A Singer’s Life Pt17
A few articles ago, I wrote about what it is like to be away from home so much, and what we find to do with our time. I thought today I would write something about the amazing experiences I have had as a result of being in a completely different environment from normal life, and how that has affected me over the years. I spoke in Part 16 about the life-changing trip to Sarajevo in 1996, and although nothing quite so dramatic has occurred before or since, I have a few examples which might be worth sharing.
The first one is relatively mundane but has stayed long in the memory. I mentioned earlier that I sang several times with the Opera de Nantes in Brittany. Since I lived in London at the time, it was relatively easy to drive to the south coast and take a ferry to Cherbourg or St Malo, allowing me to have the car at my disposal for the time in France. Once, I arrived at about 6.30 am and drove directly to the Mont St Michel. It opened at 7.30 and since it was out of season, I had the whole island to myself for about 2 hours. Utterly stunning!
Parking was difficult in the centre of Nantes, but most French cities have extensive underground public car parks which give decent rates to visitors (why do we not in Britain?) and it enabled me to get out into the countryside when I was not needed for rehearsal. Brittany is quite well-known here for nice beaches, although like England, and even more, Scotland, the sea is not noticeably warm!
However, it was not its beaches that attracted me, but the several ancient sites full of standing stones and burial places from pre-history. The most extraordinary sites are in a region called the Morbihan, about one and a half hours north west of Nantes. Between 5000BC and 3000BC, in the Megalithic Period (megas -large, lithos - stone), ancient man, for some reason, all over western Europe, often in extremely remote places, erected stone groups, circles, burial mounds and other edifices. In this region near the north west coast of Brittany, there is an enormous collection of these weird creations. This was before and around the time of the Egyptian Pyramids, but there was no writing, no record, no idea of what they represented. We still have no real clue as to what this early community were trying to say. We know that man was beginning to settle down in groups and starting to grow crops and rear animals for food. It is assumed that some sort of spiritual reason was involved. Burial, afterlife, gods? No one knows, but what we find in the Morbihan is the most fantastic collection of standing stones anywhere in the world. I have seen Stonehenge and Avebury in England, and the Callanish Stones, the Ring of Brodgar and Kilmartin in Scotland, so I am quite well-versed in Megalithic monuments, but the 10 and 12 rows of stones, approximately 1.5 metres tall, which stretch for over one kilometre in Carnac are breathtaking! There are also stone circles (‘cromlechs’, in Breton), single standing stones (‘menhirs’ – think Obelix) and several chambered tombs. Why they are all here in this relatively small area of Brittany is a complete mystery, but I am very grateful to the Opera de Nantes, where I sang Swallow (Peter Grimes), Sarastro (Magic Flute) and Father Trulove (Rake’s Progress), for allowing me the opportunity to see them!
More recently, I was singing Snug in Britten’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ which toured from Aix-en-Provence to the Beijing Festival. Since we had performed it extensively in France, we only had to fit a few new singers into the cast in China, so we had a bit of time to explore this amazing place. As often on these trips, there are arranged outings, but we can also do our own thing if time and security permit. When I sang Bach’s Christmas Oratorio in Sao Paolo in Brazil, we were told under no circumstances to venture out of our hotel compound alone – apparently there was a 50% chance of being at least mugged if not worse. This advice was followed! However, in Beijing, even though a police state, we were free to wander as we wished, and I spent many happy hours exploring Tiananmen Square (which is enormous) and many of the capital’s monasteries and temples, completely safely and very cheaply. I also found some fantastic markets, where after a bit (well, actually a lot) of bargaining, I acquired some remarkable objects which hold pride of place in several rooms in my house.
We arranged amongst ourselves the hire of a minibus and driver to take us to the nearby section of the Great Wall that was not too touristy, and six of us spent a fabulous day out. The only problem was that it was rainy and misty all day, and thus, although I know I was on it and walked along it, the Great Wall remains largely unseen by me. The next day dawned clear, so we took a long metro ride across town (22 million people live in Beijing – over 4 times the population of Scotland!!) to the Summer Palace and Lake. It was fantastic, and all the more fun for us as individual travellers.
