2nd FREDERICK ASHTON LECTURE
13 September 2021 at the Wallace Collection, Manchester Square, W1. Presented by the Frederick Ashton Foundation in association with the Wallace Collection.
Speaker: Lord Berkeley of Knighton CBE, the composer and broadcaster Michael Berkeley
Shock, Joy and Awe
I want to start near to home because as a child I remember frequent references to Frederick Ashton, a long-time friend of my father, Lennox Berkeley. I remember too the occasional visit from the elegant Fred and the naughty Billy Chappell, his partner and often collaborator both as dancer and designer. Lennox had a still closer friendship with the composer Maurice Ravel, who was his mentor, and he attended the triumphant premiere of Boléro with Ravel in Paris on 20 November 1928 with Ida Rubinstein centre stage. Outside the Opéra, Ravel called a cab and took Lennox and his friends to Le Boeuf sur le Toit, a couple of minutes away. It is often assumed that Milhaud wrote his surrealist ballet with the café in mind but, in fact, it was the other way round and the café took its name from the music, doubtless in the hope that Les Six and Jean Cocteau would patronise it, which they certainly did. There was probably backstage gossip that night with Ravel, Lennox and the two young English dancers. One was Cocteau's ex-lover Rupert Doone, who was a soloist in the Rubinstein company. The other was Frederick Ashton, who had joined Ida Rubinstein at the beginning of August, and spent his first few weeks in Paris in Lennox's flat in Montmartre, while Lennox was in the South of France with his parents.
Stravinsky, who will loom large in our deliberations, opined that great artists steal, lesser ones borrow, so I am going to follow those strictures and plunder Tony Scotland's brilliant book about my parents, Lennox and Freda, as I return to 1928. I discovered much about my father that was complete news to me. Here, in Tony's book, I found out that, according to Ashton, the reclusive Mme Rubinstein used to take class separately from the company, but when it was necessary to, as she put it, 'piece things together', her chauffeur would drive her to the rehearsal hall, then roll out a red carpet so she could walk to the door like a star. For some of the Boléro rehearsals the dancers were summoned to Rubinstein's elegant house in the Place des États-Unis and told to put on clean white shirts and white socks. Before entering the Bakst-designed interiors, each boy was handed a bottle of eau de cologne, because Ida Rubinstein could not bear the smell of sweat, problematic perhaps for one involved in the more physical side of the creative arts. White-gloved and richly clad in furs she walked herself through her part, while the mystified dancers just watched, feeling they were nothing less than in a ballet as Ashton put it 'run by an Electress of a Palatinate for her own amusement'. At the end of the rehearsal a footman passed round a plate of petits fours.
Though Rubinstein was remote, enigmatic and dictatorial, Ashton admitted she had 'style and dignity and immaculate manners'. He was mesmerized by her tall slim figure, dark russet hair and heavy-lidded eyes, even if he did not have the highest regard for her actual dancing - or her false teeth, which once dropped out while she was taking an arabesque in Les Sylphides. For the rest of his life Fred dined out on his Ida Rubinstein impression, tottering around like a 'sick ostrich', with 'curiously hunched shoulders and spread, bent knees', throwing back his head, fluttering his eyes and 'making little moves'. Billy Chappell and the painter Edward Burra had travelled up to Paris after a sailor-spotting holiday with some lesbian friends on the Mediterranean at Toulon. Well, you get the picture...
In that same year Lennox, much taken with Diaghilev's Ballet Russe, finished the piano score of his ballet The Judgment of Paris - a short piece based on the mythological beauty contest that led to the Trojan War. Musically the score is clearly influenced by the neo-classicism of Stravinsky's Apollon Musagète, which Lennox saw in Paris during its European premiere run at the Ballets Russe.
When Lennox returned to London in February 1938, with Jean Françaix, he discovered from the young French composer that the Vic-Wells Ballet was looking for a new, short piece for the current season. In particular, the company needed a filler for a fund-raising gala in May - a pièce d'occasion which could serve as a showpiece for Pearl Argyle, one of the celebrated beauties of the age. Frederick Ashton was now the chief choreographer of the Vic-Wells. Lennox also knew Constant Lambert, the company's music director.
