On the 26th of March 2013 “Superbrass” started the recording of their CD “Brass Taps” at the Henry Wood Hall in London.

The country was struggling to get free from the grip of winter, and our train traveled south from Edinburgh, through mile after mile of snow-covered fields.

(Michael Doran is the head of percussion at Trinity College of music.)

Dear Roger,

I’m in Edinburgh again. At last the late March freeze has given way to sunshine and there are spring flowers on the meadows.

How good it was to see you, and to be in London again, although I had quite forgotten how to navigate its vastness.

On Monday in front of an invited audience, I gave a little interview to Michael Doran at Trinity College in the grand maritime environs of Greenwich, just a few yards from the naval college and the Cutty Sark.

It was intended to entertain and prepare the students in part for a life in music, but had extended itself to people who had read “Letters from Lines and Spaces” some of whom are now part of Trinity’s distinguished teaching staff, and were old friends and colleagues that I had not seen since my Royal Philharmonic days.

The event seemed to be filled with many such pleasant surprises that continued into the next day when we took the train to the city from Greenwich.

As we walked south to Henry Wood hall from London bridge, we were startled by the Shard, leaping suddenly into the brilliant blue sky in the unfamiliar sunshine, and the thrilling sight of it reminded me of days gone by, when discovering new towns and cities was a weekly event for a young man breathless at the beginning of musical life, and green as the Welsh hills.

Then in the peaceful symmetry of Trinity Square the rush hour rumblings of Borough high street softened and gave way to the sound of brass that came striding across from the church to meet us, and I could feel the first vibrations of the exhilarating day that was to come.

I believe that the technique and versatility of British brass players is something unique in music in the World.

The power and energy in what they do transforms everything in its path like a revolution, and insurgence can make strong medicine for composers and players alike.

In this familiar company, I always feel safe from my self-protecting inhibitions and the music can breathe easily, free from the authority of conductors, managers and musical moralizing.

Thank you and Superbrass and for making it all happen with such care and professionalism. The CD is certain to sound very special. The fabulous sounds rang in my ears for hours afterwards, and my ribs were aching from laughing about old times with old pals.

Yours ever

Drac

 THE DEATH OF MUSIC

(The March to the scaffold – Berlioz)

Maestro – “ This must be like sinking into hell!”

A smoldering sulphorous effect of sorts fills the room –.

1st^st Trumpet –“We’re sunk!

A string touched in the silence-

.Pat O’Brian (Desk 4) Smiles comfort – indifference – -  contentment.

In the 18^th century people used to go to

  Bedlam (not far from here) to stare at the

 Lunatics

We watch the clock – The chauffeur kicking the gravel on the drive –.

HE has felt the sting  – The Arcadians and their money

Manager –(circling)

.(Soon we’ll be free to think and feel – and breathe)

Maestro -

“He is going to die! – In terror – agony!”

1^st Trumpet –“He’s lucky!

Maestro -

                         “You sound like the most awful café band.

                         Don’t you care what happens to him?”

( Dramatic monologue, rehearsed on an airplane methinks, at great expense to us!, and while we wait )

 “For a penny one could peer into their cells, view

The freaks of the ‘show of Bethlehem’ and laugh

  at their antics.”

.Manager –“Maestro, it’s past one o’clock I’m afraid- lunchtime you see”

Seething, phosphorescent malice of a lifetime bubbling to the surface –

Reek of soup from the cafeteria.

Maestro – (Piano -adagio accelerando e crescendo) –

“You are afraid?  –You are not afraid evidently, to sound like circus orchestra or to be laughing stock of Europe – (Poco forte) – only 

afraid for  lunch. Fear no more my friends (Fortissimo) You will not see ME again!

“Entry was free on the first Tuesday

 of the month. In 1814 alone, there were 96,000

such visits.”

Pat O’Brian –“I’ll miss our little chats”

In 1983 the LSO recorded the soundtrack for the “Return of the Jedi” which was the third of the Star Wars films to be made.

Dear Martin,

I passed through Newcastle on the train last month while listening to Radio 3. Naturally, I was wondering how you were, when quite coincidentally, a broadcast from Newcastle started, just as the train pulled out of the station, – E.J. Moeran’s music it was, from the Sinfonia centre. Despite the inadequacy of my little Walkman, headphones, and the noise of the train, I really enjoyed it, and the horns sounded great! I always admired his music, It’s just beautiful, and I’ve never played a note of it in all these years.!

