‘Tricky when they’re
all
difficult,’ sighed Serena.
‘I suppose Rannaldini will have to turn up for the recording,’ said Tristan wearily.
Serena smirked because the Maestro was still finding time to take her to bed. But, to her irritation and despite heavy hints, Tristan still hadn’t made a move on her.
The recording itself was held in a huge assembly room attached to Wallsend Town Hall in north-east London. As the orchestra straggled in on the first day, in early January, the temperature plummeted below zero. Snow lay thickly over the regimented beds of wallflowers and pansies. Lengthening icicles glittered from the gutters in the morning sun. Inside the hall it was even colder: the central heating had been switched off in case gurgles and clicks were picked up on the tape.
‘It’s going to be breathe-in time for everyone,’ said a fat female member of the chorus, looking round the tiny gallery with disapproval. Down below technicians were trying to find room for all the orchestral chairs and music stands, and putting green bottles of water by every singer’s microphone.
The off-stage band had ill-advisedly been sent to play in the bar where an impromptu rehearsal for soloists, who had deigned to turn up, was also under way. Hearing screeching, Sexton, who was heroically trying to get into the jargon, remarked that Dame Hermione was ‘in fine voice’.
‘Chance would be a fine thing! That’s the chorus master,’ said Serena sourly.
‘Do you have a pass, sir?’ asked a man on the door, as Rannaldini stalked in, chocolate brown from skiing.
‘It’s Maestro Rannaldini!’ hissed the other doorman. ‘Where have you been? Outer space?’
Within seconds, Rannaldini was rowing with both Serena and Tristan, and changing everything. Half an hour later, Hermione swept in and started yelling that her dressing room was too small and too far from the stage, and she had nowhere to warm up.
‘How dare you send me yellow roses that are fully out when you know I only like buds?’ she then shouted at Christy Foxe, Serena’s PA, a little scrubbed-faced school-leaver, who had just staggered in with Hermione’s four suitcases. ‘And don’t forget I always have a glass of chilled champagne at eleven.’
‘No need to fucking chill it in
this
hall,’ muttered Christy, making his escape.
Rannaldini was now altering the schedule. No matter that the chorus, who had been booked for the day at vast expense, would be cooling their heels, he wished to kick off the recording with Hermione’s last duet with Franco. When Fat Franco didn’t show up, Rannaldini dragged him out of another recording studio in Rome and sacked him.
‘That’s a million saved for a start,’ he told Tristan gleefully, as he put down the telephone.
When Franco’s agent came on the line in apoplexy, Rannaldini countered suavely that the final contract had not been signed, again due to lawyers wrangling; and, if it had, Franco was in default for not having attended a single rehearsal or having lost a kilo of weight. ‘He hasn’t got a fat leg to stand on.’
‘How can you fire the finest tenor in the world?’
‘
Pour encourager les autres
.’
As shock-horror at the sacking ricocheted round the world, Liberty Productions called a press conference to announce their new leading man: ‘The dazzling, drop-dead gorgeous, honey-toned Australian tenor Baby Spinosissimo. The most exciting thing to come out of Oz since Joan Sutherland.’
‘And the same sex,’ muttered the
Daily Mail
, scribbling furiously.
Aware that he was getting Liberty Productions out of a hole, Baby had played terribly hard to get. When Howie Denston, now his agent, had rung to offer him the job, he had said he’d think about it. He then went screaming ecstatically round the house, before calling Isa Lovell. He was going to earn more money in a few months than in his entire life, so he could now pay his tax bill and buy that horse, Peppy something, Isa kept banging on about.
Baby rolled up at the subsequent press conference on the arm of a ravishing pony-tailed youth in a pinstripe suit. Gwynneth, the flabby crone from the Arts Council on whom Rannaldini had landed when Viking hit him across the room, was covering the event for the
Sentinel
. Wildly excited, she whisked the pinstriped youth from group to group, introducing him reverently as ‘Mr Spinosissimo’s partner’.
‘How long have you and Baby been together?’ asked the
Telegraph
.
‘Oh, he picked me up in the car park half an hour ago,’ grinned the youth.
‘D’you prefer guys to women, Baby?’ asked the
Mirror
.