Lennox went up to Sadler's Wells to play his Judgment of Paris to Ashton, Lambert and the director of the Vic-Wells, Ninette de Valois. The verdict was positive, and agreement was soon reached on casting. Boosey and Hawkes were very taken with the score as was Britten who suggested some improving points of orchestration. Ashton himself was to create the choreography, Robert Helpmann was to be Paris, and Pearl Argyle Venus (sharing the role in repertory with Margot Fonteyn). Argyle had become Ashton's first English muse. Lambert himself would conduct, and Billy Chappell was to create the costumes and scenery. The premiere was set for 10 May, and The Judgment of Paris was to be given another performance on the last night of the season, and another three performances were scheduled. Come the big night, Benjamin Britten caught the train up from Suffolk and Queen Elizabeth motored from Buckingham Palace, with a posse of gentlewomen who had 'kindly consented to sell programmes'. The purpose of the gala was to raise the £24,000 still needed for essential additions to Sadler's Wells, in memory of Lilian Baylis, the theatre's founder. It was an almost entirely English programme put together by Ninette de Valois. In the first part, revivals of Bliss's Checkmate and Lambert's Horoscope; in the second part, Lennox's new Judgment of Paris and the Meyerbeer/Lambert Les Patineurs. As the only premiere, Paris attracted most attention. Argyle looked 'divinely fair', 'condescended to do the splits', shed her skirt to reveal a fetching little undergarment and so upstaged the goddesses Juno and Minerva that Paris had no option but to give the golden apple to her. The willowy Chappell, dancing Mercury, designed for himself a daringly brief tunic of white and gold, in which he posed provocatively on a flight of steps beside some classical columns …
Ashton later intimated that he 'liked Lennox above all other composers ..... even C. Lambert'. But though he was to be involved in at least five further ballet productions - including two choreographed by Chappell - Lennox never worked with Ashton again, though not for want of Ashton's trying. In the early 1980s Ashton asked him to write a full-length ballet for Covent Garden, but Lennox was struggling with his final (and never-completed) opera Faldon Park. He was also disconcerted by Britten's admission that he had been exhausted by the effort of composing his three-act ballet, The Prince of the Pagodas.
Tony Scotland's latest book, Wulf, published by Shelf Lives, is also something of a short eye opener, detailing, as it does, the life of Britten's young muse, Wulf Scherchen. It's a fascinating read. Another family connection with Ashton was the painter, John Craxton. Both Lennox and I had received commissions in return for paintings and it was typical of Ashton's genius that he winkled Johnny away from Crete to come and design Daphnis and Chloe at Covent Garden. There's a wonderful photograph of John and Margot Fonteyn on holiday, whilst on the stage she was partnered by Michael Soames. The opening of Daphnis is, like Britten's first Sea Interlude in Peter Grimes, one of the great joyous paeans of musical praise to the beauty of nature, birds and dawning light.
For all the Bohemian trappings of his early life at Oxford, Paris, Suffolk and in London, Lennox was, to our eyes as young children, quiet, introverted and totally wrapped up in his music so this early life, which in Paris, embraced friendship with the Stravinsky family, was to us three boys, revelatory. Given the connections with French music it was perhaps natural that Lennox should be asked to help with a Faure score for Andrée Howard, dancer with the Ballet Russe and choreographer, and he made an early version of La Fete Etrange for two pianos, and a later one for orchestra, last seen and heard when the Royal Ballet danced it in 2005 with Darcey Bussell and Ricardo Cerveras in the lead roles.
It was, in fact, Ravel who suggested Lennox study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and as a result he met Soulima Stravinsky, the composer's son, who was in the same class. At the Stravinsky household Lennox got to know the maestro, who was composing using an upright piano with a blanket stuffed in it to muffle the sound. He did not want an instrumental sound but did need some sort of feedback, something that would give him the ability to check the notes he was writing.
Here in the Wallace Collection we have as our companions some of the greatest visual testaments to the emotions of joy and awe, because in the work of Frans Hals, Rembrandt - that touching and tactile portrait of his son, Titus - Murillo, Canaletto's delight in the joyous, sparkling canals of Venice and of course the penetrating gaze of Velasquez, we not only find innovation, but perhaps more importantly, the ability to sculpt and develop tradition with personal vision. Nothing is totally new, everything is a synthesis of past experience, but when informed with an original voice it becomes new.
