It is sometimes said that some people seem to waltz through life without an apparent care in the world. Others march through, often not always minding where they tread. On an immediately mundane note, I tried one evening to do the waltz at a school dance; I inadvertently trod on the hem of my partner’s green dress, tumbling her to the floor. I have only danced once since, and that didn’t end well either. I would have been better off with another quite common dance of the time, the Valeta; I seem to remember it involved waltzing alongside, rather than facing one’s partner. I’ve also played plenty of them during my career, mostly over and over again in Tchaikovsky ballets.
The word ‘march’ has played more of an active role in my life than have waltzes. The one that immediately springs to mind is the march in Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony – surely one of the best. One particular performance, in 1965, was under the very fine principal guest conductor of the Hallé at the time, Arvids Jansons (father of Mariss). He was very popular with the orchestra. The march was electrifying, as was all his Tchaikovsky. He saw me once entering the YMCA in Manchester to play snooker. He said that in his youth, he too had been in the YMCA, in his hometown in Latvia. Jansons’ very nice wife was astonished and delighted when she discovered that if, after buying a garment in Marks and Spencer, she tried it on and it didn’t fit she could return it to the shop and get her money back. Apparently, she couldn’t wait to come back.
Jansons’ baton-less conducting style was most individual. Not however as individual, as that of Georges Tzipine’s, whose conducting resembled more that of a musical Middleweight Boxer. It was the latter who, during one rehearsal, said to us, ‘I must be ze only French conductor who spent his honeymoon in Sheffield.’ I think he was probably right.
Other marches, unlike the Tchaikovsky, may not excite quite the same reaction. A student of mine in the Grenadiers, who played in the late queen’s very moving funeral procession told me recently that he needed three days to recover from repeated renditions of those slow marches of Beethoven and Mendelssohn.
I have very often stumbled in the potholes during my life’s journey but have been blessed with a lot of luck too. Some people I know appear to manage the feat of both waltzing and marching through life depending on the circumstances. Often self-disciplined when they feel it necessary and yet at other times generous-hearted, and happy to take a gamble. I telephoned one such, Tony Tunstall, (whose fine playing always reflected these characteristics) on his 90th birthday and found myself asking him whether he had enjoyed it all, so far. He replied to the effect that he had merely lurched from one cock-up to the next. His quip was not at all accurate of course, but I knew what he meant. His learned and often provocative behaviour, while usually highly effective, may have sometimes had an edge to it, but he was extremely generous-hearted. But those few words were a very funny summary of his life.
Talking of generosity, last week I boarded a bus back from the shops, and a man about my age, also wielding a stick, leapt to his feet and motioned me to the empty seat in the window next to him. I thanked him profusely, and he tapped his chest and said, ‘I’ve got a dicky heart, and many years ago my mother said to me, “When you get to my age, dear, two things will happen; one is that you will become more and more helpful and the other is that you will become more and more scared stiff”’. I said to him that the latter was exactly how I felt, and I promised to work on the former.
It was in March that I was born – March the 27th 1942, the very day that the Nazis began their task of exporting 65,000 Jews from France to the camps at Auschwitz. Fancy one autonomous country trying to obliterate the culture and the lives of people of another, these days, nearly eighty years later. Unthinkable.
I was brought up in the Welsh Marches close to a tributary of the Teme, in Ludlow (the inspiration of the wonderful hymn-tune Corvedale) and near the Stretton Hills, broadly speaking the old dividing line – or ‘Mark’– between Wales and England, where I first learned to fish. But as far as musical marches are concerned, the best by far, notwithstanding Tchaikovsky, has to be the March of the Belgian Paratroopers. It’s a winner.
