Brassed off
It is midnight. I am on a coach with the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Russia, driving through the streets of Aberdeen, completely lost. The orchestra have just played an excellent concert – Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto and fifth symphony plus three encores – to a small but enthusiastic audience at the city’s Music Hall. Their reward is a bag of fish and chips, courtesy of the local charity Love Russia, and a 14-hour drive to Felixstowe, where they are due to play a few hours after their arrival.
The orchestra come from the city of Tomsk in Siberia. At the beginning of November, they left their home town and took the Trans-Siberian express to Poland; it took five days. From there they were taken on two coaches on a tour of Holland, Luxembourg and the UK. Audiences have been poor everywhere and by the time they reached Swansea last Thursday there was no money left, not even enough for food. They were reduced to busking outside McDonald’s to generate interest in that evening’s concert and to raise some cash. Orchestras are used to roughing it; they are used to waiting months to be paid; they are used to absurd itineraries. But this was a different order of hardship. These musicians, 80 in all, by no means all young, have been staying in youth hostels – often 10 to a room; eating poorly, if at all; and zigzagging bizarrely across the UK: from Swansea to Halifax, Aberdeen, Felixstowe, Oxford, Rhyl, York, Bournemouth, Torquay.
The tale of the National Philharmonic’s tour of Britain is a mixture of Greek tragedy and Hollywood musical – The Oresteia meets The Bandwagon. It is also a story of our casually exploitative attitude to the cultural riches of the former Soviet Union. And perhaps a less-than-glowing reflection on our hospitality as a nation too. By the time I caught up with the orchestra in Aberdeen on Sunday, a little known telecommunications company and an elderly man in Halifax had offered contributions towards the cost of the tour, but the situation remained desperate. In Aberdeen, the musicians came close to revolt. They refused to rehearse; instead, they showed up an hour before the concert and held a heated meeting on the stage, demanding money up-front from the hall. It quickly became clear that the concert could not begin at the scheduled time of 7.30pm; indeed, the odds were against it starting at all. The musicians were exhausted, but not too exhausted to be furious.
The house manager announced that the concert would be delayed; the doors of the hall were barred to the public; the debate inside continued while outside bemused members of the audience milled in the foyer. The venue refused to provide funds, but with cancellation appearing inevitable a solution was finally found: the tour promoter, Mario Gutierrez, promised that on Monday the sponsors’ money would make it possible to pay them some cash. They agreed to play. They were asking £800 per concert – the princely sum of £10 per player. It wasn’t just a question of subsistence, but of self-respect.
Half an hour later, having gobbled the roll and soup provided by the venue, and more formally attired, they were back on stage. They began with Tchaikovsky’s lovely, lyrical andante cantabile, the orchestra’s strings sounding sweet. The contrast with the angry scenes earlier was extraordinary; that they could compose themselves and play so well was a sort of musical miracle. The conductor, Polish-born Boguslaw Dawidow, and the piano soloist, Jessie De Bellis, squeezed each other by the hand as they went on stage. “Whatever happens, we will play to the end,” he told her. And they did, with a few slips but without a catastrophe. “I felt sad; I could see the faces of the musicians,” De Bellis told me afterwards. “I wanted to cry and was worried about how I would play, but I had to carry on.”
The audience – 500-strong in a hall with a capacity of 1,200 but making enough noise to cover the gaps – was won over. I felt oddly ashamed that, on their first visit to the UK, they have been treated so shabbily. They have barely a word of English between them; they have no money, no way of getting back to Siberia before December 14; and they are being shipped like cattle around a country that appears to be indifferent to them. I wanted to buy them all champagne – to offer them the welcome to the UK that no one has thought to give them so far – but champagne is not on the menu at the Ashvale fish bar.
I had intended to stay in Aberdeen but, as much out of solidarity as journalistic curiosity, joined them on the coach for their strange tour of the service stations and regional music venues of Britain. By six, after a fitful sleep, we were close to Carlisle. One of the musicians wished me good morning; the man behind me on the bus was doing a puzzlebook; others were standing outside in the cold morning air and smoking those deadly little Russian cigarettes; while maestro Dawidow, exhausted by the strains of holding his orchestra together, was looking dejected, unable to believe what was happening.