I have called this talk Shock, Joy and Awe because these are emotions I have relished when encountering those artists and present ones too, whether it be Harrison Birtwistle, Akram Khan, Wayne McGregor, Sean Scully, George Benjamin, Pina Bausch, or my processor at this lectern, Nicholas Hytner. And there are also the old works that seem ever new, Jackson Pollock's use of chance, Mark Rothko's spacial experiments with colour, Mark Morris's joyous re-working of Handel in L'allegro... those special experiences that are etched into our memories. The Rite of Spring was just that for so many of us. I was still very young when Lennox took me to hear Stravinsky conduct Le Sacre and to meet the composer. Combined with my own growing awareness through improvisation it was, as Graham Greene so tellingly put it, that 'one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in'. Are we giving children today the opportunity to experience the movement of that door? Sadly not.
Being a chorister at Westminster Cathedral, I was used to singing Gregorian chant and polyphonic masterpieces by Victoria, Palestrina, Tallis, Byrd and even the first performance of Britten's Missa Brevis, but the sheer visceral, sexual and even cruel rhythms of Le Sacre were exhilarating in their ability to shock. They seemed to realise the ideas swimming around in my head and in my improvisations when I would sing myself to sleep. There is joy too in the use of Russian folk song, right from that opening phrase high on a bassoon - a territory that must have been terrifying for the player when he first saw it. Start solo, on a high C? Is this composer nuts? Joy, and certainly awe, at the sheer newness of this language, of Stravinsky aping the sound of the ice cracking and breaking apart in the Russian Spring. I have had the pleasure of working with Deborah Bull, not just in the Lords where we often join forces on behalf of the Arts and arts education but also co-presenting a Royal Ballet production of The Rite of Spring for BBC TV with Richard Alston, thus bringing together aspects of the music and dance people who were able to teach me about the technical difficulties of mounting Le Sacre.
If the music were not so original, so individual, the score might seem episodic rather than organic and developed, and there is in the writing the thumb print of a composer working with a keyboard. Those repeated chords on the 8 horns with their off-beat accents are in fact simply, but wonderfully, two triads, - E flat major in one hand and, an octave apart E minor in the other, clearly an idea heard at the piano where they fit the hands like velvet but ruthless gloves. Lennox was probably still keener on works like Apollon Musagète and the neo classical music so wonderfully choreographed by Balanchine in Apollo, the aural equivalents of Picasso's Blue period where the pure strength of voice means that new work is created out of old with total freshness. I remember, as an over-awed child, saying tentatively to Stravinsky how aspects of his ear for sound so excited me - the use of the four pianos in Les Noces and the two flutes in the cadence to Symphony of Psalms, scored as a high major third in a way that broke all the existing rules of orchestration at that time - and even when I was a composition student at the Royal Academy of Music - but in this instance, in Symphony of Psalms they act as the most perfect and fulfilling, if protracted, full stop. Stravinsky smiled benevolently, pleased, I think, that the high thirds in the flutes had registered with a young composer. I have always loved a degree of expressionism in music and art, Alban Berg, Francis Bacon, a fracturing of tonality and realism.
Other composer friends of Lennox and Freda would come to supper when I was a child and, indeed, Britten was my godfather. Two who had a particularly mischievous glint in the eye were Francis Poulenc (a benevolent sparkle) and William Walton (a more caustic glimmer). Poulenc and Lennox took a delight in the 'naughty' but succulent harmony francaise that makes so many Poulenc pieces idiosyncratic and irresistible like Gloria which Kenneth Macmillan made into such an effective piece of dance for the Royal Ballet and which Darcey Bussell chose for the Radio 3 programme I have presented since 1995, Private Passions.
I want to concentrate on the importance of new work because we are at a dangerous cross roads in the Arts, and new work is all too often the first victim of cuts. Many dancers and musicians are freelance and fell through the support network which was supposed to help them over the last year when all work had to stop because of Covid. Of course, the Chancellor's fund for the Arts was important and welcome, but it tended to be institution-based, using existing Arts Council clients, so did not get to individuals or small companies specialising in new work. Now many of these same people are going to suffer a double whammy because the Brexit negotiations, utterly disastrous for the Arts, despite Boris Johnson's promises, have pulled the rug from under our ability to tour and to export our work. This despite the Government's constantly saying how much it appreciates and values the work of the creative industries which, of course, bring in billions to the exchequer and dwarf that brought to our shores by the fishing industry, much though I admire our fishermen. I have yet to hear in the Lords a single non-ministerial supporter of Brexit, and there are several, whose intellect I admire, speak up about the disastrous negotiations that led to us shamefully rejecting a reciprocal offer from the EU for touring because the Home Office did not want to appear to be undermining even remotely its red lines on migration.
