Читать книгу Degas' Dust - Carnie Matisonn - Страница 11

I started playing in Dr Aronowsky’s Jewish Guild Orchestra at about the age of fourteen. Among the fifty-two members in his orchestra were great musicians such as Jos De Groen on bassoon, his son Jos on clarinet and the oboe; Dr Giuseppe Vitali on trumpet; Rudi Ursher on trombone; a few Wits University mathematics lecturers, including the inimitable George Buric; the violinist and composer Ronald Rapport; and a pianist and percussionist who later became a respected conductor in England. I was, of course, the youngest – there were about three others of high school age, but they were several years my senior.

From that first audition, Solly had been sure I would eventually become a part of his orchestral mix – entrusted with minor roles I could handle at the beginning, but allowed to grow in skill, confidence and presence.

None of this struck me, like much else that happened at the time, as particularly unusual. It was just how life was. Our rehearsals were on Sunday mornings for three to four hours and concerts were usually on Saturday nights and sometimes on Sundays. We were expected to practise on our own the rest of the time.

I also played for an operatic company while still in my teens, in the school orchestra and in small ensembles on weeknights if one of the members provided me with transport. Because it did so much charity work and because of my love for Solly, I played in the Guild orchestra without remuneration – but all other gigs were for money. Every bit helped, though my main interest was simply to be part of a talented group, to recreate performances from the dreams of the great composers.

My material needs were mostly limited to food; I didn’t care much about clothes or anything else. As long as I had one change of clothing and a jersey, I was content. Transport was usually hitch-hiking or walking.

I practised at least two hours a day and up to four if there was no concert. I never did much homework – and intensely disliked everything about school, mainly because of the narrow-minded attitudes of many of the teachers and the bravado and pseudo-­machismo of the select group of anti-Semitic bullies who considered Jew-baiting their favourite sport.

Nobody in the orchestra commented much on my age and I gravitated towards those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-­four. We were mainly interested in playing and spoke mostly about music and what we thought about performing guest artists and visiting conductors. Most importantly, we made sure we had fun together at after-concert parties.

The orchestra took the place of family in my life and was always a happy, familiar sanctum. Few of our concerts took place in Johannesburg, as we often accompanied high-profile soloists who enjoyed a fan base outside of the city. Our venues were mostly civic centres and city and town halls, and we could sometimes travel together for hours on the bus. Outbound journeys were jovial affairs with lots of noise from the brass section. After performing, we could arrive back in Joburg as late as 2am. We used a luxury coach with rows of double seating. It wasn’t unusual, in the dark hours of the night, for a carefully chosen companion, such as – in my case – the charming and talented eighteen-year-old blonde clarinettist, Vanessa, to offer some respite from a frantic night.

I played in the orchestras several nights a week, often returning to my caravan in the early hours of the morning, though on many a concert night I would stay with Vanessa, despite her being older than me. Neither of us ever thought about that or commented on it.

To Vanessa and me, it was all about the music – the melodious expression of thought, emotion and wisdom. She and I played to hear and feel the sorrow of the composers. I played to feel in touch with myself and experience goodness. Music was harmony and the beautiful Vanessa complemented that harmony to create a kind of musical symmetry with me. Naturally, I also liked her figure, elegance, poise and femininity. She had the demeanour of a quietly spoken English lady, though she was of Dutch descent.

This, my first love, was the purest and most uncomplicated romance I would ever have. Other than the physical side, our relationship revolved around the orchestra, its music and what being in the orchestra exposed us to. Our discussions were almost always only about composers, the interpretation of the music, our sense of its dynamics and how we experienced any alternative interpretations under the batons of different conductors.

In a way, we thought our lives were a song, with all of its notes, phrases and nuances brought to life on each intimate ride in our dark bus on those lonely roads. We wrote tunes and songs of our own. We were friends and young lovers, but expected nothing from each other beyond knowing that, as long as the orchestra was the shared canvas we could apply ourselves to, we could happily mix upon it. We knew each other there alone – in the concert halls and on the bus. And in that space, words were superfluous; we wanted only music and our time together.

But we also knew that, once the common denominator of the orchestra and our music were no longer the most important things in our lives, we would drift apart. And that would be fine.

I made friends during that time, though, who would go on to remain a part of my life for all its remaining decades. I befriended Ken Koransky in an orchestra pit in my teens and he was next to me at my sixtieth birthday party in Cape Town. He went on to have a stunning career as one of the world’s finest, though perhaps under-­recognised, tenors – he toured many of the great opera houses of Europe and America and dazzled audiences everywhere he went. I once heard him sing the words from a restaurant menu with the great anthropologist Phillip Tobias in a way that was so brilliant, beautiful and funny, it wanted to make you both laugh and cry at once. He is still my close friend today.

In the orchestra, in our youth, there had always been a lot of laughter and good humour. The biggest jokers in the pack of fifty-­two were usually the brass players. On one occasion, just before a performance at the Brakpan City Hall in honour of the then Prime Minister John Vorster – a former Nazi sympathiser who’d been jailed for his treasonous views against Winston Churchill and Jan Smuts during the Second World War – Freddie Daus, the French horn player, put a few soapsuds into the soloist’s trumpet. It had been lying next to his chair on stage before the curtain call for us to file on to the stage. The opening bars of his rendition of Carnival of Venice were a mix of gurgling music and soap bubbles blown in the direction of the music critics, gathered bureaucrats and townsfolk. Giuseppi Vitali, our esteemed soloist, recovered in style and went on to captivate the audience with his triple-tonguing rendition of the trumpet classic.

At the end of that evening’s entertainment we were invited for dinner at the mayor’s parlour. The mayor’s opening praise song to the prime minister – the evening’s keynote speaker – was enough of a distraction for us to sneak off to overcome the “Brakpan drought”.

We brought our empty instrument cases and raided the counter behind the bar of enough booze to fill most of them. Several musicians carried their instruments around in their hands and, as soon as Vorster ended his boring, patronising speech, we offered him an impromptu performance of “Why was he born so beautiful, why was he born at all…”

Solly’s embarrassment was palpable and, in an attempt to dissociate himself from our exhibition of disdain for our humourless head of state, Solly ordered us out of the mayor’s chambers.

We gratefully accepted and returned to the city hall with our ill-gotten gains and had a jam session while opening every one of our purloined bottles of beer, wine and spirits. Our music became ever wilder, with the brass and woodwind instruments dominating the afterparty – until the doors of the town hall were forced open by a group of passing bikers with a nose for a good party. We noticed their arrival, but by then we were beyond caring.

They began dancing and helping themselves to what was left of the drinks. Finally, Solly appeared from behind the stage and ordered us to pack up and head for the bus.

By the time we rolled into Johannesburg in the early hours of the morning, the younger members of the orchestra, me certainly among them, looked like a comatose collection of degenerates – in whose company I felt totally at peace.

For years, many of the people in that orchestra had been in search of accolades, to be recognised by the critics as serious exponents of classical music – but the biker gang had shown more simple, honest, unencumbered and open appreciation for our drunken renditions of music than we’d ever felt before or probably ever would again.