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Letters
Parisian magic in Perthshire
I remember attending and enjoying the potato shed concert described by Richard Morrison in his column discussing unusual performance venues (June). Recently, I was lucky to see the wonderful Zeffirelli production of La bohème in Milan, and while the grandeur of La Scala made the occasion unforgettable, it also brought to mind a very different production in a very different venue. Years ago, I attended a scaled-down La bohème by Scottish Opera-Go-Round in Pitlochry Town Hall, in which the skeleton cast of half-a-dozen singers with piano accompaniment did a sterling job recreating Puccini’s Paris. As Act One was coming to a close and Mimì and Rodolfo sang their famous duet, they strolled off stage towards the Latin quarter. The side door to the hall was thrown open and, unknown to the audience, it had started to snow. The spectacle of the young lovers strolling out into the moonlit night with snowflakes falling was truly magical. La Scala? Cry your eyes out.
Rod Chisholm, Wormit, Fife
Sadly missed
I was sorry to read of the death of Christopher Gunning (Farewell to…, June). As you rightly say, he was well known for his Poirot theme on television and he also composed a wonderful concerto for saxophone and orchestra called On Hungerford Bridge, which John Harle recorded some years ago. I have not been able to listen to it, as well as most of my CD collection, following a stroke in 2020, but this piece is one of the memorable ones which I do miss!
Ian Morgan, Malvern Link
Red light Ravel
I’d be glad to know what evidence, other than hearsay, Oliver Zeffman has for claiming Saint-Saëns was homosexual (Smooth operator, June). As for Ravel, in 1966 his biographer HH Stuckenschmidt recalled being told by the conductor Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht that Ravel ‘had occasional encounters with prostitutes’. Ravel scholars were cautious about accepting this, knowing the bad blood between Ravel and Inghelbrecht. But more recently, Ravel’s friend and pupil Manuel Rosenthal has been quoted as recalling a phone call he made to Ravel, which gave him a crossed line, so that he heard a conversation between Ravel and a woman who was berating him for wanting to cancel a rendezvous. Rosenthal said her tirade left no doubt as to the nature of their liaison. Ravel wrote, ‘Artists are not made for marriage. We are rarely normal, and our lives even less so’, and he often worked long into the