I was travelling up north on a “Shell-LSO” concert tour, and as part of our family plan to relocate and recalibrate ourselves, I broke off to view a couple of hotels that were for sale, and once or twice, I thought we might get to be neighbours again but I wasn’t moved to make any decisions by what I saw.

This is all proving to be more difficult than I imagined it would be, because a lot of the businesses are for sale on account of trading difficulties, and touring the north of England I’ve been shocked at the state of the country and the boarded-up shops and industrial wreckage. It’s obvious to me now that we haven’t felt the impact of the downturn so much in London, even though the LSO did hit another financial crisis, shortly after we opened the Barbican hall and called on Raymond Gubbay to help out.

Anyhow, we’re still in business and last week we recorded the sound track for  “Return of the Jedi”, but we had to go to Abbey Road to do it, Denham having being finally closed.

I will miss going there. What a film history it had! A draughty old aircraft hangar, where you could break your neck in the dark with all those cables lying about, and Oliver, Fiddler on the roof, Dracula, Star Wars, Superman, Indiana Jones, all recorded there. What an inventory! Not to mention the dramas that were enacted off the screen.

Getting the sack from “Battle of Britain” along with Walton and Malcolm Arnold was one such, followed by Gilbey’s gin and bitter recrimination at the village pub.

“The Return of the Jedi” was done in the usual congenial atmosphere, and all great fun. Darth Vader was Wagnerially incinerated at the end, accompanied by a horn solo from yours truly, and the great delight of Pat Vermont who always refers to him as “that horrid asthmatic man!”

“Oh mercy! Why does the vilest person in the universe have to be black?” he has been pleading since 1977.

He told me discreetly, to avoid offending the delicate sensibilities of the trombones, that he always dreaded Darth’s appearance on the screen because it involved more loud trombone music. He’s wearied by sitting in front of them for thirty years I think, but his going back to Jamaica to live with his auntie is scheduled definitely for next year, he says.

It did seem strange doing a film session in that studio. I can only associate it with those formal introductions, foreign accents and photographers from the “Gramophone”, but we’re still laughing here as you can tell.

I hope you still do lots of laughing in the Sinfonia. Give my love to the family. I wonder, do the children have a Geordie accent? Ours are learning “Saaarf” London.

Luv Drac

Dear Pat,

When I see Belfast on the television news, plagued by disputes about the flying of flags or the sporadic violence that erupts in the streets, while Dublin grapples with problems of the Euro and the unimaginable numbers that represent the nation’s debt, I think of you in old Ireland, and smile to myself, knowing how unaffected you are by the antics of politicians and financiers, and that you are always at ease in the certain knowledge that with the help of music we can save every day, and fend off every disaster.

I have envied your calm and resolve in the face of these matters for years. This morning, therefore, I resolved to ignore the coalition’s minister of culture and the depressing and disingenuous content of her recent speech on the relationship of the funding of the arts to the economy, and to give my full attention and adoration to this glorious day!

The world is born again, and as I watch the wind whipping the white horses across to Fife in the sunshine, the seabirds fill the skies with their cries of joy, and the Forth stretches open mouthed and amazed across to the open sea.

The grandeur of nature astounds me, and this bright spring weather after a long wet summer and a cold winter is such a joy, but try as I might, thoughts of the asinine artlessness of the minister for culture drag me away from this beautiful morning and back to the past. How many such experiences have we known?

Politicians, concerned continually for their media image and anxious to avoid exposure to real truths that are superfluous to statistics, become lost in their obfuscations, chicanery and feasibility studies, and are simply baffled when they come across serious matters that concern the role of music, or art of any kind in the human community. And they clutch desperately at the term, “market forces” like a disturbed child cowering in the corner with a broken toy.

We, who REALLY answer to the public and make our living providing the arts to the people, know that they are precious gifts to the senses that are indivisible from life itself. A brass band or a youth orchestra could be a gift to a young boy that could save him from the misery of the dole, and the evident and ancient power of music has relieved the immense pain and personal loss that has been caused by politicians in the darkest days the world has ever seen.

