The year began perfectly, doing my favourite thing: skiing. My little sister had a new job at Whistler running the office for the Yes Improvement Ski company, and I had some free time to spend hanging out with her. She was set up sharing a big house with some fun Aussie guys. This was my fifth year out of Australia, so it was a relief to be amongst them especially because they were a a little younger than my 29 years.
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| Peter at Whistler 1997 |
I moved from Köln to Brussels in chapters. I grabbed a couple of suitcases during the Brahms String Quintets project when I was playing with Moog in April in a venue just outside of the city. My focus certainly was on the job of performing fine German chamber music alongside my teacher. I was on first viola, so I had some big lines to play. We had a good time playing together.
April, living in a modular apartment in the European Union district of Brussels turned out to be fun. There were a few girls from Luxembourg living above and below me, so I had company.
There was a huge bar on the corner that always seemed to be empty. It took me a couple of weeks to work out that Belgians go to the pub late because the closing time was somewhere in the early hours of the morning.
The British drinkers were always three sheets to the wind by midnight because they could not adjust their '10pm UK pub closing time' speed of drinking. The Belgians paced themselves, knowing too well the strength of their local beer. I went down one night at 11pm and saw people spilling out the doors onto the street. I went in.
Within five minutes I had met a ready-made group of eight Danish girls —18 year-old daughters of diplomats— each one more beautiful than the last. Whenever I was in town they'd all come over to my place and I would cook for them, and they would all drink like sailors. Usually we went out after dinner.
There was a clever Aussie girl in the city, a friend of my big sister, who was there working in the hospital's oncology department. I knocked on her door and introduced myself to her and we became friends instantly. Her frequent dinner parties helped to keep me grounded amidst a stupidly busy touring schedule. She loved good food, red wine, art and photos of women with the same name as her: Anne Hamilton, of which there are many.
During my travels that year I played my first Brahms songs for mezzo soprano, viola and piano, which I would perform very often later in life after finally meeting the girl whom I would marry. But not yet. That was yet three years away.
Visiting London, to play a quartet concert in Wigmore Hall, I met up with violinist Joanne Green who was studying violin there. We went to a formal party with her room mate, and I slept the night there, and was suitably tired and hungover the next morning. That night the quartet played 59.2 and some Shostakovich— during which the two brothers could not bare to look at each other.
That night we slept in the car before driving it onto the ferry back to France.
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| After playing Death and the Maiden |
Further south, Mrs Irina Shostakovich (his much younger last wife) took me aside after we'd played one of her husband's quartets at La Grange de Meslay and said:
"Young man, you are going to do very well. You're special."
It was very sweet of her, though I think she was a bit blind and was talking to the wrong guy.
My mother met me in the Loire Valley in the summertime for an organized bike tour, just the two of us, that included gastronomy and fun countryside accommodation.
After the second day we were pretty sure that the tour organizers had underestimated her age (60) as the route was a little much at times. We passed through Vers and knocked on the door of artist: Jeffrey Stride.
Jeff invited us in for lunch, and I was delighted to see that he had a daughter around my age who was happy to have an English speaking visitor. She now has a daughter who is a budding violinist.
My mother was in France still, now sitting in a lovely little chapel for a concert with my first Kegelstadt Trio (Mozart) which I played with a couple of the Professors from a summer course we were giving for amateurs. Lucas then played a Beethoven sonata. I'd invited him to come down and teach.
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| Peter on violin Lucas on guitar |
At one point in the concert there was an awkwardly long gap between groups, some kind of misunderstanding about who was next.
I remember it like it was yesterday, going out on stage to talk to the public in French, but without anything to say. I did an improv of French nonsense, stringing together unrelated words and phrases. It was Como training that enabled me to do it.
One of my favourite cross-culture moments was at the cafeteria lunch one day when Lucas ignored the typical French woman's pleas when someone pours wine, "Un peu"... "C'est bon, merci..." and he had to pour it through her fingers to get the wine up to the brim, like they did in his mum's pub back home. The French were now dealing with professionals.
Inspired by the innocently condescending attitude of some of the French people I was meeting, I'd gotten bored being polite and had reverted to entertaining myself by putting them off balance with provocative rejoinders to their cultural advice. They usually laughed, but not always.
"Do you have wine in Australia?"
—"It's just like beer isn't it? Without the bubbles?"
and: "Have you ever had oysters before?"
—"I am from an island"
One time at a large table, in a concert reception with ten tables, someone thought it would be amusing to have the Australian taste the wine that the waiter was about to pour. I could have just swirled it, smelled it tasted it and raised my eyebrows and nodded. That would have been the easy and sensible thing to do.
What I did was to look at the label, saw that it had been made in the previous year and knowing full well the uproar it would cause, I said:
"The wine is good. It's a 1997. It was made last year. I don't need to taste it. Go ahead."
Yada yada yada, finally I agreed to swirl, it sniff it and taste it.
"It is much too cold." I said, apologetically.
Someone else tasted it to check: "He is right! It is too cold."
They took all of the bottles back to the kitchen to bring them to room temperature. They realized that they were dealing with a professional drinker. An uncouth colonial, probably from prisoner stock.
Honestly, I liked the people I met in those little villages. They were very sweet and welcoming, and they had lovely table manners.
