Normally going fishing means a visit to Fisher Library at Sydney Uni. This evening – a major computer operation at the office having forced the workaholics to shut down and go home – it meant a trip to the Fish Records shop at 350 George Street.
The stricken sales assistant told me I was the last-ever customer, and that he’d carefully chosen the Great Gate of Kiev that was blaring to be the final track played in the shop. It was very grand, and I didn't have the heart to tell him that I probably would have bought more if I’d been able to concentrate better!
My acquisitions included two DVDs: the Royal Ballet's 2005 production of Delibes’ Sylvia with Darcey Bussell in the Frederick Ashton choreography, and the BBC’s 1966 television production of Billy Budd. The opera was a kind of sop, given that I’d managed to miss all the current Opera Australia performances. The ballet is one I’ve long been curious about, since Tchaikovsky praises it to the skies and the Australian Ballet has never done it.
Listening to Sylvia you can hear where Tchaikovsky gets it from, although he does it better. Not that Delibes’ achievement is to be sneezed at when you consider the beleaguered state ballet music was in. No, Delibes is really good. There's genuine variety and imagination in his music. And I especially like the way he uses colour, with daring things like bringing in the leading man with just flute and clarinets and “exotic” stuff like the beautiful use of saxophone (not heard in the concert suite). The horns, too, have more fun here than in Tchaikovsky, to the extent that a bumper is needed.
That said, the DVD was more to satisfy my curiosity about the ballet itself rather than the music. Which was just as well, because the musical interpretation seemed wooden, lacking rhythmic flexibility and elegance. If we didn’t have the wonderful unfolding of Darcey Bussell's limber legs to watch, some parts of it would be thoroughly unbearable.
Do dancers really prefer this kind of musical treatment, with such rigidity of tempo? If they do, perhaps it’s because too many of them grow up dancing to so-so studio pianists hammering their way through uninflected Chopin. [Aside: the year I played for a university dance department, the teacher walked into the first class, came over to the piano and said, “No Chopin.” Excellent advice. He got a lot of Prokofiev instead. At times I had to shore it up into neat 8-bar phrases with judicious edits. That’s what ballet will do to a musician.] Or worse, they’re spending their student years dancing to recordings, which of course have to err on the side of conservative regularity.
Back to the Fishing. With the George Street shop closed I now have the choice of going to an upper floor of the QVB (tourist territory and out of my way) where the bias is towards DVDs rather than CDs, or to King and Clarence (again, not on the ground floor and even further out of my way). No longer will I just happen to walk past Fish and be enticed inside on a whim; I'll have to go there. I'd be curious to see whether the presumably lower off-George Street rent offsets the disadvantage of your customers not beating a path past your door on a regular basis. Bearing in mind that the George Street shop was within spitting distance of Angel Place, surely a synergy could have been established in that respect?