“I don’t want to fight because I want the tour to go to the end,” the softly spoken conductor had told me earlier. “We have a contract and I want to get to the end until the musicians are paid off. I didn’t understand that the tour was to be paid out of the tickets. I believed that everything was covered, but when we arrived we realised that the tour depended on ticket sales. But with 80 people travelling, that is an impossible situation. I have worked with many different groups of people, but I have never had such a disaster as has happened on this tour. It is not fair on the musicians. If you don’t eat during the day, if you can’t rest, it is very hard to play. In Aberdeen they told us at the hostel that we had to leave at 9.30 in the morning, but I pleaded with them to let us stay. This experience is something that has never happened in my life and I am in shock.”
So what went wrong? Gutierrez, a Chilean based in Amsterdam, is married to De Bellis and the tour was planned as a showcase for her talents. She had found it difficult to play concertos in the Netherlands – “managers won’t even listen to the tapes you send them,” she complains – so her husband decided to circumvent the system. “I was flying from Stockholm to Amsterdam when I had the idea,” he recalls. “I was reading the New York Times and saw a story about orchestras in Russia – that tickets cost virtually nothing, these wonderful musicians had no money, that they were being forced to play on the metro to earn enough to live. I decided to find a Russian orchestra, put her [Jessie] in front of them, and make a tour.”
They took advice, listened to tapes and visited Russia before settling on the National Philharmonic. Gutierrez says that the tour would have been impossible with a western orchestra; that, in effect, it was only the poverty of Russian orchestras that made it possible. He justifies the tour on the basis of the exposure being given not just to his wife, but to Dawidow and the National Philharmonic. He even talks optimistically of the loss he will make on this tour as being an “investment” and says he hopes he will be back with the orchestra next year. But all that sounds like a dream, and it seems highly unlikely that this orchestra will agree to be promoted by him again.
Gutierrez has had little experience of promotion, apart from organising recital tours by his wife in the Netherlands, Sweden and her native Uruguay. That is a very different proposition from criss-crossing western Europe with 80 musicians: even Russians, impoverished as they might be, have to eat, drink and sleep. His plan was bold, ambitious and completely bone-headed. Until Global TeleSystems offered support, he had no sponsor and insufficient funds even for the most basic needs of the orchestra. He was relying largely on the daily box office take, which is – as the Arts Council will attest – a hopeless basis on which to organise an artistic enterprise. Attendances have been low everywhere and, once the venues have taken their cut, there has been little left for the band. Do they eat, sleep or buy petrol to get to the next venue? Not an easy choice. The orchestra has had to busk it – literally.
“I had been told to expect 700-800 people at each venue,” says Gutierrez. “One hall told me it was one of the most popular concerts of the season. With 500 people a day, we would have got by, but we have never achieved that. I don’t know why. We put everything we had into this. We had a good programme, a good poster, good venues, an interesting orchestra. A Russian orchestra should have pulled in large numbers at the box office. Some of these towns hadn’t been visited by a Russian orchestra in years. But still the people didn’t come.” So does he regret ever setting out? Does he wish that that plan hatched in a plane had never occurred to him? “In a way yes, because of the poor attendances. But in another way no, because they were all very nice venues and the musicians are happy to play in them.”
Happy is not the first word that comes to mind when you talk to Dawidow, the National Philharmonic’s conductor. “We are in a dramatic situation,” he says sadly, “not because of our mistakes as musicians but because of the mistakes of the management. I want to make sure that no one else does this with other musicians, because I am scared that there are many smart guys who are trying to use the bad situation in eastern Europe, and I don’t want to let other people suffer because of that. I am free to speak out: I am not Russian; I’ve got three orchestras; I don’t need anything. The only thing I really care about is music, and I don’t want anyone ever again to kill the musicians like this.”
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