I have recently been taking a personal stock take. I shut myself down for a couple days while staff went about the shelves and aisles of Guy Noble looking at what items were in stock. One of the things they found (apart from dusty boxes of memories and an old sports sock) was an astounding warehouse of impatience. I am one of up the most impatient people I have ever met. I am always railing against that phenomenon at traffic lights where every driver takes just a little bit more time than the one in front to put foot to accelerator and move on. This is an awful waste of time, and if the government really wanted to improve productivity in this country it would install a sort of countdown system so that a line of 20 cars could move off at the exact same time, thereby saving maybe six minutes over an entire day of driving. Those extra minutes could then be better spent checking on your friends’ Facebook updates or practising scales.
I am so impatient I have no time for repeats. Certain movements of Haydn’s symphonies are so boring that to hear them once stretches the friendship; to hear them twice feels that your life force is ebbing way. That sinking feeling as performers turn back a page to plough through the same old territory is more depressing than a convicted felon, days from release, reoffending and being sent back for another term behind the prison walls. (Or, in more musical terms, behind bars.)
I do try to slow down. I have sometimes self-medicated on Arvo Pärt in an attempt to rallentando my brain waves, but no amount of tintinnabulation seems to work. If I am walking somewhere, I zoom past other pedestrians at a jaunty Shostakovich presto when everyone else seems to be in the middle of a Mozart andante. Ever so rarely, someone in an even greater rush overtakes me and I think to myself, “What an idiot!” with no sense of irony whatsoever.
Tempo is so subjective. Stuart Challender used to conduct his rehearsals with the Sydney Symphony at a fairly steady tempo, then go like the clappers in performance.
I myself have been conducting a piece in performance and thought it was too slow, and then listened to a recording of the performance later to find that it was much faster than I thought. I used to query why some conductors come to rehearsal with metronomes, but I’m starting to believe there’s something in it. Maybe it’s best to decide how you want the tempo to be when your heart rate isn’t up from nerves or excitement. In the musical theatre show Mamma Mia!, the dancers would come off stage complaining about how fast or slow the performance was, which was strange as the tempo was run off a click – a machine that pumped out the same tempo exactly performance after performance. If you are full of energy the tempi can seem slow, and if you are tired at the end of the week, the tempo can seem fast.
The great classics sound good whatever the tempo. I still remember in the days of vinyl records my father was listening to one of his favourite pieces, Vivaldi’s Winter Concerto from The Four Seasons, except it seemed to be a very fast performance, and no wonder – he was playing a 33 rpm at 45. Apart from the fact that it sounded like a chipmunk orchestra and was a few tones higher, it was still a valid interpretation.
As someone who rushes through life, I am jealous of people who run to their own time, who pause and think before speaking, who refuse to be sucked into the swirling river of modern life and find small quiet pools amongst the reeds. I admire people who have thoughts like taps with a leaky washer, a drip that forms slowly and then falls into the sink of the mind, whereas my brain is like a broken mains pipe, spewing ideas into the street. And even as I am admiring those people with their careful, slow and patient manner, I am secretly wishing they would bloody get on with it!
