I was concerned that my blog-friend of many years, Neil Whitfield, was not responding to a comment I had posted to his blog (he needed to approve it before it would appear, which he would normally have done quite promptly). No fresh posts had appeared since the post of 23 December on which I had attempted to comment. That post recounted a visit to the Wollongong hospital after a bout of what he said had been food poisoning. There was also an unresolved issue of black vomit during the “food poisoning” episode. As the days went on I became more concerned.
Although I feel I know Neil quite well,* we did not often meet in real life (“irl”). I think we met-up 3 or 4 times, and I took him to see Madama Butterfly when I had a spare ticket. In 2004 he helped arrange for MC, a former student of his with whom he was on good terms, to mind our house and our cat. I never even met MC (who was, nevertheless, a totally satisfactory cat-and-house-minder). Once Neil invited me to a Chinese New Year party.
We only really exchanged emails when there was something to be said that couldn’t be said by comments on blogs. I did find a phone number on an ancient email which may or may not have been current. I didn’t even know his address although I had a rough idea.
Yesterday I rang Wollongong Hospital but all they could tell me over the phone was that he was not a present patient.
After a bit of google-street-view sleuthing to match the picture of Neil’s apartment block on his blog with an actual address, I phoned the police and asked them to do a welfare check. They went there quite promptly and one of the officers attending phoned me. I didn’t know the unit number. I suggested that either the hospital or the ambulance service, who had taken him there on 22/12, could provide that.
Within the hour, the constable rang me again and told me that they had broken in and found Neil dead.(Almost certainly she said “passed away.”)
It wasn’t a surprise but it was still a shock.
The police asked me about next of kin. I was pretty sure that the person that Neil would want to be informed was his former partner, M. Neil called him that on his blog out of respect for his privacy. In what turned out to be his fourth last post , touching on M’s invitation to Neil to go to his place for Christmas, Neil named him, maybe for the first time on the blog. M had been the host of the Chinese New Year party I went to so many years ago.
Also present at that party had been the author, Nicholas Jose. I knew that Jose had met M in China when Jose was Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Beijing from 1987-1990. I thought the odds were pretty good that Jose would have contact details for M.
Without giving all the background, I suggested the police contact Jose, who ought to be reasonably easy to track down. As apparently proved to be the case. I then asked the constable to pass on my number to Jose and ask him to call me, which he did later in the evening. He did have contact details for M, and I finally got to speak to M today.
It turns out Neil had already discussed funeral arrangements with M and M has been able to pass the news to Neil’s relatives.
I would like to let MC know but he has been a bit harder for me to track down, probably because, as a teacher, he maintains a low online profile. I had already emailed him when I was worried and received no response. It was a 2004 gmail address built on a Shakespeare reference. Though the email didn’t actually bounce such email addresses are often only infrequently checked. I could see where he was teaching last year, but it’s not a good time of year for ringing up schools.
*[obvious tense issue, I’ve decided to leave it as it is.]
On Friday night to the SOH to hear the SSO. I expect that to be my last concert or live event for the year.
Because it was primarily billed as “The Rite of Spring” I arrived not even knowing what the other items were to be. I heard someone say “Saint-Saens” and had a pianist’s Pavlovian drool at the prospect of a piano concerto.
The actual program was:
ELIZABETH YOUNAN Nineteen Seventy-Three, 50 Fanfares Commission SAINT-SAËNS Cello Concerto No.1 STRAVINSKY The Rite of Spring
Vassily Petrenko was the conductor; Johannes Moser was the cello soloist.
The Younan was one of the “Fifty Fanfares” which the SSO has been programming for a few years now. Apparently there are still a few more to come. My feeling is that these “fanfares” have been most successful when composers have paid less attention to the idea of a fanfare as something brief and chipper. There is a limit to how much slightly generic contemporary orchestral music I need to hear – not because it’s not nice to hear it but because any item on a program displaces a ghostly universe of other possibilities. I enjoyed it without really gaining a clear impression of Younan as a composer herself.
It turned out that the Cello concerto was a quite a familiar work. There is a thread of pastiche running through it. Each time the orchestra played this lick I could feel it tugging:
Still trying to tie down exactly what piece that concluding Phrygian-ish b-c-f-e-d# brings to mind. Too many candidates swirl in my mind for me to be certain and it could just be a musical commonplace.
