George Crumb’s mesmerising 1983 Processional, and Michael Tippett, wild-eyed and confrontational in his Piano Sonata No 2, attempted to take on Beethoven at his own game. BBC Radio 3 broadcast the recital the following afternoon – or part of it, their cack-handed scheduling forcing them to omit the Crumb. Close-miked to edit out the weather, the broadcast gave little sense of the thrills and spills of actually being there. It’s an ill wind…
GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON ROCKING INTO YOUR 80S
JULIE HOWDEN
Summer knight: Roland Wood as Sir John Falstaff in Verdi’s Falstaff
Orchestra’s opening concert offered us a rare chance to hear in its entirety the miracle that is Mendelssohn’s incidental music to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, complete with extracts from the play, delivered with her own beguiling musicality by Dame Harriet Walter. The moment the Mendelssohn started, the heavens opened. Yet, strange to report, the downpour helped make the occasion. This is a play where Oberon’s rages cause ‘every pelting river to overflow its continents’; where ‘the nine men’s morris is filled up with mud’. I imagine Mendelssohn, who loved Edinburgh and was no stranger to the vagaries of the Scottish weather, would have been enchanted. Less welcoming was the festival’s improvised chamber-music venue in the old university courtyard on South Bridge. Here I experienced complete aural wipeout during a violin-and-piano recital, as the rain thundered into the uninsulated plexiglass roof. I fled after the first sonata, my £32, more or less literally, down the drain. The following day, in greenhouse conditions under a burning sun, I heard the Zehetmair Quartet give superb accounts of two Brahms string quartets. Later in the week, the wind arrived – a stiff north-westerly – causing an untethered door in the adjacent Law Faculty to clatter and creak through the final pages of Steven Osborne’s elemental account of Beethoven’s last piano sonata. Not that it mattered. We were already well out of our comfort zone, such was the nature of a fascinatingly devised and thrillingly realised programme in which a Schubert impromptu morphed into 68 The Oldie October 2021
Quem di diligunt adulescens moritur – ‘He whom the gods esteem dies young’ – has been the unofficial motto of the music business. If you were a proper rock ’n’ roller, you didn’t remember the Sixties. Real hellraisers were in the 27 Club along with Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain. Plane crashes took Buddy Holly aged 22, Otis Redding aged 26 and Patsy Cline at 31. Ian Curtis of Joy Division hanged himself aged 23. Karen Carpenter died of a heart attack, aged 32. Dennis Wilson drowned at 39. John Lennon was shot dead aged 40. The list is long. But the list is far longer of those who have made smaller headlines and older bones. The Rolling Stones are a case in point. Bryan Jones drowned in a swimming pool aged 27, but the late Charlie Watts, a man who described his career as ‘four decades of seeing Mick’s bum running around in front of me’, is more typical of the industry.
Hope I die after I get old: Charlie Watts died at 80
‘Hi, honey, I’m not home’
Papa was a rolling stone, and then Grandpa was – now even Great-Grandpa can be a Rolling Stone (Mick Jagger became one in 2014, aged just 70). Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Neil Diamond are all around 80 – the reasonably ripe old age at which Watts died. Watts hated Glasto and didn’t like festivals, far preferring jazz. His Desert Island Discs, with Tony Hancock, Frank Sinatra and Charlie Parker among his picks, is worth a listen. Fame was never the spur. Nor girls. He married Shirley in 1964 and hated women ‘chasing me down the road’. He was the opposite of a burn-thecandle rocker. When he and Bill Wyman decided to grow beards, he said, ‘The effort left us exhausted.’ He would describe his long career with the Stones as an accident. ‘It was just another band. I thought it would last a year, three years, and then I stopped counting.’ And ‘the problem with the Rolling Stones was – you saw them in the newspapers.’ The morning after he died, the Today programme closed to a medley of Stones hits. I was doing the washing-up and I stood at the sink motionless as shivers went up and down my spine. I listened to his drumming properly for the first time and realised that every time I danced to the Stones, I was dancing not to Mick’s vocals but to the beat of Watts’s drum. What a very fine drummer this modest, dapper, Savile Row-suited man was. ‘I just like to be in there right in the front and very loud,’ he said. I would say, ‘May he rest in peace’ – but from the sounds of it, given the choice, he’d prefer a nice bit of jazz. RIP Charles Robert Watts (2nd June 1941-24th August 2021)