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Later that year, rehearsing for a Dvorak Piano Quintet project in some large concert hall in Brussels I became friends with Barbara Binet, pianist. She was well known in German cello circles having accompanied David Geringas' studio. In Belgium she was also known as the daughter of an army Colonel who was imprisoned for selling secrets to the Russians. LA Times
At the time I met her she was being clumsily pursued by a Belgian Royal family distant-cousin twice removed type of Duke who was 4,043rd in line for the throne. He was involved in the funding of the project somehow. He was a sniveling, miserable little hairy-faced fellow.
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| Barbara Binet |
At lunch with the quartet, Barbara, having had enough of his attitude, made a point of very obviously paying for my lunch and left the restaurant arm in arm with me. Thus began our long friendship and quick relationship lasting almost to the end of my reign in the quartet, which wasn't much longer. I had some packing to do, and planned to rent a car and drive my belongings back to Köln to finish up my degree. There was also a well funded Cosi Fan Tutte recording project —on period instruments— that I'd been invited to join.
Corinne Chapelle came to stay at my place near the end of my tenure in Brussels. She was dating my buddy Felix at the time. She had decided that since I was nearly 30, I needed to ask the universe for a longterm girlfriend, so we wrote a list of must-haves. I got to work visualizing it without really knowing how that is done. What if you wish for the wrong thing, or you're not specific enough?
For three years I had been writing sporadically to Saskia, the girl who I'd met at Music Academy in Santa Barbara in '94. I'd never had a reply. My letters had been accumulating at her old address. Finally someone arrived on her doorstep with the bundle of letters. She wrote back —to Felix's address in Köln— saying that she was now at the Juilliard School in Manhattan, and would be going back to the summer academy in Santa Barbara in July '98.
"So why don't you finish what you're doing there in Germany and come and be with me in New York City."
I needed to square away my diploma at the Hochschule, despite not having anywhere near the normal amount of time to prepare my final exam. I could do some gigs with the Köln Chamber Orchestra and some baroque stuff to try and get the funds back up after having had a financially disastrous year with the Danel Quartet.
Cosi Craziness
The Mozart Cosi recording paid 500 a day and 700 for each of two concerts. (Deutschmarks still, at that time). It was an important project, sponsored by the WDR - radio- and with famous singers. High pressure, good money. I'd be able to buy a plane ticket after this gig.
My stand partner had somehow wangled a very special viola for me. It was a 'cut-down' Gaspar da Salò. A pleasure to play and a perfect fit for the small viola section of four. She had been telling the dealer that she was going to find a bank to pay for it. I only knew for certain that she had a lot of charisma but was a couple of sausages short of a barbecue. Nevertheless, I was new here, a foreigner. I was of a mind that it was best to let the locals do their thing and see how things played out. 1997 proved this theory to be wrong.
During one of the listening to playback moments up in the booth, my stand partner (principal violist / boss) slipped her hand around my waist.
Super awkward moment for me and if I'm being honest, I was a little shocked. As we walked back to our chairs I calmly explained to her why it was inappropriate. She seemed to listen and hear what I was saying but I could see from her face that something was very wrong.
We sat down again and got back to work. A few minutes later as we were recording she stood up and walked out. Renee Jacob kept conducting as he turned and watched her walk off. I had never seen anything like it. Nothing was said. There was a lot of shrugging of shoulders. We kept going with three violas. Meanwhile she had locked herself in a dressing room.
In the break there was a bit of a hoo hah. Her father and step mother were called in, being well known musicians themselves. I'd met both of them. The step-mother came over and gave me a hug, which was unexpected but very welcome. She seemed to know something that I was just finding out. The break was extended a little until they got the door unlocked and took her away. We got back to work.
The next day, I passed by an early morning committee meeting that was in action just before rehearsal and I stopped to chat. We clarified things with a brief question/answer session, establishing that: no, I did not own her apartment, no we were not getting married and no, we were not running off to America together. Hello?
The committee was dismayed that it was happening again. This wasn't her first time apparently. She was a permanent member of the ensemble, so they were stuck with her.
I said to them:
"Cancel my future contracts and take care of your colleague. She's lost the plot and needs your support at the moment."
We had another day of recording to do, followed by two full concert versions of the opera (Cosi is a long one) which we did with three violas. I showed up to the wrap party really just to hand that expensive viola to any one of her friends who was willing, but nobody wanted responsibility. In the end someone took it reluctantly. Not much of a support network there I don't think. Maybe she'd alienated herself in the past. I could only guess as they were pretty tight lipped...
The most appropriate word for the whole situation was and still is: Yikes.
I made the four hour train trip to Hannover to play with musicians from the Orchestra of the 18th Century to do all of Bach's Brandenburg Concerti. I remember the project well for two little reasons:
1/ I asked one of my colleagues what his secret was to being so successful as a freelance violist. His answer was: "It's best to not say anything. Violinists do not ever want to hear the opinion of a violist."
and 2/ During the concert my D-string, which was roped, 'half'-broke a few bars before I had to play the melody, so it was barely hanging on with one strand and could have fully snapped at any moment. (I made it work and nobody noticed).
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I'd been looking in Köln for short term accommodation and found a decent room to rent the day after the last concert. The place had a coal-burning water heater, so you had to plan ahead when you wanted a hot shower. The really, really weird part was that my new flat mate was a psychologist who had just a couple of days earlier, admitted a new patient. That patient was my stand partner. She'd been having delusions and when she had got home had destroyed her apartment and the police had been summoned.