I keep thinking it's Saturday. In fact, it's Friday. (Well, it's actually Thursday for a great many people in the world, but we won't go into that.) I don't know why I keep thinking it's Saturday: perhaps it's because it's the first day this week when I haven't been committed to do something specific, something that takes up enough of the day to make it feel as though I'm actually busy. (I am, but we won't go into that either.)
Monday I accompanied Arnold Bachop at Les Cleveland's funeral, at First Church. I hadn't seen much of Les in recent years, but when I was younger we had a good deal to do with each other when he was singing in various shows I was involved in. His extraordinary buoyancy and delight in life was spoken of again and again, and when someone said that they heard him climbing up the steps into a plane and saying, And how are you, my fine friend, that old Cleveland vibrant bass came back to me instantly. I've been addressed as his fine friend on a number of occasions, as no doubt has half of Dunedin. What an extraordinary larger-than-life personality he was. How it makes you feel that your own funeral is going to be a bit of a non-affair!
Normally on Monday afternoon I'd have been working with the Choristers, a group of elderly ladies who sing and give the occasional concerts at old people's homes. But we had to cancel this week's practice because of the funeral.
Tuesday we went to see Social Welfare to sort out the money we've made in the last financial year over and above what we're allowed to earn on top of the pension. That was a bit stressful, even though we were pretty sure of the outcome. It didn't take up a great deal of the day; nevertheless, it used up a good deal of our emotional energy, I suspect.
Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday: in the evenings I've been rehearsing The Sunshine Boys, along with various members of the cast. Some scenes are going very well; one that was going well fell over on Thursday, for no accountable reason.
Wednesday I met up with one of the members of the church's youth group, for lunch, and then went on to do some data input for the church office, only to find that some of the input I'd put in last time had gone AWOL and had to be put back in, and that after I'd input the recent data, I was left with $2.00 out. Very annoying, and I couldn't solve it at the time. Will have to have another look.
Thursday, I played for Arnold again, and for Peter Chin, also an old friend, and up until fairly recently, the Mayor of Dunedin. (Oh, I walk in exalted circles, I can tell you.) This time we were at the Senior Citizens afternoon that's held (I think) once a week in South Dunedin. A pretty cold day, so most of the Senior Citizens wisely stayed home, and our audience was less than twenty. Never mind, it was a cheery concert and we all enjoyed ourselves.
And so to today, where the only thing I had to do was give one of my granddaughters a piano lesson. That wasn't until late this afternoon, so the rest of the day was free. I spent some time brushing up on my lines for the play, particularly the scene that had gone awry last night, and sending off three flash fiction stories to an NZ contest that closes at the end of the month (I'd written all three of them earlier in the month, but tidied them up today). Did some more Arabic with my wife, took the dog for a walk, and generally potted around. Or so it seemed. I kept feeling all day that there was something I should have been doing, but whatever it was it didn't eventuate.
Watched another episode of Trial and Retribution, a series Lynda La Plante initiated back in the late nineties. At that time there was only one episode a year, and they were great massive three-hour jobs, usually spread over two nights. The later episodes (the series finished in 2009, I think) got shorter, and had less detail in them, which was a pity. Only two of the original actors made it through the whole series: David Hayman and Dorian Lough. They played two of the detectives in the series.
The show originally featured a long police procedural section followed by a trial, in which sometimes all the police work was unravelled and the criminal got away. However, in the later episodes, the trial section vanished almost completely (there was no trial whatsoever in the one we watched today - Ghost Train - for instance). There have been two distinct features of the series: a split screen technique which will often throw different elements of the story together (apparenlty La Plante wasn't fussed about this idea), and a kind of dwelling on of the grotesque details of the person murdered. Not only do we often get a glimpse of the deceased in all their gory glory, but the director will hark back to this several times during the show, so that all the hard work the make-up people have put in will get its due worth. Some of what they do is too graphic to watch, we've found, and we just have to shut our eyes until they get onto the next part of the story. Apart from that element, and La Plante's typical modus operandi of preferring female victims to male ones, females who are often badly abused by the males, the series makes gripping watching. It's had a real run of wonderful British actors, and Hayman in particular has been a wonderful anchor for the show.
