1960s PRIVATE LIFE
0179 The Royal Court
While we were at Slaidburn Street we joined the English Stage Society. This supported the English Stage Company -- in other words George Devine’s Company at the Royal Court Theatre. This was in Sloane Square, at the other end of Kings Road. We, accordingly, became avid theatregoers, mainly at the Royal Court. Under George Devine, this was then the leading avant-garde theatre. Thus we saw wide range of works by Arnold Wesker, including the Kitchen, and of other contemporary writers -- especially John Osborne and Brecht. As members of the society we were also able to go to Sunday 'platform' performances of banned plays. This was still in the days when the Lord Chamberlain maintained an iron grip on what you could see. In this context I particularly remember a production of Wedekind's 'Spring Awakening', which was a fine play.
We used to go regularly to the Royal Court, and put up with the sound of the trains rumbling underneath and the gents loos flushing at the back of the stalls! Regrettably the Royal Court decided it had to modernise and the price for this, when as usual the cost escalated, was that it had to switch to a more popular repertoire. George Devine resigned at that point, and soon after committed suicide. We resigned in sympathy – though the fact that Sarah had just arrived was also a contributing factor. We had worked out we couldn't any longer find the time, or the money, to go to the theatre so much.
This was a time also when we used to go regularly to the Festival Hall to hear the various orchestras. We had our favourites, the LSO London Symphony Orchestra being the best of them -- having Barry Tuckwell on horn and Leone Goossens on oboe. We saw a range of conductors, including Klemperer who then conducted the Philharmonia. He was in his later years and perched himself on a high school -- always looking as if he might fall off it any minute. He specialised in Brahms and we saw a number of the Brahms symphonies, though I wasn't all that enamoured of them. Later on, when I heard them done less sombrely, I did come to like them! He was a stickler for detail. I remember one performance when, after the interval, he struck up the orchestra and was five or ten minutes into the piece when he suddenly stopped and looked, scowling, across at a point in the orchestra. At this stage a musician -- making himself as small as he could -- crept around to where the Klemperer was looking. Obviously he had missed getting on stage after the interval. Klemperer, still glaring at the musician, took us right back to the start of the piece and then through it in its entirety!
We saw a number of singers as well. We attended a concert by Maria Callas, which cost a fortune; something like £50 per ticket (several hundred pounds per ticket these days), though she was on her last legs and was more of a mezzo soprano. Even so she sang like an angel, and had a genuine presence -- one of real star quality. But our favourite soprano was Victoria de Los Angeles, who had the most beautiful voice we have ever heard. She used to sing a range of songs, in particular the 'Songs of Auvergne' by Cantaloupe which I still love. We also heard Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, the other great soprano of the time (but German and famed for her lieder). She was crisply superb but I preferred the warmer tones of Victoria. Surprisingly, though, we didn't go to the opera - except for one cycle of Wagner's Ring, with Birgit Nielsen who was superb and Hans Hotter who wasn't . Pat didn't like opera until she sang in the chorus of Opera Milton Keynes many years later!
For orchestral music I preferred the Festival Hall to the Albert Hall, since in those days - before they had the clouds in the roof - the Albert Hall was a disaster. In one of our few visits I thought heard the organ start-up, but couldn't see anyone in the organ loft and found, to my horror, that it was actually the pianist with the sound so distorted that it was like an organ. So we always went to the Festival Hall, which was very dry (as I like it), and never went to the Albert Hall. Other people prefer more resonance in their halls, but I like a musicalogical approach and dryness suits me down the ground.
We attended one performance which turned out to be the first performance of Pierre Boulez, with the London Symphony Orchestra. It changed our lives. It was rated, in The Times the following day, as the concert of the decade -- and I think it probably was. Pierre Boulez is an absolutely brilliant conductor even when he's conducting music which is not in the modern idiom. No one can beat him for conducting Webern, or even his own music, but we also heard him deliberately take Mozart at half the pace so that it sounded just like Beethoven: which was exactly the sound that he wanted to demonstrate. The problem was that he was so good that he put us off all the other conductors. When he went back to Paris we gave up on our music – though, again, the advent of Sarah had a lot to do with the decision.
The third leg of our culture was the National Film Theatre, where we used to go regularly to see the whole range of classical films. In particular in those days -- and even now -- we loved Eisenstein's films; and even sat through a six-hour session at the NFT where they showed every single one of the rushes Eisenstein made in Mexico for his uncompleted film Que Viva Mexico. You were supposed to appreciate how the film had developed, take by take, but I am not certain that it was as entertaining as his other firms!
We also used to go to the London Film Festival, and the best value at this was the overnight session. We used to start at eleven o'clock at night and watch three complete programmes through the night, before we staggered home at 7 o'clock in the morning. In the middle we were served soup on the embankment, in the moonlight. It was a very good experience, but so tiring. The film I remember, was one that no-one else has ever heard about. It was called Hallelujah the Hills, directed by Adolph Mekas, and it was a described as follow-on to Hellzapoppin. It was very, very strange but so creative!
All that went the way of such things with the arrival of Sarah!
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