The staff of ITM return from a summer break to relate the remainder of the epic tale of the trip to Hungary. It gets interesting and perhaps controversial from now on, honest...
Mammut is depressingly like most other shopping centres in the world; glass, faux marble, lifts, adverts, toilets, predictable assortment of shops, cinema as you find in US malls; but it did have a supermarket in the basement and so I bought some apples and water (opportunity to try out Hungarian; seemed to work). I had by good fortune got hold of some sandwiches, a lunch which had been made up by our fixer in expectation of our timely arrival the afternoon before and handed out in the small hours as a welcome present. Being of the 'pack sandwiches and a flask' upbringing which had served me well over several hundred miles of hill walking, I'd brought them with me and now consumed an interesting mix of what I gradually realised to be soft cheese and paprika. By the time I'd finished, the people I came in with (and because my memory is still shot at this stage, I now can't remember at all who they were) had installed themselves in a Greek restaurant, which I tagged along with. Whether the following is a trait of Hellenic or Magyar cooks I am unsure, but by the end of the modest meal we had been given both complementary liqueur and watermelon slices by the staff, which pleased me much. By the time I was back on to the bus for the return journey to the hotel my sleep clock had returned to around the level of this time the day before - livable-with for now, but with short-term memory and some decision-making starting to suffer, wouldn't feel safe driving, etc. Startlingly, I recall being thrown into a rap improvisation somewhere on the way back and doing rather well at it, despite being on autopilot. That is to say, I appear - somehow -to have come up with some rhyme witty enough to raise a torrent of mirth and applause from my audience.
I decided not to try to sleep immediately but instead go for a wander round the neighbourhood. This ended up as having no sleep at all, although I can rationalise this in that I was doing moreorless alright at the time, and it would be better to sleep only at night. A large assortment of people were heading to a swimming pool at the end of the road (in fact it gives its name to the street; Pünkösdfürdő utca means 'street of the Pentecost Baths') so I moved with them. The street* had looked somewhat unattractive from the limited number of pictures I had seen prior to the trip, and indeed was still not the most endearing neighbourhood what with all the Soviet-era blocks and parched grass typical of Warsaw Pact suburbs, but neither was it a crime-racked dump (the 3rd district is considered one of the more affluent in the city) and it was quickly apparent there was no danger in walking the streets here. The Danube (the link is to a 360 panorama) dictated the end of the east-west street and beyond the point at which we stopped I could just make out the long island dividing the Szentendre channel from the river's main course. Just as I was contemplating striding over the mini-earthworks to have a proper look at the riverside (why am I so easily led away when there might be something interesting to look at round the corner?), a sub-group walked up to us and announced with visible annoyance that the open-air pool was closed 'because it had been raining earlier', something which was clearly not the case now. Anyway, there seemed to have been no possibility of persuading the place to re-open (I lacked the Hungarian to explain the shortcomings in this business model) so we set off back up the street.
And what should we happen upon, yards from our hotel, but a...bar.
Now this was in many ways a Good Thing, because hotel bars the world over are a rip-off, and now here was a place not two minutes' walk away where a korso of beer (about a pint) was 290Ft (less then £1) and the wine equally inexpensive. And it was also equally cheap to buy coffee - proper strong Hungarian kave like a double espresso in a little cup - which I decided then to be the best course of action. But- there's a butdo not be drunk at concerts and rehearsals. The climax of this paragraph is probably crashingly predictable. That's not to say everyone behaved irresponsibly, but let's not beat about the bush: people drank, some significantly, before a concert, which I just can't endorse as being advisable.
I've got a slight confession to make here. Having learned the 'ordering in a restaurant' section of my Complete Hungarian book, I bought my coffee using the vernacular, which pleased the barmaid greatly, This was overhead by a member of my party, who first tried to copy the sounds I told him would result in him getting beer, and then when this failed, me making these sounds to order his drinks for him. Having then clarified the vocab to my 'student' (he did pay, by the way) I can only assume I had now taught the entire orchestra the Hungarian for various alcoholic beverages, which somewhat contradicts the tone of the last paragraph. On the other hand, the bar staff understood the English terms too, so I'm not sure I really have much to be guilty about.
Actually, I didn't really stay long enough to find out. Having spun out the coffee and then increasingly abandoned any hope of conversation (Companion was nowhere to be seen, and I think she had done the sensible thing and slept for a bit) I quietly returned to my room to get concert clothes and other items necessary for the public performance of music on the violoncello. I do seem to have some kind of knack for leaving without being noticed when I want to, which comes in useful now and again. There is the usual rigmarole of forming-up in the lobby when departure nears; somebody is late, several people now rather merry, me glad I won't have to fight my instrument on to a bus this time.