Our monumental “Pathetique” symphony with Kempe in 1972 at the Festival Hall was a performance that those who were present have never forgotten. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on that day, acclaimed as it was throughout Europe and America, stood destitute and ostracized in its own land, at the edge of oblivion, the politicians and critics baying for its blood and the press loitering at the stage door before searching the pubs and gutters for our casualties. There was no post performance conversation or bonhomie that night, only sighs of relief, zips and breathlessness but with that concert and the intensity of the performance, the orchestra had asked a poignant question.

“Our tormentors demanded songs of joy. – How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

Perhaps you will remember those words that you spoke that brought us all back to reality and the masculine malodour of that dressing room.

I have never forgotten them.

Our land and the behaviour of its representatives seems as strange as ever it was to those of us that just want to make music and enough money with which to do it.

I know you will remember the tone the critics took on the day after that concert, when even the nastiest of them was forced to relent with a condescending nod to our “virtuosity”, and to put aside the instruments of torture for a day, before normal malice was resumed, and we were once more thrown at the familiar mercy of the Arts council and the Treasury.

We were, of course, exactly where we were meant to be, where we always had been, and where we are today.

I shall now follow your example while the day is still rejoicing, and the television screen stares blankly at the wall!

“O men it must ever be

That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing,

A little apart from ye.”

Yours Ever

Drac

On the 26th of March 2013 “Superbrass” started the recording of their CD “Brass Taps” at the Henry Wood Hall in London.

The country was struggling to get free from the grip of winter, and our train traveled south from Edinburgh, through mile after mile of snow covered fields.

Dear Roger,

I’m in Edinburgh again. At last the late March freeze has given way to sunshine and there are Spring flowers on the meadows.

How good it was to see you, and to be in London again, although I had quite forgotten how to navigate its vastness.

On Monday I gave a little interview to Michael Doran at Trinity College in the grand maritime environs of Greenwich, just a few yards from the naval college and the Cutty Sark.

It was intended to entertain and prepare the students in part for a life in music, but had extended itself to people who had read “Letters from Lines and Spaces” some of whom are now part of Trinity’s distinguished teaching staff, and were old friends and colleagues that I hadn’t seen since my Royal Philharmonic days. The event seemed to be filled with such pleasant surprises that continued into the next day when we took the train to the city from Greenwich.

As we walked south to Henry Wood hall from London bridge, we were startled by the Shard, leaping suddenly into the brilliant blue sky in the unfamiliar sunshine, and the thrilling sight of it reminded me of days gone by, when discovering new towns and cities was a weekly event for a young man breathless at the beginning of musical life, and green as the Welsh hills.Then in the peaceful symmetry of Trinity Square the rush hour rumblings of Borough high street softened and gave way to the sound of brass that came striding across from the church to meet us, and I could feel the first vibrations of the exhilarating day that was to come.

I believe that the technique and versatility of British brass players is something unique in music in the World.

The power and energy in what they do transforms everything in its path like a revolution, and insurgence can make strong medicine for composers and players alike.

In this familiar company, I always feel safe from my self-protecting inhibitions and the music can breathe easily, free from the authority of conductors, managers and musical moralizing.

Thank you and Superbrass and for making it all happen with such care and professionalism. The CD is certain to sound very special. The fabulous sounds rang in my ears for hours afterwards, and my ribs were aching from laughing about old times with old pals.

Yours ever

Drac

John Green, author of ‘The Stone Frigate” and “ Reunion” is my old friend and customer from our days at the “Bull’s Head”.

Waterfront Ave

February 2013

Dear John,

Although I have heard you complain albeit gently and occasionally about the steepness of Mount Street, and its effects on your now historic and war torn body, having watched the television news and the dismal pictures of the streets in the towns of mid Wales running like rivers under the relentless rain, I know you will be thankful today to have your house on the hillside.

I wasn’t able to come and see you in November. I’m sorry for that, and although I considered it, I eventually decided against inviting you to the British Horn Society’s annual festival in Cardiff, in order to save you from spending the day with a hundred and fifty french horn players.

Your time was evidently more pleasantly spent in writing to me about your Christmas in Brecon, and your letter took me right back to the old town and our Christmases past in the “Bull’s Head.”