Culture is all about curiosity and the exchange of ideas so it is not just what we can no longer export to Europe but the European work that we are not experiencing here that is at stake. If you are trying to put together a viable economic tour then you need constancy in regulations, visas and work permits. I know several musicians for whom the cost of setting up and paying for this has virtually eliminated their fee. The DCMS is trying to find a bilateral way through. If they can successfully negotiate with Spain that will be a huge step forward, but we are closing the stable door after the horse has bolted and the EU will be imposing further red tape next year with its ETIAS (European Travel Information and Authorisation System) regulations. It seems that our great national institutions like the Royal Ballet, Royal Opera and orchestras like the LSO will be ring fenced by the DCMS but the problem is that it is often the small companies that are the engine room for new talent and the experimental that those larger companies cannot afford to embrace, so a bedrock of work is being cut from under the feet of all our creative industries. Furthermore, those small-scale companies feed into the majors.
I try to stand in a fairly neutral position as a cross-bencher in the Lords and when and if I see sense I support the Government but I have to say that, in terms of the Arts, if Covid and the Brexit/touring debacle were not terrible cards enough to be dealt, there is a further even more fundamental, indeed shocking, challenge to the creativity of our nation which I have just touched on: the removal of arts and music from the regular curriculum and the cessation of peripatetic teaching means that learning an instrument or taking class in dance has become the preserve of the rich and privileged. Many contributors to Private Passions like Tom Courtenay and Alan Plater have said how much they owe to the arts at school and a passionate teacher when they were members of fairly-impoverished families. Kaddy Kanneh-Mason, the mother of the remarkable Kanneh-Mason family recently contributed to Private Passions and she told us that had it not been for the music lessons then available in state schools, and now absent, we would not have the likes of Sheku and his sisters to brighten our lives with their inspired music making. She wondered what was happening to gifted children from non-privileged families like her own. Not to mention the effects on exposure to the arts on all children, gifted or not, in fact how can you possibly know at that age. It sickens me to see these gifted artists like Sheku being lauded and held aloft by a Government which is simultaneously refusing similar access to tuition to their successors. If we are seriously in debt to our cultural sector, why are we not investing in the next generation to continue the work? Let's increase the music, of every sort, that children sing and hear at Assembly and as part of their day.
Then there is the social dividend of giving young people a creative means to self-expression. I believe that if teenagers can make music, drama and dance as an outlet for these turbulent years then they are less likely to turn to drugs and granny bashing! I have seen the effects, and they were memorably brought home to me when working with the Koestler Trust to put more art in prisons: I had a letter from a man for whom we had been able to procure a guitar. He wrote to me saying (and I quote): "Playing this instrument has transformed my life and I cannot help thinking that if I had had this ability to make music when I was younger and as an outlet for my anger I would not now be serving life for murder". A sobering and telling thought.
I have had the privilege of working with many choreographers and dancers and my admiration for the sheer dedication and physical hard work that they undertake knows no bounds. I also simply like them enormously. My first collaboration was with Michael Pink and a piece called Attractions created for Northern Ballet in 1982. Two years later I teamed up with Lynn Seymour for two very different pieces, the Mayfly (1984), starring Wayne Sleep and a troupe of Brownies, and Bastet (1988), created for Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet.
Mayfly was created in the most bizarre circumstances: Stephen Pile, author of the Book of Heroic Failures, wrote a piece in the Sunday Times about the Edinburgh Festival and rhetorically asked: Why Edinburgh? Why not.... Nether Wallop? He was then challenged to do just that - create an International Festival, the First (and, as it turned out, last) Nether Wallop International Festival.
Stephen decided on a philosophy of 'in for a penny, in for a pound' and invited an amazing roster of artists. Since the whole thing was done for charity, once a couple of big names had signed up - initially Paul McCartney - others tripped into place like a deck of falling cards. This was the genesis of Comic Relief because Charity Projects, which organised the whole affair and sold the TV rights to London Weekend Television, subsequently morphed into Comic Relief.