‘I prefer sheep,’ said Baby. ‘If sheep could cook, I’d marry one.’
Over the roars of laughter, a blonde from the
Scorpion
called out, ‘Who’s this guy Schiller who’s done the tie-in?’
‘Shriller, if it’s Dame Hermione,’ drawled Baby.
The only obstacles ahead seemed to be that Baby must lose a stone before filming, if he were to look suitably lovelorn, and that the
Don Carlos
press officer, Bruce Cassidy, predictably nicknamed ‘Hype-along’, would have to try to hide the fact that Baby swung every which way including koala bears.
In another corner of the room, as the loudspeakers played Posa and Carlos’s Friendship Duet, Rannaldini and Tristan told a battery of cameras and tape-machines how delighted they were Baby was taking over and how equally excited they were about their new Russian discovery Mikhail Pezcherov. Rannaldini did most of the talking, as Tristan lit one Gauloise from another and looked languidly beautiful.
‘Bankable and bonkable,’ wrote the
Mail
.
‘You’ve been called the Italian stallion and the Kraut lout, Sir Roberto,’ piped up the
Scorpion
, ‘how come the Frog Prince is making a film with you?’
‘Rannaldini,’ said Tristan, in that husky, smoky accent with a slight break in it that sent shivers down every woman’s spine, ‘as my godfather and friend, has inspired and encouraged me. It has been my lifelong ambition to work with him on
Don Carlos
. I have every confidence in our collaboration.’
12
Alas, the recording was continually embattled. For a start, Rannaldini was only interested in the music sounding as he wanted. He would scrap even Hermione’s most glorious take if he didn’t like the intonation of the clarinets. Nor would he adjust his tempo to suit a singer, and had no intention of adjusting it for Tristan, for whom the timing of every bar was crucial.
Normally in films, music is added later to enhance the action, but in filming an opera, the action has to fit already recorded music. Thus, Tristan kept having to halt Rannaldini if he played something too fast or too slowly because when it came to filming the relevant singer wouldn’t have the right amount of time to run to the centre of the maze or indulge in a passionate clinch.
Rannaldini detested this. He had arranged for a camera to be on him constantly while he was conducting, so that the video could be shown on a huge monitor to guide the singers on location. Such was his monstrous vanity that he required endless lighting rehearsals, and would hold up a hundred musicians, not to mention singers, chorus and technicians, all on overtime, for twenty minutes while his hair was brushed and the shine taken off his nose. Once started, though, he was reluctant to be halted except at his own whim.
Nor were his singers behaving any better. Hermione was staying at the Lanesborough, Chloe at the Capital. The hotels were only a stone’s throw apart, but both divas insisted on travelling in different limos. When she discovered that Chloe’s dressing room was bigger than hers, Hermione was enraged and duly took her revenge the next day.
Singers are reputed to sing less well when they have their periods. Their vocal cords thicken and the diaphragm supporting the voice becomes sore and easily tired.
Next day Chloe recorded her great aria, ‘O Don Fatale’, and denounced her ‘fatal gift of beauty’ so gloriously, but with such controlled venom, it was impossible not to think it was part of her character. As she came to the end, however, and before the strings could tap their bows on the backs of their chairs in congratulation, Hermione had produced a Tampax from her bag, and thrusting it towards her, asked solicitously, ‘Are you needing this, dear?’
Chloe was outraged.
‘I can’t believe you’re still young enough to use those things,’ she snarled back, and retaliated later in the day by dropping her handbag in the middle of an exquisite take of Hermione’s aria in Act II. This triggered a five-minute screaming match, with Hermione threatening to walk out. Only Tristan managed to calm her.
‘There are women, Hermione,’ deliberately he made his voice even huskier, ‘who Verdi claimed are “born for others, who are quite unaware of their own egos, and who rise above the petty squabbles of lesser mortals”.’
Hermione was so moved she behaved herself for the rest of the afternoon.
On the other hand, she was not the only member of the cast to be worried that Fat Franco had been ousted by an unknown Australian. At least Franco would have ensured that
Don Carlos
was a commercial success. Confidence was restored, however, the moment Baby opened his mouth. The entire orchestra turned round to gawp, and at the end of his first duet with Chloe, Mikhail put down the score he was studying, ran across the hall and flung his arms round Baby. ‘You have most beautiful voice I ever hear. It will be privilege to vork with you.’