I did have one experience which caused me a bit of angst though. I decided that, after Tiananmen Square, I did not have time to visit the whole of the Forbidden City before returning for a rehearsal, but probably had enough leeway to go behind the giant gateway with the huge picture of Mao, and have a look around. What I didn’t bargain for was that, beyond the gate, a one-way system took you inexorably into the old city. Now the trouble with an albeit reasonably benign police state is that certain rules are made which cannot be challenged, especially when one doesn’t speak the language, and I found myself stuck going one way when I knew I needed to be going another. I knew the metro station on Tiananmen Square would take me back to the hotel but could see no way to go back to the Square. Somehow, I discovered a series of temple buildings which I reckoned I could follow to take me back where I wanted, so I followed a Chinese student into the complex. He spoke a few words of English but was himself lost, so I cleverly found an official and decided to use the handy translation app on my phone to get help. Sadly, the app was not so good. I typed in English “How do I get back to the square?” and my phone duly came up with lots of Chinese symbols. The guard typed away in Mandarin and showed me his response. Unfortunately, ”I have a red car” was not as helpful as I had hoped, and after a few hand gestures and much shrugging, I set off in the direction I thought was correct. It wasn’t, and it started to rain, and I found that I had in fact left the Old City complex but was about a mile in the wrong direction from the square! I decided to head east. Surely, a metro station would appear, as they were easy to spot, and I could re-orientate myself. This turned out to be a part of town bereft of metro stations, and after walking about two miles in the rain, I finally dived into the bowels of the earth to find a train. Eventually, I got back to the hotel to see the bus waiting to take us to our rehearsal, and all my colleagues looking out at the bedraggled and grumpy bass, muttering about professionalism, punctuality and so on! Fortunately, my role of Snug the Joiner is famed for his stupidity, and I slipped into type quickly, murmuring apologies and self-deprecating mutterings.
Fifteen years before, I had had another fabulous opportunity as, after the wonderful ‘Marriage of Figaro’ in Aix I wrote about in Part 15, we all flew to Tokyo to play it in the Bunkamura Theatre there. My previous experience of Japan had been a few years earlier with the Hilliard Ensemble, but that trip had been organised so well that I had not needed to wander about on my own very much. I had been aware of the difficulty of riding a metro when you could read none of the signs and was somewhat trepidatious on my return. Fortunately, the football World Cup was scheduled for the following year, and all the metro stations were signed in English as well as Japanese. This made travelling a bit easier, so I ventured out on my own on several occasions. The first time, I decided to visit the electronic hub of the city, as I wanted to get some super modern Japanese kit to impress my kids on my return. I had been told that mini discs were the coming thing and set off to find one. There were hundreds of shops to choose from, but the language barrier was again problematic. Finally, I found one store with a huge sign saying” Help and Information” in English, with an attractive Japanese girl smiling at the desk. “Hi! I’m looking to buy a mini-disc player, please” I said in slow and comprehensible English. She continued to smile, and then told me all about mini discs, or possibly about football, or maybe even about her fantasies for western men. Unfortunately, it was all in Japanese, and so I was left having found neither help nor information! I did find a mini disc player for about £100, bought it and returned home to find that mini discs were the new past fad, and that it was already virtually out of date before I had used it! I still have it, unopened and forlorn, as was my wife when she heard how much I had paid for it!
A few days later, I saw it was clear and sunny, and had worked out how to get close to Mount Fuji. They say that if you can see the mountain from Tokyo, it will be a fine day, and there it was a hundred miles away towering majestically on the horizon. I had worked out a route and decided to try it on my own. Firstly, I had to get a metro to the train station and then take a train round the coast through Yokohama (Tokyo’s famous old port) to a town not far from the Fuji trail. There I picked up a mountain cog railway to a plateau high up covered in open vents and steam outlets (ripely sulphuric) and proceeded to a cable car from which you got a fantastic view of the iconic mountain. Fuji is over 12,000 feet high (3776 metres for young folk), still an active volcano (last eruption 1707/8) and absolutely stunning. The cable car sweeps across the plateau and then descends to a lake, where one embarks on a steamer to the other shore, passing red temple gates and bridges. At the far side of the lake, after time for a refreshing beer (Japanese beer is excellent), it was time to catch a small local train to the coast, where I took the fast train back to Tokyo. I must have bought an all-round ticket at my hotel because the whole trip worked like clockwork, and I fear I would have been struggling trying to get tickets for every mode of travel.
A couple of days later, several of us went to a day of Sumo wrestling at a huge arena in Tokyo. What a strange sport! Enormous men in loincloths fighting in an almost ritualistic way, but with great skill. One of the chorus boys, a lad from Finland, was approached by a sumo agent to see if he were interested in taking part, and I could see he was almost tempted. He was about 6 foot five tall and big! The next evening, we were taken to the Kabuki theatre. We had been told that Kabuki was more approachable than Noh theatre, but all I can say is that Noh must have been REALLY boring! In fairness, obviously we had no idea what was going on, but still it is very stylised.
Our experience of performing in the magnificent Bunkamura Theatre was memorable. The audience were in raptures, and we had to sign autographs, CDs, programmes and photographs for ages after each show. Often someone would take our picture after a performance and come back the next night with a copy for us to sign. No mobile phones then! The weirdest thing was that, due to the nature of Japanese writing, the surtitles which are normally above the proscenium arch were up and down the sides of the stage.
More exotic trips next time!