Just as a side issue for those who enjoy these things, the man who plays Miranda's boyfriend in the popular comedy series of the same name, Tom Ellis, was a murder victim in Season 11, which aired in February 2008. Seemed a bit odd killing of someone we like so much in a different setting...
Showing posts with label bachop. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bachop. Show all posts
Friday, May 24, 2013
Monday, August 31, 2009
Concert: More New Music
MORE NEW MUSIC
Mike Crowl will be presenting a second collection of his recent compositions - songs, piano pieces, and music for cornet and piano - at the Mornington Methodist Hall, in Dunedin, on Saturday the 12th September, at 7.30 pm.
Admission $10.00 per person - sorry, no eftpos available, but supper is included.
Several of the pieces will be receiving their world premieres, including a group of eight short songs set to words by the nationally renowned Dunedin poet, Peter Olds.
John Lewis, the champion New Zealand and Australian cornet player, will be performing two pieces specially written for him.
Other artists include: Nicola Steel, Helen & Justin Scott, Arnold Bachop, Cara Thomson, and Nadine Kemp.
Piano courtesy of webweaver.nu
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Swamped by music
For most of the year I’ve hardly played at a concert or anything else musical. Now, suddenly at the end of the year, I’m loaded up to the gunnels. Last Sunday there was a charity concert to raise funds for a local rest home. It was combined with an end of the year performance by several of my old friend Arnold Bachop’s pupils. I didn’t play for any of the singers, but did manage to give a rather under-par performance of the four piano pieces I wrote this year.
Partly the problem was the piano: it’s an upright, set up high on four castors. In order for the pianist to reach the pedals, a small wooden block is set under them on which the pianist rests his or her feet. However, this block is not attached in any way to the floor, and has the tendency to slide gradually away from where it needs to be. Furthermore, the pianist’s bottom is perched on a smallish piano stool (small in terms of seating area proportionate to the pianist’s rear end) and this gives little leverage when you’re playing at either of the extremes of the keyboard. Which is what happens in my four piano pieces on more
than one occasion.
But even blaming the piano won’t compensate for the fact that I just botched up things that I shouldn’t have botched up, and wouldn’t normally have botched up. Just one of those days. You think: I’ve played in public for more than 55 years. I won’t get nervous. I got nervous.
However, there was an up side to all this: I passed over the eight Peter Olds songs to a potential performer of them, and she didn’t faint with horror or regard them with any obvious distaste. And I caught up with several of Arnold’s pupils whom I hadn’t seen in quite some time. (We went out for a meal together after the concert.)
Next weekend I have to play for Michael Gray at some afternoon thingee in Port Chalmers. Michael used to be in Opera Alive, when I first met him. He was pretty young then, certainly at the low end of the starting age limit. But he was always very confident and competent. A great asset to the group. He’s currently moving upwards from being a baritone to a tenor. Interesting, because he often used to sing the tenor parts in the Opera Alive shows – mainly because tenors were always in short supply.
And that same Sunday morning I’m playing carols at my boss’s church. And the following weekend, another singing teacher, an old friend of mine, is putting on her end-of-year concert. And I’m accompanying everybody – except her husband and myself, when we sing Brush up your Shakespeare.
That doesn’t sound like much to do, really, but there are rehearsals all over, and, it being the time of year it is, there are various end-of-the-year dinners amongst this lot (at least three of them) and the possibility of having to play for the St Francis Xavier school musical – at very short notice. It’s all a bit much.
On top of all this, I got asked to go and have a biopsy in relation to my prostate – tomorrow. Someone else had cancelled out. (I’m not surprised, if they were having one of these biopsies. The process don’t sound comfortable! I might need some baby bedding just in order to lie down...)
Photo courtesy of Pa1nt, flick.com
Partly the problem was the piano: it’s an upright, set up high on four castors. In order for the pianist to reach the pedals, a small wooden block is set under them on which the pianist rests his or her feet. However, this block is not attached in any way to the floor, and has the tendency to slide gradually away from where it needs to be. Furthermore, the pianist’s bottom is perched on a smallish piano stool (small in terms of seating area proportionate to the pianist’s rear end) and this gives little leverage when you’re playing at either of the extremes of the keyboard. Which is what happens in my four piano pieces on more
than one occasion. But even blaming the piano won’t compensate for the fact that I just botched up things that I shouldn’t have botched up, and wouldn’t normally have botched up. Just one of those days. You think: I’ve played in public for more than 55 years. I won’t get nervous. I got nervous.
