ON TREK WITH THE ORCHESTRA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 919, 22 March 1957, Page 7

ON TREK WITH THE ORCHESTRA

ARCH is the start of the provincial tours for the National Orchestra, and very soon now the 70 players will be setting out for Palmerston North, Hamilton and Auckland, From oyster bars to mangrove swamps might be their motto as they travel about from Invercargill to Whangarei in all seasons and weathers, playing in all kinds of halls until, as one player said, "We begin to feel like chameteons." After two or three days of rehearsals the moving begins. Bill Barsby, who is the Orchestra’s studio attendant besides being a double-bass player, sweeps the hall clear of everything. The special staging which the Orchestra carries-a set for the South Island is stored at Christchurch-is loaded on to waiting trucks. Smaller instruments can go with

cellos, looking like Henry Moore obelisks in their wooden cases, and the larger brass instruments, are sent on by special transport. The double basses and cellos are always something of a worry. Once five of them were dashed into the hold of a ferry-three were smashed beyond repair, and the other two "have never been the same since." Once at Gisborne, after the truck had been loaded in the dark, the morning light high up on Wharerata revealed the load hanging perilously to one side and a rumour quickly raced around that all the double basses had fallen off and been smashed. Besides travel worries the double-bass players once found that rats had eaten their strings when they left their instruments on stage at Invercar-

gill. At £2 a string they did not appreciate the joke. Music on tour is always looked after by the librarian, Henry Engel, who is also a viola player. He has been on the job for so long now and has worked out such a good system that hardly anything ever gets lost, but he will tell you that the success of it all depends as much on the co-operation he gets from the people in the Orchestra ard the music library at Wellington. The Orchestra plays in town halls, theatres, cinemas and school assembly halls, each one of which will have different acoustics and will present fresh

challenges for the arrangement of the staging-"mackling up" as Bill Barsby calls it-and for the lighting. The acoustical differences call for a real effort by the players, especially in theatres, with their high flies. Of our main concert halls Dunedin’s Town Hall is generally considered the best acoustically, with Wellington a close second, Christchurch third and Auckland (as Professor Bishop pointed out) a bad fourth. In Auckland the difference in reverberation between the empty and full hall is most pro-nounced-an undesirable factor in any concert hall. The size of halls is also important. Wellington is about the right size, and here rapport between audience and orchestra is easily established. Correct lighting is a contributing factor, and

difficult to achieve, At Dunedin, the most graceful of the halls, the orchestra tends to become a dark, remote blur at one end. At Dunedin, too, the percussion has its own problems. A great draught whistles down through the vents in the organ pipes and catches them in the back of the neck. A piece of canvas hung along the pipes would look too unsightly, so the percussion must just wrap themselves up a little more snugly. When 70 people set out on tour stories must abound and the National Orchestra is no exception. Many of them are about railway carriages. There was the time when ice formed on the inside of the windows as the players were re-routed around New Plymouth in midwinter, travelling, it should be gdded, in an aged first-class carriage that, with its curlicews, gas brackets and curved seats, would have seemed old-fashioned in Victoria’s day. A true New Zealand flavour is given the story of the small town where the hired stage hands did not appear, having all made off to a near-by Ranfurly Shield match. Nobody at all was available to help set the stage for the evening concert, and to make matters worse it was already midday, and there was a howling gale and a snowstorm outside. Some of the local

musicians heard of the situation, and came to give a hand. The Representative on Tour, Pat Parker, was up in the flies in his shirt sleeves hauling away at the scenery, and down on the stage the amateur scene shifters were struggling across the stage holding on to a flat when the door flew open and they were carried up into the air by a great gust of wind. "I broke my glasses and the other chap put his elbow through his coat," said Bill Barsby. In many towns members of the audience will come backstage in the interval or after the concert. Sometimes it is to ask advice from a player about an instrument, sometimes to say how much they have enjoyed a concert. And when the Orchestra can feel that it is welcome in a town then being on the "band waggon" has its brighter side and the travel stains, the railway cramp, the suitcase fever disappear and are forgotten. (The soloist in the concerts at Palmerston North, on Saturday, March 23, and Hamilton, Wednesday, March 27, will be David Galbraith playing the Piano Concerto in F by Gershwin. At Auckland on Tuesday, March 26, the violinist Ricardo Odnoposoff will play Tchaikovski’s Violin Concerto.)