A small hiccup in Vienna was the sudden illness of the TSO’s principal percussionist. Russell Hartenberger, who was on the tour as part of the percussion section, had to step in as a replacement. The piece was Beethoven’s Seventh, a highly rhythmic symphony with a very prominent role for the timpani. I stood on a corner of the empty stage while Russell sweated alone through the percussion parts on such short notice. This was not the rep that he usually played. I knew him best as a key original player on Steve Reich’s 18 Musicians. When he had mastered the Beethoven he approached me and asked if I would photograph him with one of the golden caryatids that fronted each column in the hall. These huge women had cantilevered conical breasts aimed aggressively at the audience. Their putative function was to disperse sound in a hall famous for its acoustics. The combination of those breasts with Hartenberger’s small bald head made for a curious photograph.
We got talking and I told him how much his playing and Reich’s piece had meant to me when doing that first book. I confessed that I’d several times been in a room with Reich but never felt comfortable approaching him about his composition and the role it had played in my life. Russell thought that was a shame, Steve would have liked it.
Almost two decades later I was having lunch in an Asian restaurant on Gerrard Street East when a posse of percussionists walked in. As I knew a couple of them well they stopped by my table. Russell Hartenberger and Ryan Scott, remembering how much I loved Reich’s 18 Musicians, told me that they were rehearsing that very piece only a couple of blocks away for a celebration of Reich’s 80th birthday. “Come over after lunch; it’s only three blocks from here.” Ryan promised to leave the rehearsal hall door unlocked so that I could get in and Hartenberger promised to introduce me to Reich.
I went. I got to hear the entire piece twice before Reich told the ensemble, “You’ve nailed it.” Then Russell made my introduction and I got to tell the composer that I’d listened to his hour-long piece over a hundred times in the space of three months some 40 years earlier. He looked at me as if I was deranged.
However that night in Vienna after I’d photographed Russell with the breasts there was a horrible moment when the orchestra stumbled in one of the Beethoven movements and the whole thing unraveled in front of a very knowing Viennese audience. What could be worse? They pulled it together after a few bars but it was humiliating. And this was the same band that had, only a week before, made Berliners in von Karajan’s famous Philharmonie Hall cry.
***
We’re told there is no longer a place on Earth where one can go and hear only natural sounds. The soundscape is invariably disturbed by a distant train, a passing plane or traffic roar. It is always shocking after hiking deep in the northern bush to reach a highway and experience the brutalist roar of tires on pavement until it again becomes familiar. We live in a river of noise.
I’ve been porch-sitting for several hours watching late afternoon become dusk before slipping into night. Last light licks treetops on the far shore before the overtaking night sips the final colours from the day. In two hours a full moon will rise. No loon calls, no gull cries, the air is still, there are no waves and no music from the shore. All I hear is the seashell noise of my own blood moving. I’ve found a place that doesn’t exist.
When the TSO reached Budapest on its European tour we were installed in a modern hotel on the Pest side of the Danube. Then the whole orchestra was bussed to the residence of the local Canadian ambassador for a welcome reception. This diplomat proved to be an attractive middle-aged woman with a much younger boyfriend and an impressive collection of African art. The house filled up rapidly — the orchestra had over a hundred musicians. As I made my way through the crowded rooms two players from the bass section excitedly hustled me into the large living room to take a photograph. Four of the youngest female players in the string section were sitting in a demure row on a large beige sofa. Behind them on a window ledge stood a large African sculpture of a tribesman with an enormous erection. None of the young women had noticed. This juxtaposition was what I was to memorialize in a photograph.
There was a problem. I couldn’t get a clear view of the sculpture’s crotch as it was partially hidden by one of the violinist’s big hair. The solution — reposition the figure. I passed my cameras to one of the bass players and unobtrusively slipped behind the sofa to inch the sculpture into a more revealing position. As I did so the huge erection fell out of its socket and rolled across the reception room floor and vanished under another sofa. The whole room burst into guffaws, the female fiddlers cottoned on to the setup and swanned out of the room no longer the butt of the joke. I was.
***
The frog’s mouth opens and closes in a silent scream as its body slowly slips down the gullet of a four-foot black water snake. I watch this execution from my skiff halfway down the river. The frog’s glassy eye shouts terror and pain. The snake’s say nothing.
In Budapest it was my turn to find the après concert entertainment for a cabal of players from the string section. I wandered the streets of Buda, occasionally collaring a likely looking local and explaining my mission. Most suggestions were dull but a young woman suggested a bar deep under the Danube as a surefire evening’s entertainment. When she explained why I knew it was indeed the spot. After the evening’s performance was put to bed I led a dozen players down a winding set of stairs beneath a plaza by the river. Deep underground was a large cave-like room with a bar, stage, lights, loud music and the wildest drag show I’d ever seen.