Stephen took his zany slant to wonderfully-ludicrous extremes, the idea being that artists realise unfulfilled fantasies. Thus, Jenny Agutter, bedecked in a saucy outfit, became the vicar-stroke-conjuror's assistant; Jessye Norman turned the pages for the choir mistress but when it was suggested she might sing, replied, perhaps having now heard the pianistic talents on hand, that, yes, she might just manage an unaccompanied spiritual, but before she could utter a single note she was, as she recalled, bustled off the stage so 'that we would not be late for Colonel Mew's organ recital.' Thus the greatest soprano in the world never got to open her mouth in combat! Was there a Colonel Mew or was this another invention of Stephen's fertile mind? Rick Mayall came on stage and told the audience that it was "great to be in the Nether Regions". He sang a hilarious song with Jools Holland at the piano and Bill Wyman on bass. Trevor Nunn directed the pageant and in University Challenge, Bamber Gascoigne introduced Great Philosophers of the World (Professors AJ Ayer, Arnold Zubov and Gerry Cohen) versus Nether Wallop Farmers. The philosophers were asked questions about the gestation period of a cow while Bamber quizzed the farmers on Wittgenstein and Nietsche. Real Madrid were booked to play Nether Wallop FC.
Lynn Seymour and I put together a ballet for the local brownie troupe with Wayne Sleep. Rehearsals got delayed while we sent out a search party for him and he was finally extricated from the local barracks where he had, doubtless, been entertaining the troops. Nevertheless, it was a serious and charming little piece about the life of the mayfly, the Brownies lapped it up and, of course, Wayne is always great fun to work with.
The moral of this Nether Wallop story is that almost anything is possible if the context is right and a couple of big hitters sign up to kick the whole thing into being. But I also believe, having run, and partially run, three Festivals, that you have to start any creative project with an unshakeable determination that it is going to happen. When I began my ten-year Artistic Directorship of the Cheltenham Festival I was intent on making it a fulcrum for new work, requiring every musician to include a contemporary composer in their programme. In collaboration with Jonathan Reekie, then at the Almeida, I managed to secure the first performance of Tom Ades's first opera, Powder Her Face. This, and Tom's residency, really put us on the map as well as giving the stunned burghers of this Regency spa their first stage re-enactment of fellatio. In that lovely Frank Matcham theatre, I also brought in dance from Shobana Jeyasingh, the Ballet Boys and Sue Davies. What has happened in the Arts world would make these kinds of initiatives almost impossible now unless it was in London or one of the regional centres.
Bastet was commissioned from Lynn and me by the legendary Peter Wright in 1988 for Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet, and I well remember his kindly but resigned expression when watching rehearsals. Lynn was one of the most sensuous and expressive dancers of her generation and Kenneth Macmillan created those tempestuous roles for his gifted prima ballerina. It would perhaps be asking too much to expect a dancer to be able to translate her sublime gifts for lyrical sensuality and sexuality into choreography. I concocted, to her scenario, a score full of rhythmic action but perhaps the best part of the show was Andrew Logan's designs for this imaginative tale of the Egyptian and athletic Cat Goddess!
Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich crop up on Private Passions with the same regularity that they appear on the stage. What is it about these Russian scores that make them so eminently danceable? I got to live with and study Prokofiev's compositional technique when the choreographer Kim Brandstrup asked me to complete a score that Prokofiev had started for a projected film of The Ace of Spades until Stalin closed down the Russian film industry. Composed at the same time as the iconic Romeo and Juliet (1936) it has passages of equal brilliance - a ball scene, for instance - so I was delighted that Neeme Järvi recorded it with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra for Chandos. Some of the keepers of the flame were not pleased with my editing and re-compositional efforts (as at Aldeburgh, worshippers at the altar protect their icons with fervour) but I think the strength of Prokofiev's musical imagination easily transcends any adjustments made in pulling together a symphonic suite in a performable score. Kim created an original scenario but I can also imagine the Suite being married and choreographed to the Ace of Spades story for which it was intended, and including that terrific ball scene which was superfluous to Kim's scenario. Varied repetition and phrasing (by which I mean breathing) and the ability to give a character musical personality plus that natural sense of dramatic timing are what I learnt from Prokofiev's score. What must he have thought when Stalin's dictum simply meant that his wonderful ideas had to be buried deep in a bottom drawer. Little wonder that the passages of turbulence speak so loudly. This was a happy collaboration as Kim is intensely musical. Rushes - Fragments of a Lost Story featured some of the Royal Ballet's most gifted dancers. Who would not be thrilled to be arranging and elaborating Prokofiev for Alina Cojocaru, Tamara Rojo, Carlos Acosta, Leanne Benjamin, Laura Morera and Thomas Whitehead to name but a few? To see the nuances and inflexions in the music put to dance by artists of this stature is a privilege indeed. Alina so liked the final pas de deux that she asked me if she could extract and dance it in a special programme in Moscow.