One of the ways in which the Chinese cook duck, is to poach it in water and rice wine, the resultant liquid forming a disgusting, off white viscid soup, the drinking of which, we were told was to be the most nourishing and desirable part of the experience, second only to the eating of the brains of the unfortunate animal which are exposed by the waiters, who split the head lengthwise with a cleaver, thereby enabling the contents to be picked easily from the skull with chopsticks.

The seasonal accompaniment to this grisly gastronomic theatre was a sort of Sino Elizabethan musak version of “God rest ye Merry Gentlemen” which was being played at high speed, in adenoidal audio by what sounded like an ensemble of Zhonghus, Sanxians and some western digital contrivances.

In February 2013, the Cardiff City Council cut funding to the arts by 100%. Councils all over Britain are cutting arts funding and music tuition and youth orchestra provision was to be severely damaged. The financial difficulties in American intensified. The orchestra in Minnesota had been “locked out” for more than three months

Dear Dave,

I get news every day via the Internet of cuts to arts funding. The great benefits of Facebook, such as news of events and renewed contact with old friends bring bad news too and in these difficult times it seems as if there is no end to it. The American orchestras are falling into serious financial problems with great frequency now. Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Minnesota, the list lengthens. I wonder if we are witnessing the end of the profession, as we know it. Can we recommend it to our children?

I feel a greater discomfort within, that I am partly responsible for this impending catastrophe or at least guilty in some way. Maybe this is why I find it difficult to answer a child that asks my advice or approval for a career as an instrumentalist, and while common decency compels me to be frank about the fragile condition of it all.

God! This is depressing!

I don’t want to be a politician or a “disgruntled correspondent. Apathy is what ails me if I’m not careful: along with a lot of other people it seems.

But it wasn’t always like this. We did fight like hell for the RPO all those years ago, and it was worth all the press vitriol and all those “end of the month” financial meetings and negative balance sheets.

That’s it of course – It’s always been the same.

The establishment and the press criticized us for performing with “Deep Purple” and Frank Zappa. One paper called our concerts “humiliating” at one stage.

Playing music, or doing anything for small amounts of money is often considered demeaning nowadays, while the receipt of enormous fees for concerts is some sort of qualification of excellence for the conductors that have kept us close to bankruptcy for decades.

We did far more humiliating things in fact which were done as “media” damage limitation, such as an invitation that was made to the critic of the “Gramophone” magazine to accompany us on an American tour, which was to be for him, an all expenses paid holiday, touring California and the west coast of America and staying at the best hotels.

In return of course, we did expect favorable reviews to be sent home that would perhaps influence public opinion and help in some way to stabilize our perilous domestic position with the Arts council. The man in question had no real experience or understanding of music, beyond the academic. He was much more interested in his own self-aggrandisement, and reserved his professional obsequiousness for the maestro and the great and good of California. He hardly ever spoke to the players nor took any interest in their lives or their perpetual problems and it soon became obvious to us that we could gain nothing whatever from his presence on the tour beyond an increase in our financial deficit.

At the halfway point of the tour, or thereabouts, he became very obviously bored with the concerts, which were by and large repeat performances in different towns and cities, which is of course the normal and necessary practice of touring orchestras.

Anyway the result was that he stopped attending performances altogether outside the major cities, and one night he was standing in the wings of a theatre in Sacramento as we came off the stage, and I heard him make a derisory remark, to those within earshot, about the evening’s performance, which he could only have heard in part and from the wings of the stage at which point, my friend Pat O’Brian lifted him off his feet by the lapels of his jacket and informed him, through clenched, teeth that “like it or not,” our shoddy performances were paying for his California holiday and after a derisory reference to the “Gramophone” magazine and its unsuitability for certain lavatory usage, he let him go.

The act summed up the communal contempt that had grown for this unwelcome guest among the players since our departure from London, and Pat’s reprimand from the board of directors was delivered later in the bar of the hotel, accompanied by gentle cocktail piano music and stifled laughter, with a mutual realization that we had all (even the unfortunate critic, who was still trembling and drinking by himself in a dark corner of the room) made a serious mistake with this experiment. It was suggested that Pat apologized to him as a vain attempt to salvage something from it all. A grudging apology was given, and after receiving an equally reticent acceptance, we paid up resolutely for all his bills and expenses, increasing our deficit accordingly!

Yes! It has always been the same.