However, there was an up side to all this: I passed over the eight Peter Olds songs to a potential performer of them, and she didn’t faint with horror or regard them with any obvious distaste. And I caught up with several of Arnold’s pupils whom I hadn’t seen in quite some time. (We went out for a meal together after the concert.)
Next weekend I have to play for Michael Gray at some afternoon thingee in Port Chalmers. Michael used to be in Opera Alive, when I first met him. He was pretty young then, certainly at the low end of the starting age limit. But he was always very confident and competent. A great asset to the group. He’s currently moving upwards from being a baritone to a tenor. Interesting, because he often used to sing the tenor parts in the Opera Alive shows – mainly because tenors were always in short supply.
And that same Sunday morning I’m playing carols at my boss’s church. And the following weekend, another singing teacher, an old friend of mine, is putting on her end-of-year concert. And I’m accompanying everybody – except her husband and myself, when we sing Brush up your Shakespeare.
That doesn’t sound like much to do, really, but there are rehearsals all over, and, it being the time of year it is, there are various end-of-the-year dinners amongst this lot (at least three of them) and the possibility of having to play for the St Francis Xavier school musical – at very short notice. It’s all a bit much.
On top of all this, I got asked to go and have a biopsy in relation to my prostate – tomorrow. Someone else had cancelled out. (I’m not surprised, if they were having one of these biopsies. The process don’t sound comfortable! I might need some baby bedding just in order to lie down...)
Photo courtesy of Pa1nt, flick.com
Thursday, August 21, 2008
More hitting the top spots
‘How to crowl in a right way’ – this search request from a country that spells ‘did you mean’ as ‘Tarkoititko’. Interestingly enough, when you put ‘tarkoititko’ in Google, along with Mike Crowl, it asks: did you mean Tarkoitetaan? Whatever language it is, it’s subtle! More to the point, the original request brought up this blog at the top. Must be a week for it!
Google is brilliant at finding what you want, but it’s also brilliant at finding things that are so far from what you want that you wonder how it got there. Still, that’s the way search engines function, pretty much.
Somebody else was looking for my old friend, Arnold Bachop, the tenor. Just doing that brought up this blog twice, in first and second place, and then another post of mine on my older website.
Someone else wants to know about the waterfall scene in Clint Eastwood’s Play Misty For Me. I certainly don’t mention it anywhere in the post I wrote on that film, even though we came third in the Google stakes on that one. In fact, I don’t remember a waterfall scene in the movie at all.
Veno’s Lighting Cough Bottles was the next search query, and we came in number two on that, for once actually having all the words in the search query actually turn up in the same post! To my surprise the same thing happens with the query: Diana Crowl music. Google thought the best thing on offer was my post on Gerald Finzi, in which all three of those words appear, but which probably has nothing to do with what the searcher wanted.
We drop down the list in regard to a query about Generation C, but we’re still in the top ten. Somehow we go to the top of the list again with ‘I hate to sit up straight’ – a query that boggles the mind as to why you’d want to say such a thing to Google in the first place. (Actually in this instance they said it to AOL search. AOL search – who are they? Perhaps AOL had been telling one of its customers to sit up straight? It’s the sort of restrictive thing they’re into, I think.)
To my amazement I’m in the top ten for ‘dating for everyone’, something that I’d hardly have thought to have written about, but apparently did, as I also did about religious jeans. How do I get into these sidetracks?
Back to number four for Franklin Taylor, that irritant to my Mozart playing. He was the editor of the edition of Mozart sonatas I’m currently playing from, and does some unbelievably silly things in terms of adding expression marks. Still, he was working in a period when the editors seemed to think they knew best about everything, including how Mozart would have added expression marks if he’d had the time. I remember reading Albert Schweitzer’s book on J S Bach. He was just as bad, complaining that Bach hadn’t done this, had done that and shouldn’t have, and so on. Schweitzer might have been a fairly clever chappie, but at 25 or so, he was hardly a match for the genius of J S B. Guess that’s the arrogance of youth.
