One Week With John Gulliver - Music made rich with the voices of the past

Published: 7 October, 2010
by JOHN GULLIVER

I DO not believe in the supernatural but I felt the back of my neck tingling as I thought of  past concert performers and their audiences as I listened to a concert in the National Gallery on Tuesday.

The incomparable sounds of an exquisitely played violin sang out, conjuring up the past of 70 years ago when pianists, violinists and singers would stage daily lunch-time concerts as an act of defiance against German bombers in the Blitz.

Often, bombs would rain down in the West End during the concerts but the perfor­mers would play on through those terrifying moments.

“Unique” is an over-used word but allow me to use it to describe the concert I attended in honour of the famed Hampstead pianist Myra Hess, who pioneered these wartime concerts.

In the audience were women who had attended these very same concerts at the Gallery, including 105 year-old Hetty Bower and Blanche Mundlak, both from this area, as well as Betty Sagon who sang as a teenage mezzo-soprano in a Gallery concert in July, 1943.

To add wonder to the afternoon, it was dominated by a world-famous violinist Ida Haendel, who had also performed at two of the wartime concerts. 

Ida, who now lives in Florida, entered the hall to loud applause – a diminutive figure, now in her 80s, her face topped by a mass of wavy hair, wearing a violent purple patterned dress, tightened by a pink belt, and tottering on a pair of high heeled purple and red shoes.

Obviously enjoying the impression she was making, she joked and laughed with members of the audience as they queued for autographs after her performance. She looked sweetly at a young man keen for her signature and joked: “Yes, you can give me a kiss, and if you don’t have a girlfriend, see me afterwards.” It was all pure Hollywood humour, and the crowd laughed adoringly. 

Her playing was sublime, her fingering perfect, and I could not but wonder how such a tiny, frail person – who was refusing to accept the privations of age – could play with such precision and magic. It was a humbling occasion. Before she placed the violin under her chin, she said her appearance in the hall was a “very emotional” moment.

Then this remarkable woman played three pieces by Schumann, Enescu (under whom she studied) and Pablo Sarasate, for 50 minutes, with intense con­cen­tration, as if the world outside of her simply didn’t exist – the true sign of a great artist. She showed what human beings are capable of – not only great classical soloists like her, but perhaps everyone in one capacity or another.

Afterwards, she talked about herself, and with her infatuating rich voice, revealed she could perform with words as much as she could with a violin.

Born in a small Polish town, she said that when her father realised he would never be able to achieve his ambition to be a violin soloist he swore his first daughter, Ida’s sister, would succeed where he had failed. Ida’s story may have ended there but when she was only three she picked up a violin at home and started playing beautifully by ear, to her mother’s amazement.

Her sister gave up the violin sometime later, and Ida was taken to Europe’s great teachers, until she was ready to step onto the world platform. 

She was not religious, she said, but she believed in destiny – that everyone has his or her destiny mapped out at the start of life, and hers was “written” for her. 

One man, Ernest Hecht, managing director of  Souvenir Press, who himself arrived here as a child refugee in the 1930s, must have richly enjoyed the rapturous moments of the occasion.

When the original backers of the concert, the Jewish Music Institute, had to withdraw five years ago, Ernest stepped in and made sure sufficient funds were made available from his charity, the Hecht Foundation, to keep the concerts going – thankfully.

Would you refuse £100k a year? No? I thought not

AN awful feeling has come over me – I am beginning to feel sympathy for the victims of the blood-curdling accusations made by the tabloids against the men and women earning more than the Prime Minister.

I never thought about them in this way until a whistle-blower at the Town Hall told me how several senior officers are upset by an Islington committee document sent to them as part of the sweetheart arrangements now being set up by both councils.

The document sets out Islington’s plan to wind up private cleaning in their Upper Street headquarters. So what’s upsetting Camden’s officers – many of them, no doubt, drawing well over £100,000 a year?

The words “LLW policy” buried on page two of the document.

When the cleaners start working for Islington they will be given the London Living Wage – £7.85 an hour. And by mentioning this or the abbreviation LLW, Islington was introducing a “political concept”, something civil servants should never do, said the officers.

I suppose the subject of hourly wages or annual salaries must now be uppermost in their minds. The tabloids mock their high salaries. Headlines shout they are not worth it. Some lower paid staff at the Town Hall cruelly gossip about them.

Awkward as ever, I feel some sympathy for them. 

Who can blame them for accepting something offered on a plate? Who would spurn it?

And while the tabloids may make most people think how unequal salaries are, I cannot help thinking how much obloquy the very rich of Britain escape – those whose earnings reach several million a year.

Careem in from the cold

IT must have felt like a walk into the past for Nic Careem as he sipped tea at the wake held at the Irish Centre in Camden Town last week follow­ing the funeral of Dave Horan. Surrounded by old friends, most mem­bers of the Labour Party, I thought, mischievously, Careem has come in from the cold at last.  

When I used to see Careem several years ago he was a well-known member of the Holborn Labour Party. 

Then something happened and he left – to my surprise – for the bluer waters of the Conservative party. He became a familiar Tory figure in the last election.

He believes there is less in-fighting in the Tory party, he told me – something that drove him away from Labour.

But a remark he made stirred up thoughts.  

A fierce opponent of the Iraq war, he said of Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour conference: “[Ed] said the war was wrong, but he didn’t mention the hundreds of thousands who had died.  That was the big omis­sion from his speech...”