Mikhail’s own voice was just as impressive: Posa’s death scene had everyone in tears. Mikhail, however, was easily demoralized, particularly by Alpheus the bass who, in the great duet between Philip II and Posa, kept sighing and wearily holding the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb, as Mikhail, with his poor command of English, fluffed line after line.
Baby and Mikhail on the other hand took to each other instantly, almost as an extension of their comradely role in the opera. In the evening they went on pub crawls, rehearsing their songs for the next day to the noisy delight of the punters. They tried to take Tristan with them but, to their disappointment, he insisted on returning alone to a friend’s flat he had borrowed overlooking Regent’s Park. After all the rows and hysterics, he needed peace to study the next day’s score.
Mysteriously with Mikhail’s arrival things started to disappear. Serena mislaid some pearl earrings, Alpheus some gold cufflinks. Chloe had quite fancied Mikhail until a large topaz ring, the only decent present Alpheus had ever given her, went missing. The cutlery in the canteen had to be replaced twice in a week. Only Baby, Mikhail’s buddy, remained unfleeced, which convinced Hermione, who’d made an unbelievable fuss about a missing umbrella, that he must be the thief.
‘All Australians are descended from convicts.’
‘I have never stolen anything in my life except thunder,’ snapped Baby.
Poor little Christy Foxe, the PA, had the thankless task of getting the cast to the right mikes on time. A singer meant to sound far away has to stand back from the mike, but if, in the middle of a number, he has a love scene with another singer, he has to rush to the mike next to them.
In the ensemble numbers, therefore, it was like Waterloo in the rush-hour, with little Christy shunting Dame Hermione, like a cattle truck, in one direction, and the chorus master propelling Alpheus, like the Intercity Express, in the other. Collisions, screaming-matches, kicks on the shin and slapped faces were inevitable.
There were more rows in the control room, which was where singers flocked after a stint of recording to listen to the playback and try to persuade Serena and Sylvestre, Tristan’s handsome blond French sound engineer, to use the take in which they had sounded best.
Baby, who knew he sounded best in everything, got so bored even of listening to his own voice, not even handsome Sylvestre could distract him, so he frequently started dancing round the recording-machines, much to Alpheus’s disapproval.
Alpheus already disapproved of Granny’s hunky boyfriend, Giuseppe, because if Giuseppe’s consumption of red wine didn’t impair the beauty of his voice he might one day topple Alpheus in leading bass roles, as Alpheus had toppled Granny. Alpheus also disapproved of Granny, who sat calmly knitting colourful squares for a patchwork quilt for his and Giuseppe’s bed, shaking with laughter at his own even more colourful asides. He hardly bothered to put down his needles when he sang, but chilled the blood every time he opened his mouth to deliver the words of the Grand Inquisitor.
Alpheus disapproved most of all of the orchestra.
‘I think the brass section have been drinking,’ he complained, during an evening session.
‘I should be extremely surprised if they hadn’t,’ said the orchestra manager calmly.
In turn, the orchestra, who worked flat out at every session, thoroughly disapproved of the singers, regarding them as lazy, stupid, hypochondriacal, hysterical and grossly overpaid. They did, however, forgive Baby, because he made them laugh and was monumentally generous. Whenever hampers or crates of wine rolled in from his increasing army of fans, they were handed over to the orchestra. Alpheus, who begrudged giving away anything, was horrified. No wonder Baby had difficulty with tax bills.
Meanwhile, Chloe and Alpheus had worked out their schedule so that whenever neither of them was singing they could slope off to bed.
The ladies of the chorus also thought Alpheus was yummy, and whiled away long, cold hours gazing at him. Predominantly middle-aged, given to baggy jerseys and straining leggings, they were of little interest to Alpheus. One member of the chorus, however, Gloria Prescott, rose like Venus from the permanent waves and was nicknamed ‘Pushy Galore’ because she always pushed her way to the front, nodding, gesticulating, shaking her blonde ringleted head and overacting to catch the director’s or conductor’s eye. She also sucked up to Dame Hermione.