Another composer turns up in the HitTail lists (that’s what I’m checking at the moment, in case you hadn’t figured it out). It’s our old friend Gareth Farr. The searcher apparently thought his name was double-barrelled: Gareth-Farr. Unfortunately that would leave Gareth without a first name, and what would his friends call him then?
And nearly last on our list tonight is yet another composer, this time, John Adams, he of the minimalist music. He whom I haven’t quite given room enough to grow accustomed to yet. And may still do so!
Finally, we get back to another request for crawling spelt as crowling. This time it’s ‘crowls in the water’. Well, we had Crowls in the water this morning, because both my wife and I had a bath. Does that count?
Google is brilliant at finding what you want, but it’s also brilliant at finding things that are so far from what you want that you wonder how it got there. Still, that’s the way search engines function, pretty much.
Somebody else was looking for my old friend, Arnold Bachop, the tenor. Just doing that brought up this blog twice, in first and second place, and then another post of mine on my older website.
Someone else wants to know about the waterfall scene in Clint Eastwood’s Play Misty For Me. I certainly don’t mention it anywhere in the post I wrote on that film, even though we came third in the Google stakes on that one. In fact, I don’t remember a waterfall scene in the movie at all.
Veno’s Lighting Cough Bottles was the next search query, and we came in number two on that, for once actually having all the words in the search query actually turn up in the same post! To my surprise the same thing happens with the query: Diana Crowl music. Google thought the best thing on offer was my post on Gerald Finzi, in which all three of those words appear, but which probably has nothing to do with what the searcher wanted.
We drop down the list in regard to a query about Generation C, but we’re still in the top ten. Somehow we go to the top of the list again with ‘I hate to sit up straight’ – a query that boggles the mind as to why you’d want to say such a thing to Google in the first place. (Actually in this instance they said it to AOL search. AOL search – who are they? Perhaps AOL had been telling one of its customers to sit up straight? It’s the sort of restrictive thing they’re into, I think.)
To my amazement I’m in the top ten for ‘dating for everyone’, something that I’d hardly have thought to have written about, but apparently did, as I also did about religious jeans. How do I get into these sidetracks?
Back to number four for Franklin Taylor, that irritant to my Mozart playing. He was the editor of the edition of Mozart sonatas I’m currently playing from, and does some unbelievably silly things in terms of adding expression marks. Still, he was working in a period when the editors seemed to think they knew best about everything, including how Mozart would have added expression marks if he’d had the time. I remember reading Albert Schweitzer’s book on J S Bach. He was just as bad, complaining that Bach hadn’t done this, had done that and shouldn’t have, and so on. Schweitzer might have been a fairly clever chappie, but at 25 or so, he was hardly a match for the genius of J S B. Guess that’s the arrogance of youth.
Another composer turns up in the HitTail lists (that’s what I’m checking at the moment, in case you hadn’t figured it out). It’s our old friend Gareth Farr. The searcher apparently thought his name was double-barrelled: Gareth-Farr. Unfortunately that would leave Gareth without a first name, and what would his friends call him then?
And nearly last on our list tonight is yet another composer, this time, John Adams, he of the minimalist music. He whom I haven’t quite given room enough to grow accustomed to yet. And may still do so!
Finally, we get back to another request for crawling spelt as crowling. This time it’s ‘crowls in the water’. Well, we had Crowls in the water this morning, because both my wife and I had a bath. Does that count?
Thursday, June 12, 2008
And Then They Came For Me - up and running!
I’ve been too busy to write in here for the last week, because the play we’ve been working on is now finally on, and there’s been the usual lead-up of extra rehearsals.
Last Saturday we had a really muddly rehearsal: people not available, or not turning up for nearly an hour or having to go early. The only thing achieved was a bit of tidying up of scenes with the people who did actually make it. So it was worthwhile, but not as good as it could have been. We went home earlier than intended as it was freezing cold, and one of the windows in the school assembly hall where we’ve been rehearsing wouldn’t shut.
