On 22 November 2010 07:20, Steve Haflich <[email protected]> wrote: > > > At the time I knew nothing of his musical credentials, but his > discography includes conducting the Beethoven Triple Concerto. My > memory of the incident at the door suggests he was very eloquent and > compelling in gesturing what others should do. Was this from conducting > or prime ministering? > > Definitely from prime ministering. He was one of the worst conductors I have had the misfortune to play for. When I was a student at th RCM in the early 1980s, he borrowed one of the orchestras in order to practice conducting a couple of pieces he would be performing in Guildford with another orchestra later that month. The two pieces were the New World symphony and Borodin's Polovtsian Dances.
The New World went OK for most of the time, but he clearly had no clue what he was about, so we followed the leader and mostly chose our own tempos which he fell in with. The biggest problem was in the last movement, where there is a long rallentando to the first horn solo going up to the written top C, followed by the passage for first & second horns where the speed picks up again. he didn't do the rallentando, so i hit the solo at fil speed, which meant that when he speeded up further the triplets were nearly impossible. Hard enough for the first horn, but the second has much wider intervals to cope with. Completely impossible. But we plumbed the depths in the Polovtsian dances. There is a very fast twisty clarinet solo at one point, after which the strings take over the tune that the clarinet had introduced. The first run-through went OK, and then he decided he wanted to try beating in 2 instead of in 4. No problem - except that instead of making each of his two beats twice as long as before, he beat at double speed. We had a really hot clarinettist in the orchestra. He just played what is quite a difficult solo at double speed. The strings couldn't keep up through, and everything dissolved into chaos and laughter. Heath went as red as a beetroot with embarrassment. When the laughter died down he just said "I think it was better in 4." Regards Jonathan West _______________________________________________ post: [email protected] unsubscribe or set options at https://pegasus.memphis.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/options/horn/archive%40jab.org
