Since returning from Toronto I've had an extended 'holiday' mostly at home. It's an occupational hazard for every freelancer - one is always either fighting to successfully tessellate entries in the diary to make the most of every opportunity, or staring at vast expanses of white paper. I've just had 3 months of the latter, thanks to a couple of potential projects falling through, but as the next 12 months or more look like they are pretty full-on I haven't minded too much.
So now I'm winding back up to working speed and my first few months will be in London. As a kid I
could not wait to move to London. LONDON - it was all I wanted. My plan was to be a double-bass player in an orchestra, have a nice big apartment somewhere in Central London (yeah right!) and live happily ever after. I didn't know e exactly what this life would be like, but when as a 15 year old I sat in the Royal Festival Hall listening to the LSO and John Lill play the first Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto I sensed a flavour.....an atmosphere.....an intangible something that summed up how I believed life in London as a musician would be.
Well things don't quite work out that way do they. I was hopelessly naive and woefully unprepared for music college. Though fiercely independent in many ways at 18, I was poorly prepared for and poorly in control of my education as a musician. I had always been an instinctive musician which led my teachers to think my knowledge was much greater than it was. So the reality was a struggle and I waited in vain for someone to offer me the strong mentoring that I needed. Too late I realised that mentors are rare and special people.
My first part-time job as a student was as a ticket-tearer for the Barbican Concert Hall - great for a musician as I got to see concerts by word-class artists 4 or 5 times a week. A great opportunity and also a great eye opener. There was the occasional mind-blowing concert - and there were acres of work-a-day concerts. I remember watching the RPO play all the Beethoven symphonies but finding the performances lacklustre, as if the performers were a little bored by having to play these pieces again. My impression may have been unfair, or they may have well been bored with Beethoven.
That's not how I imagined it. That's not how I thought it would feel.
I quickly realised that the life of the professional double-bass player was not for me. I've recently rediscovered my love for that instrument and started playing again for my own amusement and it is truly wonderful to feel the vibrations of the bass going through one's body. It's sonority suits me, and so does the slightly melancholy aura that surrounds it, but though I certainly wish I could play better, I've never regretted leaving the instrument behind.
My next part-time job opened up a whole new world to me - a ticket-tearer again, but this time at English National Opera. This was the late 80's and the Coliseum was under the directorship of Peter Jonas, David Pountney, and Mark Elder and it was an exciting place to be. Each night we had a full house, full to the extent that many nights there would be four rows of people standing at the back of the Dress Circle to watch. The place was vibrant, challenging, and fun.
The other stewards comprised largely of other music students and musicians at the beginning of their careers hand-picked (and he turned me down first time I interviewed!) by the House Manager Peter Helps who demanded a tight and professional attitude to the work from us, but also expected that we did not want to spend our lives being ticket-tearers. So it was a crowd of young people all of whom got a huge amount from their time at the Coli and from exposure to some of the best opera performances of the time. My colleagues from that time I now know as professional singers, designers, composers, repetiteurs, musicians and one Radio 3 presenter. Pretty good going.
The whole atmosphere of the company was positive and the opportunity to watch a stable of performers work their way through performance after performance of production after production gave me the education which I had missed at music college. And mostly it taught me the extraordinary power of the human voice when coupled with challenging theatre. That was the word I knew I had to be part of from then on and I rediscovered that special atmosphere that the orchestral world had not quite delivered for me.
Life has led me all over and roundabout since then and the reality of a career in opera means that I am in danger of becoming jaded and cynical ("becoming!?" I hear you cry).
My first job this year will be to work with David Pountney - the Director of all those early productions which influenced me so - at the Royal Academy of Music on a new opera for students by Peter Maxwell-Davies. The job brings everything about those early years in London back to me in one package and with it the responsibility to try and not disappoint the expectations of another generation of students.
My second job this year will be back at the Coliseum working with Christopher Alden on a new production of Britten's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'. It will be the first time I have worked for English National Opera since I tore my last Dress Circle ticket in 1990, and I am looking forward to being back there. The company has changed enormously in the intervening years and is once again riding high, and the theatre itself (my favourite West End auditorium) has had a major face-lift but I'm hoping it will be like rediscovering a long-lost old friend.
As for London itself - I left the city over four years ago now and discovered a whole new and wonderful quality of life in Yorkshire. Since then I have visited the city very little (though at one time I thought I would never leave it) and hated it every time: the noise, the bustle, the lack of time for necessary human interaction, the expense!
However, having struggled to get my head around the fact that of the next 18 months I shall be spending 7 in the city, I have now decided to treat it like any other job - a great opportunity to discover and live in a wonderful new environment. I'm going to try to forget the London I knew, and see what I can discover about this foreign city. A challenge - but let's see if I can find again a whiff of that intangible something which grabbed me as a 15 year old.
