People I Made Music With, by David Tidboald

People I Made Music With, by David Tidboald. ISBN 9781415200551 / ISBN 978-1-4152-0055-1

One of South Africa's most eminent musical figures, who worked with many of the greatest musicians, singers and dancers of the age, conductor David Tidboald gives a fascinating account of his life and encounters with places and people he made music with.

When one has been privileged to have had a career in one of the arts (in my case as a conductor), which involved working with, and in many cases getting to know, some of the leading artists of the last half century, it does seem something of a waste to make one's departure from this planet without recording impressions of these remarkable people. Though numerous other names appear from time to time in what follows, I have confined myself in general to those I have known personally, some more intimately than others. They comprise conductors, pianists, composers, dancers and singers, a famous actress and a great writer, the order of their appearance being dictated generally by when I first made their acquaintance, either by way of their work or in person. Sometimes one memory triggers another, so that the narrative moves backwards and forwards, even on occasions sideways. The first part relates to the years before I took up the first of three permanent posts in South Africa, the second to the years thereafter. The first two pianists appear in the van of the parade because of their association with my earliest awareness of music and music-making.

Arthur Fiedler 1894-1979

When the Cape Town Municipal Orchestra celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1964, it was decided to engage an international guest conductor to add lustre to the occasion. The choice depended, of course, on who was available (and willing to come), and even more importantly at what price. I combed the agents and Antal Dorati was available but at five hundred pounds a concert was deemed too expensive. Fiedler at one hundred pounds a concert was a more feasible proposition. This, even for those days, very moderate fee had to do with his urge to get away from his enforced repertoire in Boston: he was itching to conduct the great masterpieces which at home no one asked him to do. I was to learn that this was something of an obsession with him. Arthur Fiedler was a familiar name especially to survivors of the era when gramophone records whizzed around at 78 revolutions per minute, that is, until the introduction of the long-playing record in the early fifties. The two main purveyors of classical music in Britain at that time had two categories on offer: with hmv it was red label for the prestige artists, magenta for 'economy'. As conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, Arthur Fiedler was the quintessential magenta conductor, whereas Sergey Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony, was definitely red label. The personnel of the two orchestras was identical, though one wouldn't have known it, for the sound of the Pops was athletically slim, that of the Symphony of a warm lushness: the one silver, the other gold. Naturally the essential differences of technique and temperament between the two conductors contributed profoundly to this. [...]

This is an excerpt from the autobiography: People I Made Music With, by David Tidboald.

Title: People I Made Music With
Author: David Tidboald
Type: Autobiography
Imprint: Umuzi
Publisher: Randomhouse Struik
Cape Town, South Africa 2000
ISBN 9781415200551 / ISBN 978-1-4152-0055-1
Softcover, 15x22 cm, 144 pages, several photos