The other more obvious “pastiche” is the middle “Minuet.” It would be nice to think that Camille dreamed this up whilst swanning round St Petersburg in a frock with Tchaikovsky but the chronology of his 1877 trip to Russia suggests otherwise (S-S’s cello concerto dates from 1874) and if it’s a question of influence Tchaikovsky’s variations on a rococo theme came after. Such pastiche was obviously a “thing” at about this time: in the Minuet I indulged my own reminiscences of scene 1 of Act III of Massenet’s Manon, (1884).
On account of my newly-frugal seat at the side of the stage I had to make my own adjustments for the balance (notoriously problematic in cello concertos) but I still enjoyed it. How could I not?
My side-of-stage spot came into its own for the Rite. The truly enormous orchestra included a full panoply of wind and brass. The horn section was even dotted with a couple of players doubling Wagner horn – not the first thing you would expect from Stravinsky. In the relatively brief moments when they played, I couldn’t get much of an impression of them. Their inclusion seemed more a part of the general over-the-top-ness.
There were two timpanists. The principal timpanist had 5 timpani. (I couldn’t fully see the second timpanist’s set-up.) At one point he had to creep out from behind these to tune the fifth, smaller, drum which he couldn’t reach from behind the others.
With so many players on stage augmenting each section to the max I was prompted to some meditation on gender balance in the orchestra. There was a time when there was a pretty settled gender division of labour. I recall a performance, possibly even of the Rite of Spring, when every player to the right (from the orchestra’s perspective) of and behind John Cran, the long-term principal bassoon, was a man. That is no longer the case. In particular for some time now the horn section has been infiltrated by female players. The twist is that, after many years, we are now seeing some men in the flute section. For a long time the best a male flautist in Sydney could hope for was a gig as piccolo in the Opera and Ballet Orchestra. Make of that what you will. [Edit: I spoke/wrote too soon – turns out this was principal flute Joshua Batty’s last gig with the SSO). (Correction: last gig as principal; he seems to be going freelance, and still has some casual gigs lined up for next year.)
At interval I had run into my friend and former piano teacher, P, and her husband. They told me that they had come on the particular recommendation of their son, whom they have successfully bred up to be a musician, now living in the north of England. He told them that Petrenko (who has just finished a 15-year tenure at Liverpool) was a conductor to watch. He certainly was, and it was a cracking performance.
On Bachtrack, Zoltan Szabo, whose opinions I respect, was less enthusiastic. It seems his complaint was mostly about a sacrifice of orchestral timbre on the altar of the “Riot,” and he had a detailed scoresheet to bring to account:
“However, in general, emphasising the strong dynamic contrasts prevailed at the cost of the blossoming of orchestral colours. The brilliant Introduction, mostly on woodwind instruments, sounded hesitant. A number of entries, such as the ten-part divisi harmonics just before the Dance of the Earth, felt uncoordinated and the divided glorious viola solos in Spring Rounds lacked focus.”
Maybe things had improved between the first outing which he attended and the Friday. Or maybe I just wasn’t looking for these particular points.
I did think that Matthew Wilkie’s performance of the opening bassoon solo was a bit plain, though that is partly a matter of taste and could have been a result of a slightly muted start. (Afternote: it sounded better on Saturday night’s live broadcast as did the Grieg Holberg Sarabande encore.) But where is wunderkind Todd Gibson-Cornish, the actual principal bassoon? (He succeeded Wilkie who is now “principal emeritus.”) I can’t remember when I last saw TG-C, and he has obviously been off playing in London from time to time this year. What’s the point of having a principal bassoon who doesn’t turn up for the Rite of Spring?
Before the concert I had a brief chat with Thomasina who was kind enough to say that she missed (on account of my blog-somnolence) my occasional commentary on concerts in Sydney. Thomasina’s last post, I might add, was in 2012 and I miss hers too!
This is as good an excuse as any for a “wrap” of the year.