At Covent Garden Rushes looked silky in Jean Kalman's lighting, almost a natural extension of Richard Hudson's design and Kim's subtle choreography which, as Jenny Gilbert noted, does not shout at you but creeps up on you 'like a shadow on a wall. Subtlety is key.' As Director of the Royal Ballet, Monica Mason was always enormously supportive of her artists on and off the stage. So much so that when I was Chairman of the Governors of the Royal Ballet I thought twice before offering any criticism of what was going on. It was rarely needed. We ought, I think, to pay tribute to a passionate philanthropy that keeps dance and opera alive. I remember, when I was on the ROH board, feeling that my primary duty was to the art forms and the artists so when it was seriously suggested that during the closure period of the house the Royal Ballet simply be shut down for two years I was appalled - the import of this idea will not be lost on anyone in this room. Covid has given us a taste of what this can mean. I immediately got on to Vivien Duffield and John Sainsbury who doubtless enlisted Jeffrey Sterling. Guess what - after a few phone calls and the suggestion that certain funding was about to be withdrawn, this crazy idea was quickly buried. Those generous donors, like the Robertsons and the Robeys, must never be taken for granted, especially by Governments.
As you will have realized, I am excited by a creativity that makes us look at our world afresh or re-examines the past from a new angle, as did both Balanchine and Ashton in their own way. It is this fresh look at what we can do with the human body and music that made me particularly excited to be asked to work with Wayne McGregor on his realisation of Bach's The Art of Fugue, Tetractys. Basically, my task was to help choose the movements and acoustically amplify the original keyboard score for which I used a Mozart-sized band though it could also work with single strings and early instruments. Several dancers I had already got to know and love, like Sarah Lamb, Stephen McCrae, Federico Bonelli and Edward Watson took part and there was the very considerable addition of Natalia Osipova.
Music has an extraordinary ability to 'speak' to babies, and to the brain-impaired, and I have often thought of dance as the personification of music in movement. The expression of rhythm with sticks and stones, with foot stamping, was the earliest means of communicating joy and aggression while rhythm itself preceded even that. A huge amount of music, especially popular music, is based on the beat and its subdivisions of the human heart. Normally 60 beats a minute, leading to its popular doubling to 120 in rock music. Those 60 seconds in a minute cannot wait for any man since they take their cue from the moon and from the regularity of tidal movement. As a child in Norfolk, I was always amazed that the local boat and fishermen knew exactly when high and low tide would be without consulting scientific paperwork. So we are inextricably tied to nature's rhythms although we cannot, though we might like to, change our darkening evenings.
How we process rhythm and, indeed, music itself is one of my favourite perennials on Private Passions when I have a neuro scientist in my grasp. My first wife Deborah Rogers, who sadly died suddenly seven years ago, was an eminent literary agent and through her and Private Passions I got to know Oliver Sacks who said that he found music to be invaluable in forming a bridge to sufferers of neurological malfunction or damage. He recalled one patient who, because we process music on a different side of the brain from speech, would look clueless when told 'Do up your shoes' but when Oliver sang the request, the patient bent down and tied up his laces. Oliver was himself pretty crazy by any standards. On being given tea before recording Private Passions at our house in Notting Hill, he went around the kitchen obsessively nibbling and tasting everything, including, to our astonishment, the cat food. One of his choices for Private Passions, by the way, was the Infernal Dance from Stravinsky's Firebird. The infernal idea continued with the final scene from Don Giovanni where Mozart stretches his harmonic and dramatic muscles to send the Don down to hell in a terrifying sequence of vengeful justice. Music that exhilaratingly looks over the brim of 18th century classicism and into the Romantic maelstrom of the 19th. (At the other end of the emotional spectrum Sacks showed Mozart at his most humanly warm, with the frequently requested Sinfonia Concertante in E flat. Here, in the Andante, the solo violin and viola conduct an irresistibly moving conversation. As Oliver observed, it would be hard to imagine a more complete human and heartfelt communication. Within a few bars of this instrumental duet, as with the slow movement of the Bach double violin Concerto in D minor, I am taken to a very private, intimate place.)