Young people entering the profession have no idea that they are at the beginning of a lifelong battle. I certainly didn’t. It’s as well for me that I didn’t mind a good fight, I always maintained a good sense of humour, and deep down, I felt that the joy of it all was worth much more than the problems it presented, but I was fortunate to have grown up in better times!

I can’t come to the protest day in Cardiff, but I have written to the relevant councillors etc. I’m certain that public opinion will prevail in all this. Wales has always shown the way in musical education.

Shortly before British forces invaded Iraq, I saw a man interviewed in the street by the BBC in Baghdad. The man was going to the mosque with his two sons.

Asked why he didn’t want the Americans in his country, he said,

“I don’t want my children to grow up with hamburgers and drugs!”

I don’t want my grandchildren to grow up in a country where musical education is only for the privileged and better off.

Our children are everything. They are the future. There is no future without them and they are our responsibility!

We have burdened them with the debt of disgraceful and illegal wars. We poison their food and then we blame them for the disorder in society. We refuse to pay for their education and berate them for their ignorance and naivety. We complain when they take no interest in politics while the politicians entrusted with their future and security are prosecuted for dishonesty and duplicity.

Maybe this acrimony and unrest is all for the best in some mysterious way, but we can’t accept this. Something must be done.

I’ll write to you soon about more pleasant matters

Yours ever

Terry

In October 2012, The Conan Doyle Institute in Edinburgh presented a concert to celebrate its first Anniversary. It was given by the Alastair Savage string quartet who were playing on instruments crafted from a tree that grew in the garden of Conan Doyle’s family house in Edinburgh. The programme included a piece that I wrote especially for the occasion, based on the novel, “The Sign of the Four.”

Dear Pat,

I write to you, while imagining that Dublin courtyard, filled with the aroma of cedarwood, warm walnut oil, and the sound of violins, and to tell you that, at last I can claim a violin experience of my own!

I composed my first string quartet for Alastair Savage’s group at the request of the Conan Doyle Centre in Edinburgh for their first anniversary. When I hear people perform my music like this, it always brings such a rich mixture of feelings. I feel a great and unfamiliar humility when players take such pains to achieve a genuine reproduction, which is strange terminology but may be as near the truth as it is possible to get with regard to written music.

The two violins, viola and cello that Alastair and the quartet played on Tuesday were made here in Edinburgh by Steve Burnett, from an old sycamore that stood in the garden of Conan Doyle’s childhood home on the outskirts of the city.

Searching through the Sherlock Holmes stories I thought the “ Sign of the Four” would be an appropriate one for a quartet and I set to work. Finally, the piece arranged itself into a reading of a synopsis of the story with incidental music.

I read from the book, as the audience enjoyed the brilliant playing and the atmospheric language of Conan Doyle, on a dark, late autumn evening in an elegant Georgian drawing room overlooking the cathedral grounds.

Thirty-five people make a perfect audience for Chamber music, and Steve’s  instruments, having lain asleep in the workshop for more than a year, filled the room with their song: a glorious gratitude to their craftsman and the quartet, and for the joy of having an audience. Afterwards I felt a warm satisfaction inside, redolent of my early days performing. No critics were there, no conductor or agent. No fee or potential recording contract. Only applause and smiling faces.

“As it was in the beginning”

After the concert, as I walked to the car, a fox loped across the broad elegant expanse of Melville Street with a grace and urbanity that matched her surroundings, as if she had been born in the city. I stood watching her, surveying the silent Georgian streetscape, and felt suddenly harassed by a memory of the summer from that very spot, when an open topped car, growling impatiently in the festival traffic spewed out noxious petrol fumes and the voltage and vitriol of electric guitars, carrying the insult of their “sound” around the city, like a violent mental patient on day-release.

“These planks of wood impaled with their diabolical devices and variations of torture and torment, contemn patience, dedication, craftsmanship and fineness of feeling, and glorify vulgarity, deadly voltage and sexual distortion. The hellish sound of this ‘instrument’ disturbs the Almighty Himself, and the evidence of His discomfort surrounds us!”

That is what you wrote in your letter to me after one of your reluctant Dublin rock and roll ‘experiences’, and I agree entirely, though I could never summon such faith or effective language to use as a vehicle for my own feelings.

