“Do you know who you’re talking to? May I remind you that I happen to be an adult?”I’ve accepted the electric toothbrush, and I’m demonstrating my inferior brushing method, and letting her tell me how I can improve it I don’t hear a word of it. I am too busy hating her, and counting the seconds before I can leave this antiseptic room for ever.It’s only when I get back in my car that I notice how much better my teeth feel. A single sheet of A4 paper brought about the first Dance Umbrella festival 20 years ago. Val Bourne, who started the whole thing and still runs it, has the documents to this day.
She remembers that Noel Goodwin of the Arts Council’s dance panel came back from a visit to New York and mentioned an organisation there that provided the shelter of a joint season for companies which could not otherwise afford a showing Why don’t we try the same? people asked. Bourne, a former dancer working in the Council’s dance department, was told to draw up a scheme. She did so, succinctly on that sheet of paper, then left the Arts Council to become dance officer for Greater London Arts. To her surprise there came a phone call from her former boss, Jane Nicholas: “Well, the money’s approved; you’d better do something about it.” Luckily her new employers agreed that the project could fall within her remit.
The money, in fact, wasn’t much – not enough, for instance, for any advertising except a single scrappy leaflet. It looked so heroic that the whole audience went potty and we had to encore the fight. They thought we’d rigged it.Although I had taken part in a few plays before that at school, and had a season at the National Youth Theatre that year, the tour and that incident often come back to me.It confirmed in my mind that I felt at home on the stage – I just enjoyed being up there – and it taught me that you should never panic If things go wrong, let the audience know. I have a great antagonism towards the man who walks on and says: “Due to unforeseen circumstances, the show will have to be cancelled.” What unforeseen circumstances? Just let the audience see what you are working with; I’m a great believer in that.
Schiff’s tone is strong, husky and unremittingly intense, though he can whittle it down to a soft tenor, as he did for the heart-rending reprise of the big tune where cello and flute share the music between them Elsewhere, he’d thrust his bow like a butcher carving steak. Even mishaps can be metamorphosed into magical events.Barrie Rutter will be appearing in `The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus’, West Yorkshire Playhouse, from 15 Oct. Then it came to the fight between Macduff and me and two things happened simultaneously – his sword broke and I slipped and went reeling back against the scenery.The next thing I heard was a whisper in my ear saying: “Die and I’ll drag you off stage,” and so he stabbed me with his knife.I did a big, dramatic death, very non-Macbeth-like, and with one finger hooked in this chain-mail we’d knitted out of twine, he dragged me off- stage. Obviously, there was no one going to play Macbeth but me.
It was an amazing tour, incredibly homespun. The school – Greatfield in Hull – set about raising funds and we made everything ourselves Even the swords were forged in the metal workshop.
His Sunday morning solo recital at the Wallace Collection on 8 November is something to look forward to.After the interval, an even younger soloist, the 15-year-old Alexander Sitkovetsky, made a fine job of Mozart’s D major Violin Concerto, and projected with great confidence, but the rest of this all-Mozart concert was a rather dispiriting affair, for though the band boasted a good deal of youthful talent and an unusual number of pretty girls, the direction was sadly uninspiring.. A warning went out for us all to keep our centre of gravity – have a low arse and wet knees, as they say. Half the town seemed to get involved – it was a real entrepreneurial effort.We got to our last stop, a school in Unna, near Dortmund, West Germany. For some reason, just before we went on, the guy playing Macduff said: “What if our swords should happen to break?” I said: “Come on, it’s our last show, why would they break now?”Well, the stage turned out to be brand new and slippery as hell. I had got into acting because I had the biggest gob in the school – the drama teacher, Mr Siddle, suggested that I put it to good use.
WE PUT on Macbeth when I was in the upper sixth in December 1964 and then we went on tour with it to France and Germany around the Easter time of the following year. This suited Radu Lupu to a tee.No one could deny that Lupu made a lovely, warm sound, and while he kept the volume down noticeably on his first entry, his tone still seemed full and carried well. Beautiful tone quality and the kind of phrasing that has no abrupt corners suited a work which is above all fluent and mellow, but Lupu’s tendency to minimise dynamic contrasts and to slide precipitately into phrase endings, as if their features had been worn smooth by time, came to have a soporific effect.He was markedly conservative in adding embellishments and fleshing out those passages that Mozart left a bit bare, expecting pianists to supply what was needed, but that is probably erring on the right side, and some of the details that Lupu did supply seemed like sweetly tentative suggestions – a long way short of his aptly powerful projection in Mozart’s own cadenzas.Mozart’s C minor Piano Concerto, K491, is a more dramatic and moody piece than K595, but under the limp conducting of David Josefowitz it was not surprising that the London Soloists Chamber Orchestra sold it short at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Thursday.In the circumstances, the young pianist Ashley Wass played impeccably – not only stylishly, but also with subtle, expressive shading and lovely liquid tone quality.Josefowitz set a tempo for the final variations that was almost unmanageably fast, but Wass survived its hazards, adjusting the speed in the final section a bit too much, as if in reproof. Of Bruckner’s mature symphonies, the Sixth is probably the least familiar – less emotive than its neighbours, and with a finale that is robustly cheerful. It was here that Davis’s shaping hand was most evident, in subtle adjustments of speed and easing the beginnings and endings of sections. But if he was sure of how he wanted the finale to go, and always made it sound natural, the first movement by comparison seemed less clear and even incompletely realised, partly because Bruckner’s counterpoint was less transparent, less clearly balanced than it might have been, and partly because Davis took a passive view of the music’s craggy, rhythmic character.
The opening of the Concerto was much more up his street, and he clearly enjoyed tracing a seamless, singing line with an air of smiling beneficence. And we were served every repeat intact, bar the big one in the finale.