Just in case you were wondering how I was getting on fifty years ago today in my second term at at the Royal College of Art . . .
On the morning of Friday 19 January 1973 I got to my first concert at the Royal Albert Hall, next door to the Kensington Gore Darwin Building where I was painting my ‘Greenhouse Mural’.
Met Judith Chapman a school friend of my brother’s when I went to buy my ticket
What splendid acoustics the Albert Hall has. There was a sharp noise at the beginning of Fidelio Overture which echoed . . . very dramatic. Andre Tchaikovsky played the piano in Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini by Rachmaninov . . .
Andre Tchaikovsky died in 1982 but his name still appears on the programme ofr productions of Hamlet because he bequeathed his skull to Royal Shakespeare Company.
In the afternoon I’d been in the Illustration Department discussing various projects with typographer Malcolm Winton. My idea that if I had a distraction-free month (in a lighthouse) I could finish my Natural History of Wakefield was mistaken. It took me another five years to get it into print.
So not surprisingly, back my room at the college student hostel, at 14 Evelyn Gardens, I was considering what progress I’d made and what I’d like to do next. Fifty years ago, in my diary for Monday 22 January 1973, I was contemplating the next fifty years:
Where am I now? Or, where would I have been if I hadn’t succeeded in getting a place here, for, as it happened, I didn’t manage to get a place on Post-Diploma.
Would I still be hawking round with folder and photocopies, staying with Dave and Linnie while I toured the London publishers?
Or would I be buried in a Northern Agency . . . or school museums?
Home: Poppleton’ Mill, Horbury Bridge, from my January 1972 sketchbook
Probably for I do not feel my illustrations or myself are competent or confident enough to take on real life. So I must get some work and working out done during this next 3 years . . . and get some outlets for my work going.
Planning for the next 50 years!
Perhaps I shouldn’t worry if I don’t work out everything of my art and attitude . . . if I did the next 50 years would be rather dull.
I think that my attitudes have hardly changed since I was seven or so.
Prommers gather in the arena of the Royal Albert Hall, 7.25 p.m.
We’ve gone for seats in the grand tier, in the last box to the right of the orchestra, giving us the closest view but arguably not perfectly balanced sound, however I can hear every instrument and follow the action from solo violin, to cor anglais to glockenspiel. The Prommers, the members of the audience who stand, sit or lie down in the arena, might be closer to the conductor but they don’t have the unrestricted view of the entire orchestra that we’re getting.
Some of the players don’t have the option of tuning their instruments off stage so during the interval I get a chance to draw the harpist tuning up. The kettle drum player has a method of tuning his drum during the performance, turning the keys and keeping his ear close to the edge of the drum. I think of a drum as a background beat that doesn’t really need any tuning but when it comes to finishing off some of the pieces the kettle drum really does have to hit the right note.
Ravel’s Mother Goose and Debussy’s La Mer are the old favourites that brought us here but the British premiere of a Symphony for Violin, Chorus and Orchestra by Lera Auerbach, The Infant Minstrel and His Peculiar Menagerie, is an event in itself.
Edward Gardner conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra but I decide to miss out on the chance to sketch him in action because I don’t want to miss a note of the music. His conducting style combines the necessary precision and expression with a touch of wry humour and just a hint of mime. His peculiar menagerie of performers includes several glockenspiels, a musical saw, two harps and five vocal soloists including countertenor Andrew Watts. I’d have liked to have drawn them too.