The concert and the relief and sanity that it brought, having rearranged and restored my molecules, follicles and corpuscles to “factory settings”, I sat down to write this morning, reflecting on our forty years of friendship, our many exchanges about music, and of you, across the sea in Dublin among melomanic Irishmen and  centuries of craftsmanship.

“The flames of hell give forth no light” it has been said! Nor does an electric shock generate music any more than it gave relief from their torments to the mental patients of old.

To call this painful noise  “music”, and the as the media now does, is an obfuscation that will be penetrated in time.

I fear that in our urban lives, we are being steered by increasingly excessive and almost inescapable noise towards some sort of collective neurological malfunction, the early stages of which is at present masquerading as euphoria.

Did Mary Shelley herself not describe her chimera as “handsome” and ‘beautiful” and did not the creators of the gleaming war machine swell with pride in 1914.

Please forgive my self-indulgence. I seem to have found a little revolutionary spirit under some old delusions and complacency. Only thoughts of you and old Ireland bring me comfort and peace.

After Christmas we’ll come visiting and shopping and we shall buy some Donegal tweed, against the winter blast, and Waterford crystal, to bring gentle music to the dinner table.

When midnight mass is over and the children are asleep there will be silence in Melville street so we can listen to the trees grow and the fox’s velvet footfall.

Yours Ever

Drac

In November 2012, I was invited to the annual festival of the British Horn Society that took place, this year at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff. Now that I have a claim to being an elder statesman of the horn fraternity, I was asked to take part in an interview with Tony Catterick, the Society’s historian and archivist, in front of an audience of mostly younger players.

Dear Roger,

I awoke on this lovely morning, enjoying an unusual calm and composure that allowed me to lie for a while in the warm bed, and to summon gratitude for not being in a hotel or guesthouse with the breakfast prospect of budget sausages and instant coffee. These memories come less frequently to me now, and are not nearly as troubling, as they used to be. Though it has taken a long time, for the spectre of the eternal solo to leave me in peace.

We have all trudged the streets of an unfamiliar town, aware and weary of this ominous presence, like some distant relative you had come across unexpectedly and were not too sure about. Frightened to take him anywhere lest he embarrass you, but anxious to keep him entertained in case he were to spoil the party in the evening. He doesn’t follow me any more. I’m almost sorry for that. I feel as if we would perhaps be on better terms now. I feel a certain pity for him too, when I think of his habitual loitering at stage doors or lurking in a hotel lobby as you arrive after a long journey, but I feel at the same time, a huge gratitude that his dubious attentions have been directed elsewhere.

My old friend Pat Vermont, a West Indian violist, who enriched the lives of all who knew him, and was blessed with a glorious, glamorous, androgyny, would often entertain the LSO on its world travels with his pre-concert monologues, referring theatrically to our labours and peregrinations as — “all this”.

“When ‘all this’ is over”, he would declare to the little band-room theatre,”I’m going back to Jamaica to live with my auntie!”

It is ‘all over’ for me now, that is to say my days of playing the horn for money and touring are behind me, and the chicanery of management, mendacity of critics and the shameless public and pecuniary auto- eroticism of conductors are all but distant memories.

Tony’s thoughtful interview was a world away from any of those irritations, and was an unique experience, conducted in such a calm and collected way, enabled I suspect, by years of practice, and bolstered by the comforting fact of our more than forty years of friendship

The memories of past events returned with ease, but although of course familiar, they seemed in these circumstances, to assume a mysterious separation from reality.

I thought later, that the interview had resembled one of those “out of body” experiences one reads about, that is to say, it seemed to be completely detached from any worldly feelings of anxiety or sense of time, seen from a neutral place of safety, and bathed in ethereal white light, rather than stumbling over electric cables in a dingy theatre pit.

My only moment of discomfort in an otherwise perfect day, came from the sudden thought that “The Catterick Interview,” is of course reserved only for the few, and it was that unfamiliar and disquieting circumstance that provoked a strong and unfamiliar feeling of seriousness inside me, that seemed quite inappropriate when in the company of a room full of horn players!

When I released my honorary membership of the British Horn Society from its purple ribbon, not in Cardiff where it was ‘conferred,’ but here beside the waters of the Forth, I saw that it made reference to “The world of horn playing”, to which I felt my own contribution had been made the more insignificant and humbling by the profusion and greatness of its distinguished population. Have there been so many unsung heroes in other ‘worlds?’