Sunday I treated the Friends of the Opera Company to four of my piano pieces, including
the world premiere of one: Arnold Schoenberg plays with his grandchildren. (Had to check beforehand that he might actually have had any grandchildren; seems likely!) The pieces were intermingled with a bunch of songs presented by my old friend, Arnold Bachop; Erin Pickering, one of the stalwarts of Opera Alive when it was functioning, and now a superbly accomplished singer, with great diction and tremendous tone. She lives and teaches in Invercargill these days, which is kind of a pity. (For Dunedinites, that is.) There were two other singers, Nicola Steel and a young lady whose first name is Sarah, but whose surname has decided to go AWOL on me. It was an excellent concert, in fact, which even the high-powered wind outside couldn’t undermine. (The winds over the weekend were hectic.)
Monday we finally got into the theatre – the Globe, famous for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is its dilapidated state, something I remember from when I first had contact with it in the 1960s! It was probably better in those days, but it’s always been a place where you know an amateur carpenter was seriously at work. The theatre itself has steps up beside the seats, but none of them seem regular, and they’re likely to send an unwitting customer flying. The place needs a good overhaul, but it’s probably not going to happen, even though there’s a good committee that’s turned it around from a dead duck to a thriving little theatre.
We’re not using any scenery, so the black drapes are all exposed to view: with their various little holes and tears.
Anyway, the drapes and other oddities were the least of our problems on Monday. We’ve been rehearsing with the video behind us since we first began using it, and this has been fine. However, when we got to the theatre we found that the video projector was set up at the front of the stage (people sitting in the front seats in the Globe have their feet on the stage) and that meant that no one could pass in front of the screen while anything was being played on it. We tried to show the picture from the reverse but the screen wasn’t suitable for this. In the end we did two run-throughs of the play (it’s only 70 minutes long); the first was a major struggle as we worked out how to play around the video instead of getting in its way, and the second, while better, was still unsatisfactory – although we could have coped.
We all went home despondent. And I had a horrible time about four in the morning when I woke up stressed and feeling quite ill with it.
However, the father of two of the girls in the show (he’s also the husband of the woman who directs the Narnia plays – the next one of which has a read-through this Sunday !) came to the rescue, and by the time we arrived on Tuesday, for our second lot of run-throughs, the screen had been replaced with a back-projection job, had been set further back (giving us more room –the stage at the Globe isn’t large at the best of times) and was functioning wonderfully. Oh, yes, that’s right – on the Monday we’d had no amplified sound either! No wonder stress came rushing in!
So our Tuesday night rehearsals were as good dress rehearsals should be: everything in place, and only minor things to sort out. I stopped trying to direct, and concentrated on just being in the play itself, and everyone else pulled out all the stops and got on with their parts and did extremely well.
Wednesday was our first performance, and it went like a dream. Everything flowed: the interleaving video was always in the right place, and the cast upped the ante considerably. Comments from the audience were all very positive. We’d got to the point where we didn’t have any sense of whether it was working or not – a not uncommon feature of theatre productions, I’ve found – and to hear that people were in tears at the end, and that it came across as a very emotional piece was music to our rather knocked-around souls. (It’s been a bit of a trial, this production!)
When we got to the end, where we each place a candle on the floor of the stage, in silence, while the music in the background is heartrending, you couldn’t hear a peep from the audience. Great stuff! The scene with the candles was something again that didn’t seem to have the stuff of great drama in it, yet it works. Thanks, Mr Still, we should never have doubted your play!
Two more performances this morning, for mostly school audiences, and four more over the next couple of days. I can’t say this has been my favourite play of all time, but I’m very glad to see
that it’s proving its worth.
Incidentally, our producer (she who was the director before I got the job!) had contacted Eva Schloss, one of the two people who narrate throughout the play, on video. She emailed back to say she was pleased to hear about the play being produced in NZ. It’s the NZ premiere of the play, in fact.
The photo at the top is of Arnold Schoenberg, not Arnold Bachop, in case there's any confusion!
Last Saturday we had a really muddly rehearsal: people not available, or not turning up for nearly an hour or having to go early. The only thing achieved was a bit of tidying up of scenes with the people who did actually make it. So it was worthwhile, but not as good as it could have been. We went home earlier than intended as it was freezing cold, and one of the windows in the school assembly hall where we’ve been rehearsing wouldn’t shut.
