Susan Tomes - Sleeping in Temples

Copyright Susan Tomes 2014

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First published 2014

The Boydell Press, Woodbridge

This edition published 2014

ISBN 978 1 84383 975 0 Hardback

ISBN 978 1 78204 453 6 eBook

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and of Boydell & Brewer Inc.

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A cknowledgements

I would like to thank my daughter Maya Feile Tomes and my husband Robert Philip for all their wonderful advice, support and encouragement , and Michael Middeke at The Boydell Press for his wise editorial guidance.

G i v ing people memories

I recently came across the torn and battered copy of Mozarts D minor Piano Concerto from which I learned the piece as a young teenager in Edinburgh. It contains the pencilled remarks of my then piano teacher, Michael Gough Matthews. Its always interesting to be reminded of the advice your teacher gave you years ago, and chastening to discover that sometimes it makes more sense to you now than it did then. Or perhaps it did then too, but you didnt yet know quite how to pick up that particular ball and run with it.

In the middle of the serene slow movement of Mozarts D minor concerto, theres a stormy passage. The mood suddenly changes, and the pianist breaks out into anguished, jagged arpeggios. Evidently my piano teacher had become frustrated with my inability to sense the required atmosphere of this passage. He had written devessere drammatico! over it.

Seeing these Italian words many years later, I couldnt help wondering what on earth I would have made of them at the time. There I was, a shy Edinburgh girl who had hardly ever been outside of my home country. I didnt speak Italian, as my teacher no doubt knew because he had to explain to me the various Italian words (allegro, andante cantabile, vivace, etc.) which Mozart was in the habit of using to indicate the speed and character of his music. Was it simply in this spirit that my teacher decided to go with the flow and tell me that devessere drammatico!? He could simply have written it must be dramatic! in English, the language we both used, if he wanted to be sure I understood. But he didnt, and seeing his artistic handwriting on the fragile pages many years later, I had the glimmering of an idea why.

But first I want to stay with the memory of the young me, enjoying my Saturday afternoon piano lesson in a sunny top-floor corner room in the Royal Scottish Academy of Music in Glasgow. It has since moved to a new location a few blocks away, but at that time we were in its old building, the Victorian Athenaeum in St Georges Square. Like all the UKs principal music colleges, the RSAM ran a junior academy on Saturdays for children and teenagers. Ordinary schools in the UK run until the mid- or late afternoon, and children have a lot of homework as well as after-school clubs, so there is very little weekday opportunity for music lessons. Every Saturday I went through to Glasgow on the train from Edinburgh and had a whole day of music lessons piano, violin, percussion, harmony and counterpoint, chamber music, orchestra. The heart of the day was my weekly piano lesson. I considered my teacher to be a dashing and handsome figure. His well-cut tweed jacket, his stylish haircut, his aftershave, his elegant soft leather shoes were outside of my sartorial experience at the time. Shoes which were beautiful rather than sensible, for heavens sake! I was probably wearing my black school shoes, as I did every day of the week.

One of my teachers jobs was to try and give me some idea of the right performance style for the various piano works I learned with him. When I look back I realise what a tall order this was. We students had little acquaintance with performing styles of any kind, let alone an appreciation of historical traditions. We occasionally heard one another play, but our exposure to professional players, let alone to international performing artists, was minimal. In the days before the internet, it was not at all easy to hear a range of performers from different countries. You couldnt just type a name into a search engine to conjure long lists of their videos and recordings for immediate sampling. At home we had a record player and a small collection of mostly non-classical records. If we had a classical record of something, it would certainly be the only recording I had heard of it, and I would listen to it over and over again. The repetition eroded the notion that there might be other ways of playing that particular piece, and I daresay the way that (for example) Eric Heidsieck played Mozarts D minor Piano Concerto on our LP of it was imprinted forever on my young mind as the way to play it, underlying and in a sense annulling any conscious thoughts I later had on the matter.

By that stage I was also attending the Friday night concert series of what was then the Scottish National Orchestra, under their principal conductor Alexander Gibson, in the Usher Hall. This was my first chance to hear artists of stature or performers from outside the UK. For a while I had the habit of collecting autographs after these concerts. Along with a number of other similarly smitten teenagers, I ran backstage after the concert to queue outside the green room, pink autograph book in hand. Slowly we were allowed to file in and get the soloists or conductors signature. Some of them were nice, some haughty; some were excitingly dishevelled, some bored and business-like as they scrawled a quick flourish which my school friends would later dismiss lightly with a comment that the signatures could have been anyones really.

I could tell from these international artists way of playing that there were ingredients other than the ones I was used to, but I had no idea what to make of it. On the whole we regarded any unusual behaviour as antics. Sometimes performers swayed around tremendously and made all kinds of flamboyant gestures. They leaned back from the piano and gazed at the ceiling. They scrunched forward and bent their head low over the keys as if prostrating themselves in front of a deity. Sometimes they played with far more pedal than I was used to. Sometimes they played dryly and delicately in works of the classical era, and I supposed they were after some particular effect, but I didnt know what or why. I remember occasional visits from female pianists whose platform manner was a cultivated stillness. They made a virtue of plainness, a severity in dress and gesture, a refusal to play to the gallery. This too was surprising and hard to interpret, yet I remember being struck by performers like the Hungarian pianist Annie Fischer whose quietly intense manner and deliberately unadorned appearance was very much to my taste. In the view of those around me, she hadnt dressed up enough. Why was her hair pulled back in a severe bun? If she was famous, where were her jewels? My fellow piano students and I looked forward to hearing the occasional lumbering Russian bears who would hammer the living daylights out of the piano, glowering from beneath their tousled locks as if they hated us. Why did they do that? We girls had been told to smile prettily and brush our hair when we played in public. Hating the audience was intriguingly dissident. It was an intimation of other values out there, of performers who had grown up with other traditions; I deduced that there must also be foreign audiences whose expectations were different from ours.