After the covid devastation of 2020-23 (some hangover from the main years), I managed this year to get to about 36 events. This included one play, one ballet (I snapped up cheap last minute tickets to Alice in Wonderland), 12.6 performances of “operas” (I’m including staged oratorios in this; the .6 is for Gilgamesh which I snuck into late), and 11 SSO concerts, one of those Víkingur Ólafsson’s performance of the Goldberg Variations. (I also had a little flurry of church going associated with the completion of the new organ at St James King Street, and even went to a free organ recital at the Sydney Town Hall.)
Possibly the most remarkable aspect of my event-going this year is that I managed to see Puccini’s Il Tabarro five times – twice at (free! yay!) performances put on at the National Maritime Museum as part of the Sydney Festival, and three times as part of Il Trittico put on by Opera Australia in July. I do not expect to ever repeat this.
These days I mostly book $49 “point seats” for the opera. These have their own charm, especially the very front ones where you can feel as though you are in your own private box. One can adjust for the partial view by going twice – once on each side. You need to get in early for these. I indulged in slightly better seats to go with D to my third performance of Il Trittico. Oh yes we can scoff at Puccini, but with the foundation already laid (especially for Il Tabarro) this was probably my most beguiling opera experience this year.
Other highlights of the year have included a spot (a last minute treat from a friend whose wife was unable to go) in the middle of the front row for the choir of King’s College Cambridge, as well as an attendance at the general rehearsal for Pinchgut’s Julius Caesar. For beguilement this came close to the third “Il Trittico” – Carla Blackman’s rendition on natural horn of the obbligato in Va tacito was for me a milestone in the standard of performance on this instrument in Sydney. (This early rehearsal snippet/teaser gives a foretaste but the realised execution was at another level.) Another friend’s indisposition meant that I was able to see a second performance of Watershed, the semi-staged “oratorio” about Dr Duncan’s murder and its aftermath.
But back to last night.
When Johannes Moser was announcing his encore (an all-cello arrangement of the sarabande from Grieg’s Holberg Suite; the accompanying cellos a bit too glutinous for my taste) he thanked the audience for coming in the face of the evening’s adverse weather. The fortitude of the SSO audience was nothing compared to the poncho-clad crowds who had come for an event on the opera house steps. Both concerts finished at about the same time, and so we all joined the exodus at the end. The outdoor crowd had obviously had an excellent time, but I was also struck by some of the outfits they were wearing. They looked like a “queer-friendly” crowd. There were a lot of men sporting a kind of mesh shirt. I still had no idea who the act had been.
At Circular Quay the platform was packed. I took the first train, though I would have to change at Newtown for a train to Lewisham where I had driven on account of the current shut-down of the Bankstown line. I found myself in a crowded carriage. As well as a few mesh-shirted types as previously mentioned there was a group of 6 or 7 boys or young men. They were all “non-Anglo” and my best guess as to their background was that they might be Afghan (unlikely really), apart from one who was probably Chinese background. Some had wisps of facial hair. They were mostly of a fairly slight build. One had the (surely ironic) legend “Visit Rwanda” on the back of his shirt. They weren’t with any girls. They joked about with each other but not roughly or rudely. Other than the Chinese-ish one whose hair could well have been resistant to this treatment, they all sported a distinctive hairdo, with a kind of layered bob at the back, and a frizzled perm at the top and the front. (My terminology here very ill-formed on account of my own baldness.) This was obviously a thing for them because I caught more than one of them giving the permed front bit a bounce and admiring its reflection in the carriage windows. The hairdo was part of what made it difficult for me to reach any view as to their background otherwise, other than that it seemed to be at odds with it.
I did dare to ask them, as I got off at Newtown and they continued further west, if they all had the same hairdresser, and they told me they did. Lamely I joked that (on account of my conspicuous lack of hair) I was envious, and that it was “a good look.”
They were friendly to me but they must also have thought I was pretty ignorant. It wasn’t until I got home that I discovered that the outdoor concert had been given by Troye Sivan (links to review with pics), and the mystery of the hairdos, as well as the mesh shirts, was solved.
I regret I didn’t dare speak to that bunch of fanboys a bit earlier. I like to hope that their homeward trip to the western fastnesses of voting-no-to-gay-marriage “ethnic” Sydney augurs well for the Australia of the future.
Stumbling on melons 