The journey through the suburbs is more familiar now and I can remember the route and landmarks from this morning, except now they are subtly different in the light of the late afternoon. It seems something of a mystery why there was no major school of Hungarian painting in the late nineteenth-century, for the quality of light would seem to be just as facilitating as that of Tuscany or northern France. Budapest castle was particularly conducive as can be seen from the pictures I took whilst we were waiting to enter the concert venue. The courtyard of the museum had a scattering of trees, statues and an old field gun which looked particularly good when framed artfully. There was also the strange intermingling of an English orchestra half in concert dress, instruments still in cases, mixing with the tail end of the Hungarian police, also half in uniform, half on ceremony. No conflict, you understand, but the sense of a transition between two very different cultures. Once we were inside the hall the atmosphere was relaxed. There was enough time to prepare for the concert gradually - indeed I sat and played through some Bach for a bit, partly to try and keep the skill in my fingers awake but partly for the hall's acoustic. Upstairs, the dressing room overlooked the northern side of the city, the Buda Hills (which I wanted to climb on the free day) and, perfectly installed as the foreground subject of a photograph, a single flagpole with the red, green and white flag of the Republic at its head. I waited until the breeze unfurled it against the sunset and pressed the shutter button for a 500th of a second. Perfect.After a little conversation, I waited downstairs for us to walk on, gradually joined by the rest of the band. The hall had filled up considerably - in fact we were, to my delight, actually having to find extra chairs to allow the whole audience to fit in the hall. It was later explained to me that the concert was free and had been publicised hard by our Fixer, but this turnout was still something you would never expect in the UK, especially for a student orchestra. People simply don't care enough about the sort of music we perform back home, blighted by apathy, being told they must consider it snobbish and being too overworked to have enough time for culture. Tonight's programme: Beethoven Prometheus Overture; Haydn 'Clock' Symphony and Beethoven's Seventh. Perfect for the size of orchestra we're taking, and hopefully nobody will notice the second horn is actually a flugelhorn.
There is loud and warm applause from the assembled Hungarians as we enter. I notice something almost immediately - there is no conductor's podium. As I sit down in the principal cello's seat, I assume somebody must have forgotten bring it on and speculate how the Conductor will probably make a joke of having to carry it on himself. But no, here he comes, striding down to the semicircle of chairs with the projection of confidence that all musicians learn as part of our 'act', still with no podium in sight. Christ, I realise: he's actually going to conduct it from memory. The whole gig. All of it.
Now, as a sort of freeze-frame before the baton goes down, let's make it clear that I'm not, on principle, opposed to this. There is a long history of conductors doing ridiculously complicated pieces sans partition - Boulez and Rite of Spring is the most arresting example - but, as our conducting teacher impressed on us, the guy with the stick absolutely, positively has to have a completely watertight knowledge of the dots. It's a bit like overtaking: if you are even slightly in doubt about it, do not do it, because you have to be utterly certain there is going to be no possibility of failure. You will note that at this point I do not doubt our Conductor's intentions nor am I suggesting that he did not fulfil the above caveat; but the thing about Boulez and Rattle and all the others is that the musicians they had were crack professionals who had had as much rehearsal as they needed (admittedly that isn't much), had had normal sleep levels and knew the piece inside out. We were a student orchestra, doing this on our first, rushed, rehearsal in half a week, having had probably no more than about 6 hours' proper sleep in the last two or even three days and without having been forewarned of this. Oh, and did I mention some people had been drinking a couple of hours earlier...? What it comes down to is this: however prepared the Conductor might have been, we the players simply didn't have the mental resources at our disposal to deal with this at a whim, and cast aside our natural instinct that something was wrong here. What we needed in this situation was certainty and extra security. Just play it safe this time.
I won't lie: when the beat went down I was scared. Not quite as scared as the night I suddenly found myself speeding towards enough surface water to make my friend aquaplane into a tree a few minutes later, nor the occasion my housemate nearly choked to death on her own vomit after a horrific night's binge, but still decidedly uncomfortable. My thought process (sparing what mental RAM I could from the effort of translating dots into arm movements in my increasingly lethargic state) kept circling round 'I don't have confidence in the direction even though I should have, so I'm going to end up thinking about it so much and worry about making some massive error that I will actually make a massive error.' After a while I hit upon the idea of watching the leader rather than the conductor. I don't know if this improved my playing but it got me to focus enough that I avoided any serious mistakes and leading my section astray. I will refrain from speculating on how well other members of the orchestra were coping, although I couldn't spare much to watch for signs of danger.
There was, however, one definite high point, which was a truly extraordinary few minutes before the start of the Haydn symphony. For various reasons, one of our number, a gifted arranger, had made a version of the Tuba Mirum from Verdi's Requiem for nine trumpets, horns, bassoons and timpani. In the resonance of the hall it sounded like the end of the world, incredibly loud and spectacular and creating all the more astonishing an effect by segueing straight into the start of the Clock Symphony (the above video is, regrettably, not of us, but is about as close to conveying the awesomeness of the movement as any I could find. The Haydn began at 2'06). Incredibly (at least it seemed to me) we got through it all without communal mishap. I have no idea who bailed who out or if there was any bailing-out happening at all, but the Haydn danced along as it should (you know my opinions on Haydn) and the final chord was followed by as great a round of applause as had begun proceedings. We've made it this far - indeed a mantra that seems to sum up the tour.
