dubious can be wonderful experiences. One of my best was a free local authority gig near Huntingdon with a little chamber orchestra. It was cold, but we had the most fabulous show. That was because the conductor, John Wilson, was terrific. He insisted on us using loads of vibrato to get a big, fat, Hollywood tone – it sounded fantastic, it was great music-making and the audience loved it.”
Sometimes, though, it’s just too much to take. “Once we were
in a big park at the end of the season when the weather was chilly,” Michael
recounts, “and it was a bad date all the way through. There was a generator the
size of a lorry churning out diesel fumes right next to the stage. We had a
huge programme, almost three hours of music, including ‘The Ride of the
Valkyries’ which sounded ludicrous on a tiny orchestra with virtually no rehearsal.
I was sitting on the inside third desk [row] of the first violins and the
lighting strip stopped just in front of us so my desk partner and I couldn’t
read our music and we got colder and colder – lighting helps to keep you warm. As the evening went on, my desk partner
became more and more furious. And at the end, in the 1812 Overture, the
fireworks were right next to us and when one huge one went off beside us, he
just lost it. In front of 6,000 people. He stood up in the middle of the piece,
got his fiddle case out from under his chair, wiped down his violin and bow
meticulously with a cloth, put them away, jumped off the stage and went home!
Afterwards he thought he’d be sacked. But he’d had such a terrible evening and
been so angry about it that the management didn’t dare go near him.”
But these highly trained, accomplished and dedicated
musicians agree that the worst indignity of all is that audiences will come to
a concert like this and assume that “that’s what classical music is”. “Some outdoor
concerts are good,” says Jane. “But usually you turn up, you freeze, you have
only a top-and-tail rehearsal, there’ll be a bad soloist who’s married to the
director, and it’s amplified so you don’t know what it really sounds like.
These concerts are part of our job, they’re good experience, people enjoy them
and we shouldn’t be too precious about them. It’s a fun evening. But surely not
at the price of people thinking that that’s all there is to classical music?”