2007
A call from a former colleague at the Toronto symphony office takes me down to the rehearsal hall of Toronto’s new ballet/opera house, the Four Seasons Centre. I’m to observe a young conductor from Quebec, get acquainted and take a few photographs in preparation for a subsequent studio portrait session. One of the photographs will be on an album cover. I’ve photographed a number of conductors at work but this new guy, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, is different. He’s tremendously musical, so full of song and wonderfully persuasive and charming in front of an orchestra. The hall’s players seem completely seduced and work hard to please.
Some days later we do a studio session. Yannick arrives with his boyfriend and we work hard for an hour or so. Although I suspect he’s somewhat of a musical conservative it strikes me that Yannick is just what the TSO needs — someone youthful, charming and dynamic to dilute the rows of gray hair in Roy Thomson Hall with a younger audience. However, in no time at all he is scooped up by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, then Rotterdam’s and by 2012 he’s fronting the legendary Philadelphia Orchestra. Soon he will direct the orchestra at the Met. We don’t move fast in this country. And we still wait for our own to be validated elsewhere.
2002
Everyone knows that Nashville is a music town. What most don’t know is that it’s not just ground zero for the commercial country music industry, it’s also home to blues, folk, rock and a very respectable symphony orchestra. As a result of work in Toronto with the TSO I’ve been flown down to Tennessee to photograph for a Nashville Symphony fundraiser.
They need a new hall. The current one is located in one of those mid-20th century brutalist cultural centres that mix spaces for the visual arts, books, theatre and music in a singularly compromised facility. When I climb to the high seats at the back of the concert hall during the first rehearsal I instantly understand the problem. With every forte passage in the music the ribbed metal pan ceiling rattles on the open web steel joists supporting it. It creates a junkyard clatter. Horrible.
The band’s conductor, Kenneth Schermerhorn, is a former Leonard Bernstein protégé. He’s chosen to mount a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as the cornerstone of the big fundraising gala. It will also be a sunset performance for him. He’s in his 70s and retirement looms. He dies not long afterward at 75.
I will photograph for a week as he marshals and rehearses the substantial forces — full orchestra and large ch
orus — for the realization of the performance. It’s hard work for them, it’s a pleasure for me. Compared with Toronto, Nashville’s players are young and the band is small, only around 80 players. But it has vigour and it’s wonderful to feel the performance come together hour by hour, day by day. Toward the end of the week the chorus joins rehearsals and the whole endeavour begins to cohere. I spend the evening hours after daytime rehearsals at the country music bars downtown or at the Bluebird Café where songwriters and players from the region come in to introduce their newest songs and test audience reaction. It’s another kind of rehearsal.
My first job is to visit the town’s best tailor with Schermerhorn to choose the clothing for photography. As the hall is dark and I’ll work with long lenses I’ll have to push process the black-and-white 35mm film to extreme speeds, often over ISO 6000. Despite this, when the commemorative book is eventually printed the pictures look wonderful. Even more surprising is their impact when these miniature camera images are used to fill whole billboards along the interstate. From a moving car at 50 yards they manage to be arresting.
When the big performance arrives on the final weekend I get to see one difference between Americans and Canadians. Nashville’s elite step right up to the plate. Within hours of the gala launch they’ve already written cheques for well over a third of the total millions required. Canadians would have sat on their wallets waiting for government to pony up most of the dough. It’s not long before all the required money is raised. A great little orchestra will get the hall it deserves.
2000
I come from a long line of Anglican ministers on my mother’s father’s side. These Irish protestants went to Dublin’s Trinity College for generations and then joined the clergy. Some of them crossed the Atlantic to establish parishes in the New World. Thus as children my sister and I were marched to service every Sunday at 11.
I had a brief career as an altar boy. I’d rise at 6:30 and rush to church on my bicycle, slip into my cassock and surplice and meet the minister in the little room beside the organ bellows. The seven a.m. communion service required me to kneel beside the altar for three quarters of an hour and then abruptly rise to my feet to assist with the wine and wafers. Almost invariably I’d stand, see stars and sparks, then faint dead away. After a year of disrupting the service I was seconded to choir duty at 11. That summer it was decided that I should get some polishing at Trinity College Choir School with the great ecclesiastical composer Healey Willan. I went. I hated it. After a subsequent brief career groping choirgirls in the organ bellows room I finally quit. The minister’s rage at my departure was such that my parents ceased to be churchgoers.
Decades later I was sitting in a bar on the outskirts of Vienna drinking with the bass section of the Toronto Symphony. Being the tour’s photographer is a job I love. I’d been the orchestra’s photographer on and off for a number of years. My first assignment was back in the early Andrew Davis days. I was to photograph him for overhead transit ads on the subway and streetcars. As it was early December I was to do it during a Messiah dress rehearsal minus the chorus. The orchestra launched into the Handel and I launched into the string section to get a good angle on Davis. After 30 minutes someone in the back desks of the section raised her hand in complaint. Andrew stopped the band and turned to her.
“I can’t concentrate. The photographer is singing.”
The concertmaster stood up and turned to her.
“Yes, I can hear him too. He knows the music and he’s in tune.”
Andrew waved his stick and the rehearsal continued.
