The Sydney Opera House on Saturday evening, the curtain rising on Giuseppe Verdi’s lesser-known Simon Boccanegra. At the back of the chequer-board stage Amelia gazes out at a painted sea, awaiting her lover. With an impatient swish of much material, she sweeps regally to stage front. Under an extravagant blonde wig Kiri Te Kanawa’s dark eyes flash with fierce love. The audience gasps with a softer emotion, a sense of awe in the presence of great beauty, a goddess in a white gown trimmed with gold, an angel anchored to us mere mortals by an earthly passion.
We are made to wait and wait — and wait. And then she is singing, a meltingly beautiful aria, her voice high and clear, her flowing gestures weaving out over the audience, touching those mysterious parts around the neck, the blood prickling, the hairs rising. I am scarcely breathing. Then she is finished and there is the crass thunder of pent-up applause for this fleeting conjunction of vocal and physical beauty of a rare and wondrous order.
Ah, the man beside me says, turning with tears in his eyes, she is a beautiful lyric soprano.
She is more than that, she is undoubtedly the most beautiful and memorable performer I have seen. And I had seen Margot Fonteyn heartachingly perform her dying swan at Covent Garden, and on another occasion there in another supercharged Tchaikovsky, Romeo and Juliet, I saw her frequent partner Rudolf Nureyev bound from backstage 20 metres in three leaps to crash like a wrecking ball on to the front stage and the audience yelled and clapped and cheered for 20 minutes, a minute for each metre. Later my colleague introduced me, and I shook the hand of this Tartar titan, speechless as he moved down the row of reverent fans.
As a journalist in London I was privileged to interview famous musicians like Daniel Barenboim and Andre Previn, but my favourite was Larry Adler, who told me he married the last interviewer from my magazine. To help me relax he gifted me a miniature harmonica the size of a thumb and half its width. It came in a little cardboard box with his name in black on silver. He popped it inside his mouth and played the famous theme he wrote for the British movie Genevieve, for which he received an Oscar nomination. I still have the harmonica, and it was recently played by neighbour Coral Trimmer, herself a famous harmonica player.
My interest in classical music was imposed on me initially by our music teacher at Holy Name Seminary in Christchurch, Father Bernard O’Brien, SJ. We called him Dimbulb because he was so bright. He insisted on silence so he could enjoy Beethoven’s Violin Concerto on the scratchy turntable. I remember the LP cover because I stared numb and bored at it for what seemed like hours. Nathan Milstein was the violinist, the cover was a blue sculpture of an emperor, or god. At some point I started listening to the music, and never stopped.
Dimbulb was friends with the poet Denis Glover and brought him to the seminary to impose on us Douglas Lilburn’s music for his ‘Sings Harry’ song cycle on the scratchy turntable. The singing was demanding but the chorus ‘Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle’ was catchy. At this stage I still preferred Elvis. You had to get Dimbulb’s permission to bring music into the seminary. When I presented him with Pat Boone’s ‘April Love’, he asked me if I thought I had a vocation.
I didn’t, and moved to Wellington Teachers’ College, and quickly joined the World Record Club, first record ‘Swan Lake’. I took out a subscription to the National Orchestra, eventually the NZSO. Guest conductors were often world famous, like Arthur Fiedler of the Boston Pops, Zubin Mehta and Igor Stravinsky. I was a matter of metres from the great and very ancient Russian composer, who held his hands above his head and used minute finger movements to conduct the Firebird. A few years on as a cadet journalist at the New Zealand Listener I interviewed Arthur, but not alas Igor.
At the next desk at the magazine was subeditor Larry Pruden, already famous for his compositions such as Lambton Quay and Taranaki Overture. He often lay across his desk with his head hanging to administer nose drops. He frequently disappeared, to nearby Broadcasting House to chat with the likes of Ashley Heenan and acquire the stereophonic LPs Broadcasting had no use for being still mono. He had thousands of records and liked to share his love of music with myself and another young journalist Cameron Hill. Memorably Larry responded to me saying how there seemed no point in many recordings of the same piece by playing nine versions of ‘The Pines of Rome’, pointing out different conducting techniques, the favourite in this instance Eugene Ormandy.
I got to London as Kiri was just breaking through. I was on a mission to see those who had made it. I made the trip to Ely Cathedral to see the great pianist Sviatoslav Richter. The programme promised Back, Beethoven and Brahms, but he played Prokofiev, and memorably in a dark cathedral. More usually it was London. I went to Covent Garden for ballet and operas like the eight-hour Berlioz Trojans and the even longer Wagner Ring Cycle, memorable for my seat right beside the stage and Brunnhilde winking as she exited her apocalyptic performance. I haunted the Festival Hall or Albert Hall for the Proms and the greats like Colin Davis, who gave Kiri an early break, Otto Klemperer and Russian conductor/cellist Dmitri Rostropovich, the latter playing Dvorak’s Cello Concerto with the Moscow State Orchestra the night Russia invaded Czechoslovakia. The orchestra was booed until the cellist held up his bow and asked for silence in honour of the tragedy unfolding in the composer’s country, and please no clapping. You could hear a pin drop and afterwards we all filed quietly out of the hall.
After five years of musical immersion, I was told by the Home Office to leave the country. I was not a happy chappy to be deported from the epicentre of music, but I got over it and otherwise might never have seen Kiri, given the queues for tickets were very long for the toast of London.
NB Photo of Kiri in Figaro, unable to load one from Simon Boccanegra.