People I Made Music with by David Tidboald

Author:David Tidboald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: People I Made Music with
ISBN: 9781415204184
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2011-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

ARTHUR FIEDLER 1894–1979

When the Cape Town Municipal Orchestra celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1964, it was decided to engage an international guest conductor to add lustre to the occasion. The choice depended, of course, on who was available (and willing to come), and even more importantly at what price. I combed the agents and Antal Dorati was available but at five hundred pounds a concert was deemed too expensive. Fiedler at one hundred pounds a concert was a more feasible proposition. This, even for those days, very moderate fee had to do with his urge to get away from his enforced repertoire in Boston: he was itching to conduct the great masterpieces which at home no one asked him to do. I was to learn that this was something of an obsession with him.

Arthur Fiedler was a familiar name especially to survivors of the era when gramophone records whizzed around at 78 revolutions per minute, that is, until the introduction of the long-playing record in the early fifties. The two main purveyors of classical music in Britain at that time had two categories on offer: with HMV it was red label for the prestige artists, magenta for ‘economy’. As conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, Arthur Fiedler was the quintessential magenta conductor, whereas Sergey Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony, was definitely red label. The personnel of the two orchestras was identical, though one wouldn’t have known it, for the sound of the Pops was athletically slim, that of the Symphony of a warm lushness: the one silver, the other gold. Naturally the essential differences of technique and temperament between the two conductors contributed profoundly to this. They were both, of course, first-rate musicians, but the American-ness of the one contrasted with the Russian-ness of the other and characterised the respective repertoires in which they excelled.

The Pops covered an enormous range of light music, from novelty numbers composed by the resident arranger, Leroy Anderson, to ballet, and in ballet itself there were divisions: Fiedler and the Pops did Falla’s The Three-cornered Hat, but Koussevitzky and the Symphony would have done Petruchka. The general symphonic field belonged to the Symphony, no argument.

For his concerts in Cape Town therefore, Fiedler wanted to do exclusively non-light programmes, and it was hard to get him to agree to anything else.

This was not our only dilemma. There were two veterans gracing the Cape Town music scene at the time, the pianist Elsie Hall and the soprano Cecilia Wessels (of whom, more later). The former had a uniquely long career. She had studied with Clara Schumann (she boasted of having opened the door on one occasion to Brahms), appeared in Bernard Shaw’s Music in London as ‘little Elsie Hall from Australia’ (and is surprisingly kindly treated by him, it must be said), and went on playing well into her nineties. In fact she booked the City Hall in Cape Town for a recital to celebrate her hundredth birthday. Sadly she didn’t make it but, as with Rubinstein and Horowitz, her fingers remained nimble to the end.

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