Beethoven's Seventh was the second half. Yes, also directed from memory. The cello part is a monster at times with all the dotted triplet rhythms and string-crossing and it was probably a good thing I'd played most of it before, because I really wasn't enjoying the level of concentration I was having to put it by the end. This, too, was judged to be a success by the assembled throng, and meant we cold play an encore (I have little knowledge of how clap-happy audiences are in different countries, but am working on Hungarians needing the same quality of performance to demand an further items as we would back home).
The piece we played for the next three minutes changed everything. It made every event of the last three days worthwhile. The diminutive but perfectly crafted orchestration Béla Bartók made of his piano miniature Este a Székelyeknél contains little more than a few held notes for the violoncello section to play, but this mattered not. The simple melody, hung over a few carefully chosen chords, seemed to me far more poignant and pertinent than anything else I had heard in the concert. I don't know whether it was because it was closer to my own idea of what music should sound like, or simply that I had played and loved the piece in its many incarnations for years and years, but it caught my attention like nothing else, and offset every trial and setback we had suffered to get this far. And when we had finished, the audience simply wouldn't let us go, which I would like to think was because of their love of the piece and delight at hearing their own country's music, as well as for the rest of our playing. We bowed, the conductor bowed, walked off and back on; we stood up again, he bowed again; he stood up different sections individually, bowed again, walked off and on again, and still the whole hall applauded. I was thinking we'd have to play part of the Haydn again, but eventually we simply had to leave because we had a meal booked. I'm sorry, citizens of Budapest; we would gladly have played more but we were just too tired that night. Our appreciation of you is not diminished, rest assured.
It was dark by the time we were back on the bus. Dinner would be served presently on a river cruise on the Danube, although right at that moment I wouldn't have cared if it had been the nearest McDonald's because I was really starting to get hungry, a state in which I start to get profoundly uncomfortable in (an unholy alliance of metabolism and blood sugar levels if you must know, not helped by the potency of the coffee earlier). The civilised strains of the concert hall had given way to the furious noise of a student group gearing up for the evening, now amplified in the ugly acoustic of a MAN bus. I grabbed the frontmost seats and put the cello at the window side so I could grab it round corners. It turned out that we had a little time in hand, so before dinner we would drive up to the Citadella, on the great rock overlooking Budapest. I'd been up here on my last visit at night but didn't remember much apart from being told the place was crawling with pickpockets and quickly learning that there was no way I was going to take any serviceable photos with my primitive film camera in the dark. I'd been judicious with the cello, for the drive down Budai vár and up Gellért Hill to the fortifications felt like a rally special stage as we swayed round hairpin bends. I was first off the bus and followed our Fixer to the viewpoints. It was a clear night and here was the city spread out before me; the castle, the great river and its bridges, the dome of the St. István Basilica, the long avenues and lights of Pest and the peaks of Buda. I steadied my Olympus on some conveniently situated benches, turned the dial to 'night' and did the breathing-out thing to keep it steady whilst depressing the shutter. (The pictures came out alright). The rest of the group seemed equally impressed with the view.
Back onto the bus, noise level to bad-closing-on-torrid, and down the hill again, across the new bridge and along the embankment of downtown Pest. Presently we stopped somewhere upstream of the parliament building and were told not to get run down legging it across the road to a waiting river boat. It was a reasonably large vessel; bigger than anything you'd get up the Thames to the bit we'd come from, and on the lower deck we found a huge spread of hot and cold foodstuffs. I had to positively restrain myself from scoffing the whole table whilst the system for purchasing wine was explained. As it was after the concert, I had no qualms whatsoever about sharing a bottle of white with the friends I was sitting with, which turned out to be a very good decision because the stuff was delicious. As was the cuisine - I ate my first proper hot food in days; soup, meats, vegetable sides, cheese, fruit, all of it both welcome and satisfying. This was better. We shared the glasses of bőr around, me raising laughter by going through the motions of sniffing and chewing it (no, I don't know what wine buffs really get from these actions that you can't get just by drinking it normally) and made comments to the general opinion that the food was fairly excellent. Presently the deck cleared a little and we drifted upstairs, where our party were spread out round the open-sided observation deck. There were fantastic views to be had here to, albeit from a different angle, along with me obligingly photographing others to swell their Facebook albums (I really don't mind doing this though).
I was feeling decidedly better about things now, assuming that I would have a proper night's sleep ahead of me and that the rest of the tour would consist of spectacular concerts and memorable socialising and culture-soaking. OK, it's a shame one of our number vomited on the boat, and now enough individuals were fuelled with drink the din on the coach back was deafening, but I assumed this would be only a temporary foible. And yet...remind me, what's that quote about assumption from the (otherwise risible) film Under Siege?
Something was about to happen that would bring the whole chain of events to a head, and almost push me over the edge. But it happened after midnight, so it must wait until the next post...
Next time: Some decisive stuff happens, and I become intimately acquainted with the biggest acoustics in the world.
*This link is to possibly the most hilarious and pedantic blog I have ever come across, that of an irate Budapest resident who feels the need to share examples of outstandingly bad parking in his city with the world.
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