The choice of two pieces to do with fire was perhaps not entirely musical. Not only did Oliver have an obsessive need to touch and taste everything in sight but Deborah told me that he had a very real fear that he might internally combust. She had to book him into hotels which had not only a swimming pool but which would allow the use of his flippers. My librettist collaborator, the writer and poet David Malouf, reported that on a book tour in Australia, Oliver and he were side by side in a coach on their way to an event which took them through the bush. As the driver excitedly told his passengers how the extreme heat had recently led to several devastating fires near the road, Oliver became increasingly agitated, demanding to know, hopelessly, where the nearest water was. David was mystified as the distinguished psychoanalyst began to shift ever more violently in his seat, wretched and increasingly fidgety. On reaching the venue for their literary event Oliver rushed from the coach and locked himself in a green room, refusing to come out for several hours despite a large, nonplussed audience, now also becoming restless in their seats. (I have rarely got to know a wonderful healer who was so personally afflicted by his own area of expertise. A physician unable to heal himself but whose own personal experiences certainly helped others.)
Another close client-friend was Bruce Chatwin, and he and I would talk endlessly about Australia and the ancient Songlines. The composer Kevin Volans worked with Bruce and described an approach that he likened to the work of the painter Philip Guston and the importance of chance in creativity, the synthesis that we see in the studio when people are sparking off each other, Wayne and his dancers, Brian Eno and David Bowie. I explored the history of the Songlines while walking with a guide, a native of the King's Canyon area near Ayer's Rock. He also taught me the secret of walking for miles in high temperatures and his advice echoed the disciplines of both dance and the farming that I have been part of for forty years in my area of mid-Wales, the Marches on Offa's Dyke. It's all to do with natural rhythms. Here, this is a land of shale but in the wonderful red earth of Australia there needed to be, in addition to the correct clothing, hats and boots, hydration. Every 15 minutes my guide would insist that we stop and sip water and you were not allowed to begin unless you were carrying at least two litres. On the farm I noticed how the local boys would stagger bale stacking, not rush at it but find a tempo with pauses for water and gossip. They achieved far more at a measured pace than guests who, willing to help out and keen to show their mettle, were soon exhausted by their racing at the task. When I talk about natural rhythms, I think I am also embracing the nature of relaxation. Whether you are a dancer, a tennis player or a violinist, if you are tensed up and anxious, movement does not flow naturally. When you are relaxed all that technique begins to appear effortless. In fact, technique allows relaxation. Well, that's what we all strive for! But as well as Mozartian facility, a classical approach, we also yearn for Beethovenian struggle, sturm und drang, and the turbulence of the Romantic age.
Strangely, I have observed how not only humans are calmed by music but animals too become transfixed. Many farmers leave a radio on in their cow sheds. We have two red bulls, James and Jaffa. James is placid, Jaffa more temperamental, and especially after he had to have a foot treated which required him to be lifted in a special machine onto his side. Then he had the foot cleaned and what looked like the sole of a shoe glued to his hoof. Following this undignified performance none of the boys could get near Jaffa. Then one day I was in barn alone with him. I leant over the rails and sang to him a slow chant-like refrain. He pricked up his ears and then lumbered over to me, nuzzling. I stroked him and continued to sing and he clearly appreciated the music. Of course, even a nuzzle from a bull weighing a ton can be dangerous - they don't know their strength - but I have an enchanting video of this exchange and my tousling his curly head. I have repeated the exercise with the same results but I must be careful because if, when he is out in the fields, he comes over to me for an embrace I would not have the rails to protect me from a sudden throw back of his enormous neck. I was very touched by this experience which once again demonstrated the ability of music to communicate across barriers.
Dance and music, and music as expressed by the movement of the human body, offer us a catharsis into which we can all enter - the body becomes a musical instrument inflecting the musical line as a great cellist might. As an audience we bring our own emotions to the experience and take from it a greater understanding of our own lives, a beauty that we all aspire to, a disturbance we crave and a symmetry that we envy. We continue the synthesis of ancient tribal life with, essentially, the same means. I was privileged to be given this opportunity as a child, the opportunity that has made Sheku the cellist he is, and I want to see every child given the wonderful chance to explore creativity, the ability to express themselves, regardless of circumstance, rich or poor.
Thank you.