Sunday I treated the Friends of the Opera Company to four of my piano pieces, including
the world premiere of one: Arnold Schoenberg plays with his grandchildren. (Had to check beforehand that he might actually have had any grandchildren; seems likely!) The pieces were intermingled with a bunch of songs presented by my old friend, Arnold Bachop; Erin Pickering, one of the stalwarts of Opera Alive when it was functioning, and now a superbly accomplished singer, with great diction and tremendous tone. She lives and teaches in Invercargill these days, which is kind of a pity. (For Dunedinites, that is.) There were two other singers, Nicola Steel and a young lady whose first name is Sarah, but whose surname has decided to go AWOL on me. It was an excellent concert, in fact, which even the high-powered wind outside couldn’t undermine. (The winds over the weekend were hectic.)Monday we finally got into the theatre – the Globe, famous for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is its dilapidated state, something I remember from when I first had contact with it in the 1960s! It was probably better in those days, but it’s always been a place where you know an amateur carpenter was seriously at work. The theatre itself has steps up beside the seats, but none of them seem regular, and they’re likely to send an unwitting customer flying. The place needs a good overhaul, but it’s probably not going to happen, even though there’s a good committee that’s turned it around from a dead duck to a thriving little theatre.
We’re not using any scenery, so the black drapes are all exposed to view: with their various little holes and tears.
Anyway, the drapes and other oddities were the least of our problems on Monday. We’ve been rehearsing with the video behind us since we first began using it, and this has been fine. However, when we got to the theatre we found that the video projector was set up at the front of the stage (people sitting in the front seats in the Globe have their feet on the stage) and that meant that no one could pass in front of the screen while anything was being played on it. We tried to show the picture from the reverse but the screen wasn’t suitable for this. In the end we did two run-throughs of the play (it’s only 70 minutes long); the first was a major struggle as we worked out how to play around the video instead of getting in its way, and the second, while better, was still unsatisfactory – although we could have coped.
We all went home despondent. And I had a horrible time about four in the morning when I woke up stressed and feeling quite ill with it.
However, the father of two of the girls in the show (he’s also the husband of the woman who directs the Narnia plays – the next one of which has a read-through this Sunday !) came to the rescue, and by the time we arrived on Tuesday, for our second lot of run-throughs, the screen had been replaced with a back-projection job, had been set further back (giving us more room –the stage at the Globe isn’t large at the best of times) and was functioning wonderfully. Oh, yes, that’s right – on the Monday we’d had no amplified sound either! No wonder stress came rushing in!
So our Tuesday night rehearsals were as good dress rehearsals should be: everything in place, and only minor things to sort out. I stopped trying to direct, and concentrated on just being in the play itself, and everyone else pulled out all the stops and got on with their parts and did extremely well.
Wednesday was our first performance, and it went like a dream. Everything flowed: the interleaving video was always in the right place, and the cast upped the ante considerably. Comments from the audience were all very positive. We’d got to the point where we didn’t have any sense of whether it was working or not – a not uncommon feature of theatre productions, I’ve found – and to hear that people were in tears at the end, and that it came across as a very emotional piece was music to our rather knocked-around souls. (It’s been a bit of a trial, this production!)
When we got to the end, where we each place a candle on the floor of the stage, in silence, while the music in the background is heartrending, you couldn’t hear a peep from the audience. Great stuff! The scene with the candles was something again that didn’t seem to have the stuff of great drama in it, yet it works. Thanks, Mr Still, we should never have doubted your play!
Two more performances this morning, for mostly school audiences, and four more over the next couple of days. I can’t say this has been my favourite play of all time, but I’m very glad to see
that it’s proving its worth.Incidentally, our producer (she who was the director before I got the job!) had contacted Eva Schloss, one of the two people who narrate throughout the play, on video. She emailed back to say she was pleased to hear about the play being produced in NZ. It’s the NZ premiere of the play, in fact.
The photo at the top is of Arnold Schoenberg, not Arnold Bachop, in case there's any confusion!