Where would Beethoven, Strauss, Wagner, Mahler and John Williams have been without the likes of us? Would Siegfried, Robin Hood, Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker have lived so vividly in the human imagination without such noble accompaniment to their exploits? And where would our British orchestral life be today without the real life heroes from our ranks such as Barry Tuckwell, Keith Whitmore, Jim Brown, Nick Busch and John Bimson who chaired the boards, and steered the London orchestras through their never ending difficulties, while peering at times into the abyss of bankruptcy and annihilation, but always leading the cavalry charge on the concert platform against the critics, who at that time almost to a man, supported the Arts Council view that there were too many orchestras in London.

“The world of horn playing” has given a great many gifts to a lot of people and for my own part it has given me a rich and meaningful life that has been endowed with countless good companions and many lifelong friends, the labours and achievements of whom, amplify this honour beyond measure to me.

Thank you all

Yours Ever

Drac

At the Edinburgh festival in August 2012, the London Philharmonic’s performance of Rachmaninoff’s ‘The Bells” was cancelled due to a power cut at the Usher Hall. Before the concert, I went to meet my old friend Tony Chidell who was in the orchestra. We had not seen one another for more than twenty years

Dear Tony

Do you know it has been more than twenty years since the Maastricht treaty was signed, Bill Clinton was elected, and we were last together in London? The cancellation of the concert meant very little to me of course, except to say that had the announcement been made sooner we could have spent some more time together.
“Power failure at the Usher Hall”, the Scottish news said last night. It’s difficult to get to the truth through such imprecise language. There is a forest of nebulous, platitudinous, multi-purpose vocabulary that is used by critics, radio presenters and third rate conductors everywhere, to bewilder and amuse their audience and fuel their own self delusion.
Surely there must be some who suffer a nightmarish dread of an era to come, where it will, be required of “experts in the field” to provide some proof that they have some real knowledge of their subject or even some practical experience of it, beyond the operation of a CD player in a radio studio, or dramatic corporeal gesticulation on a rostrum, which activities are at best incidental to the genius of the great composers, and the sounds of the finest orchestral players in the world.
We will never know, unless we turn to the critics, who seem to know everything, and I half expected to see a review of the concert the next day. It certainly would not have been the first time that a review had been published, of a concert that never took place nor is it the first time a concert has been interrupted by darkness.
Years ago the lights went out towards the end of a concert during one of our RPO Welsh tours during the finale of the seventh symphony of Beethoven which was steered calmly to its conclusion by the composure and silver haired experience of the then ostracized and destitute Royal Philharmonic, (though my own youth and meagre ability produced little or no contribution to the proceedings). The conductor was still faintly visible, by moon and street light to those who were interested but he had appeared to have lost his place in the score long before the power cut had intervened to sharpen our concentration.
His consequent histrionic and desperate attempts to simulate control and acuity had been made the more frantic by the sudden darkness, and when the heroic rescue of the symphony was acknowledged at the end with thunderous applause, he very obviously thought it was all for him, and having spotted a little pool of light that had fallen onto the stage from a streetlamp, he jumped into it to take his triumphal bow!
It was a joy to see you again, still laughing and performing in such distinguished Philharmonic company, though that sticky sandwich bar and the malodorous dressing room revived the anxiety and dyspepsia of touring days for me, and I freely admit to feeling a glorious feeling of relief when I took to the street at last and headed for home.

In Wales all those years ago the maestro narrowly escaped the horror of anonymity that they all seem to fear so much, by drawing on the power of people who knew their trade, and I can still remember the look of relief on his face, though for myself, having been restored to sanity by a couple of years of normal, non orchestral life I cannot imagine any greater anonymity for any musician than to appear in an orchestral concert without an instrument!
The real power of music lies in the hands of those who compose or perform it and last night the electrical ineptitude of the Edinburgh city council deprived the maestro of a platform for his conjuring trick, but it is the power of money and the media that perpetuates the maestro’s deception and protects his five figure fee and it is that power that in these times is failing us all who want simply to perform and to afford regular meals.
I’ll be in London in January for a recording, assuming all is well with the National Grid.
Yours ever,
Drac