From the Leader's Chair by Sillito Kenneth;

Author:Sillito, Kenneth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
Published: 2019-11-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

Moving On

1973 was an important year for my family as my son Mark was born in the March. Everything seemed fine for a while, but then we noticed he didn’t seem to be crawling very well and was finding standing up unusually difficult. Sadly, it turned out he had water on the brain. Today, he is still physically compromised and uses a wheelchair, but he drives with a specially adapted car and mentally he’s absolutely fine. He’s been helped by an organisation that promotes employment for the disabled in the workplace and is currently volunteering in a library helping the public with IT problems.

Given my commitments with the ECO, the Gabrieli Quartet and session work, there really wasn’t much time for outside interests. Some days I might have three recording sessions and then go back home and head for the attic room at Golders Green and practise for whatever I had the following day. I was a keen TV football viewer, but I just never seemed to have enough spare time to make it to an actual match.

I was also never much of a tourist abroad. Some of my colleagues would grab a guide book and make the most of their spare time, visiting all the sights, galleries and museums. However, I tended to concentrate my mind on one thing in particular, if only because I found that from a purely professional point of view, trying to do a lot just took too much out of me and affected my focus when there was a concert to play that evening. Quite often we’d land in the morning and have a rehearsal, after which all I invariably felt like doing was grabbing some much-needed rest.

Occasionally, I would make a special pilgrimage, as when I was playing with the St Martin’s Academy I made my way to the Chicago Art Institute to see a Winslow Homer—I think it was After the Hurricane. Typically, I walked past all the other great works of art and fixed my attention on that one painting. Otherwise I feel like I’m being bombarded by things that one feels one ought to look at, but there is never enough time to do them justice. On another occasion in the mid-1960s I went out of my way to track down an El Greco on the wall of a church in Spain—it was of a dying knight surrounded by clergy, with the most amazing lace around their necks—but this was very much the exception to the general rule.

By 1973, the Gabrieli Quartet was taking up more of my time and energy and so was the ECO, of which I had been associate leader since its formation in 1960 and leader for four years. The quartet was now beginning to lose a number of potential engagements and tours simply because I was tied up with the orchestra. Something had to give and after much soul searching, I decided reluctantly that I would have to leave the orchestra. I gave my

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.