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
At the Dunedin Club
My friend, Arnold Bachop, the singer, and I performed some songs at the Dunedin Club a couple of weekends ago. I'd never visited this institution, even though it's been going since 1872 or thereabouts. (It resides in a house built by the famous Johnny Jones, known for whaling, amongst other things. He only lived there for about seven years.) There's probably no reason why I should ever have been in the Club. As its name implies it's intended as a place for members to join, and I suspect I wouldn't be willing to part out with the steep membership fee for the sake of hobnobbing with the hoi polloi.*We entered the hallway, which was wide enough to swallow up any one room in my house, and waited until the butler – sorry, the manager – came to acknowledge our presence. He wasn't at all formal, and told us that the Victoria League AGM was still taking place, and would we mind waiting. We’d come to sing to the Victoria League people.
So we read up on which worthies of the town were members, and noted that many of them were professional people making a good deal of money. The walls had a number of old paintings on them, scenic paintings that seemed to me to lack any real distinction, as well as a sketch of the house by Shona McFarlane, and portraits of Jones and his wife. Cheery-looking Victorian couple.
There was a Suggestion Book on a hall table (some of the other furniture in the hall would collect a very pretty penny at an auction). It dated back to the first years of the Club, and some of the 19th century handwriting took a little deciphering. Most of the suggestions were fairly basic, relating to the hanging up of coats, or umbrellas, or the like. As time went on the suggestions didn't get any less down-to-earth, but perhaps that's what suggestion books are all about. Avoiding dealing with long discussions about the banal in a club meeting.
I took a quick trip up the stairs – which creaked with their age – and glanced around the upper hall. The floorboards were rather uneven, and noisy: certainly you wouldn't want to be taking a quiet trip to the loo in the middle of the night.
Meanwhile the Victoria League continued with its AGM. The Victoria League, I later learned, began at the beginning of the 20th century, and was most well-known in the early days as a group to help men during the First World War. It opened clubs and hostels, and provided beds for both soldiers and their wives. During the Second World War, it worked in a similar capacity, and since then has been strong on assisting students in need.
The League in Dunedin has seen its hey-day, I suspect, as most of the members are in their sixties and upwards. For them it acts as something of an ongoing social club. However, the Victoria League worldwide is still a valuable society.
Finally we went into the dining room and did the songs, which went well. Afterwards, the husband of the president of the League took us around some of the back section of the Club. A long corridor has cartoons and caricatures by Tremain and Syd Scales and others of many of the past presidents and members. The billiard room at the back of the building is big enough to encompass not just a room of our house, but the whole ground floor. Two enormous billiard tables stand waiting for members.
The place has been done up very well over the last decades, helped by the fact that the Club has architects and men with some ready money willing to put their efforts towards maintaining the place in style. Upstairs the rooms have been altered considerably, making them more hospitable for guests. Supposedly the men’s toilets downstairs, which our host was keen to show us, are original, although if that’s the case, they’re very well preserved. Apropos of that, the most extravagant toilets still standing in Dunedin must be those at the old Art Gallery. The building was raised for the South Seas Exhibition back in the twenties (I think) and the urinals are a sight to see (and to pee at!)
* Love this phrase, but I now realise it's inaccurate, of course: the hoi polloi are the great unwashed, not the well to do...
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Mr Bachop turns 70
Today was long-time friend Arnold Bachop’s 70th birthday. Arnold, a lyric tenor, has been singing for as long as I can remember; in fact, I did my first and only radio broadcast accompanying him back in the early sixties, and by that stage he’d already performed on the radio a number of times.In the last two decades he and I have been involved firstly with Opera Alive, a group of twenty to twenty-five young people who would put on a musical variety show (often with a them, which wasn’t always strongly adhered to), and then when Opera Alive disbanded, we began putting on shows featuring the music of particular composers, such as Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and so on.
It was good to be included in the his ‘nearest and dearest’ group today – the group included lots of relations, of course, as well as pupils and other singers, and accompanists like me, people who’ve worked with Arnold over the years.
There were a number of grandchildren there, including one little boy who, during one of the songs that were presented, walked up behind the lady accompanist and lifted up the back of her jacket and tried to put his head under! Very disconcerting for the accompanist, but she coped admirably.
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