In the Vienna bar I’m sitting next to bassist Ed Tait who hasn’t drunk for years because of health concerns. This evening as we’re near the end of the tour he’s decided to have a wee dram. We get to talking and discover that we’d been classmates many decades ago at Healey Willan’s Trinity Choir School. As the drams got less wee it was decided that when we return to Toronto we’ll attend a choir service at St. Mary Magdalene, Willan’s old parish.
Some months later this we did. Ed drove in from the country and picked me up. We parked his car on Manning Avenue and walked to the church. The minister was greeting a long line of parishioners at the door. When we reached him he stared closely at each of us.
“Welcome back, my sons.”
This gave me the whim whams but Ed managed to get up during the service and go for a nostalgic communion. I remained slouched in the pew with my eyes closed, hiding if not from the Lord at least from the reverend and my past.
***
I spend a lot of time now just simply being. I sit on my island’s point, clear my head and watch the wind carve the water and choreograph the pines. I witness the sun polishing the wind’s work. I smell pine resin and dead needles. I feel the mother-touch of moving air and listen, listen, listen. I’m content to be alone.
1968
Composer David Tudor sits at a grand piano. The keyboard cover is flipped up but he doesn’t play. All the sounds generated come from a glass dipping duck that pecks away at a bowl of water on the Steinway. Tudor has attached a tiny mic to its beak — blup, blupp, blurpp — the stupid top-hatted bird with the bright red bottom goes up and down, dip and dunk, dip and dunk, a perpetual motion machine. A mic cable runs from the bird to the piano leg to an amplifier to a mixer that’s connected to a chessboard. Gordon Mumma and a couple of other musicians are also wired to the board. Each of its squares houses a photocell. Every time the chess players, John Cage and Marcel Duchamp, make a move the music is remixed. The performance goes on for hours and hours. Chess is a slow game.
Duchamp had long been one of my heroes. Toward midnight the Toronto audience gets restless and begins to drift out of the hall. I turn to my future wife Annick and remark how much I’d like to meet Duchamp. She looks around at the dwindling audience and stands up. She heads not for the door but for the front of the house. I follow. We slip through a narrow door beside the stage and walk into the middle of the performance. Tudor smiles and nods before going back to his duck. I sit beside Duchamp and his wife Teeny while Annick joins Cage. They are very gracious and we strike up a rambling conversation between their moves. After a half hour or so other audience members do the same. Soon the stage is jammed with people and Tudor throws a hissy fit. He kicks everyone off but us. The performance goes on — one o’clock, two and then toward three. We’re still there.
Finally the two masters declare a draw. Cage packs up the chess pieces. It is one of those cheap sets in a softwood box with a sliding lid. He closes it and then offers it to me. What I should have done is gratefully and gracefully accepted it and asked each to sign it. Instead I modestly decline it and kick myself for the next 40 years. A few months later Duchamp is dead.
***
After stepping out the door I hear a dragonfly rattling in its death throes. The pitch is high and unusually loud so I bend over to have a closer look and spy a creature vibrating its way out of a large cocoon. As I bend in closer I realize that the cocoon is attached to a snake. The rattler’s body — middle-thick as a radiator hose — moves with the slick slowness of slime — warning, warning, warning. I’m instantly cold, vulnerable, alone. It’s as if Eternity is at my feet.
The model is like a coffin. North York is getting an arts complex with a gallery, a theatre and a concert hall for recitals. Garth Drabinsky will program the theatre and hall so I’m on the job as photographer having done work for Drabinsky’s Livent. I’m told that part of my appeal as a photographer for Garth is that we’re both polio survivors. Although I’m seldom aware of it, people tell me I limp some when tired. Garth was not so lucky. He will limp and drag a foot for the rest of his life. We never talk about this.
Advance marketing for the North York venues is underway even though construction is ongoing. A beautiful model of the hall has been commissioned and shipped to my studio. Russell Johnson of Artec in New York has been commissioned to do the acoustics. Being a master of
sound, he’s wisely decided not to reinvent the wheel. He’ll work with the classic shoebox shape of the Musikverein in Vienna, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and Boston Symphony Hall. If you limit the seats to under 2,000 and have some nice wood and plaster forms to absorb, reflect and disperse the sound you’ll get a beautiful instrument to put an orchestra in. The ranks of gigantic gold women with improbable conical breasts does this dispersal job at Vienna’s hall but good Toronto won’t do brassy Amazons. Our diffusion panels are more redolent of a suburban rec room.
You can’t fool much with the formula. When touring with orchestras I’ve always gotten a great seat, centre orchestra level, a dozen rows back so I could shoot without obstructions. Stuttgart has an asymmetrical Rudolph Steiner–inspired hall that has acceptable acoustics when you’re in the audience but goes bad for musicians on the stage. If you’re back with the brass or tympani you can’t hear the four dozen string players less than 20 feet away. All the players at rear can do to keep the beat is watch 50 bows. Onstage in the fan-shaped hall in Budapest you could hear every note twice. Weird doesn’t work.
Final Fire Page 8
