There has been no shortage of monstrous male maestros, writes Richard Bratby in a Spectator feature on Cate Blanchett’s new film, Tár, in which the actress plays an abusive female conductor, left. Many of the most sensitive interpreters of a score have been beasts as people. “The ear is amoral,” Bratby says. One of the worst was Toscanini, who would shout profanities in Italian at his orchestras, smash his stand and hurl his baton at those who upset him. On one occasion, he threw his gold pocket watch to the floor and stamped on it. The musicians had a whip-round and the next morning the conductor arrived to find a cheap nickel timepiece on his desk, engraved: “To Maestro, for rehearsal purposes only.”
Stewart McDonald, SNP MP for Glasgow South, was pleased when he visited the Marks & Spencer website on Boxing Day and snared a bargain on a fine zip-up jumper. He should have checked the small print. It arrived this week and to his horror he unwrapped what turned out to be the official zipper of the England football team, with three lions logo on the cuff and collar. I guess he won’t be wearing that on his next trip to Hampden Park.
In the end, silence
Stomp, the junk-percussion stage show that originated in Brighton in 1991, is to close in Manhattan after 29 years. In the beginning the group scavenged in scrapyards for metal to whack in the name of music but they have been getting them professionally made since an incident in the early days when the cast ended a performance feeling light-headed. It was only when they saw green ooze seeping out of the bottom of their oil drums that they realised they were poisoning themselves.
What a Charlie
Innocent that I am, I assumed that “powder room”, as a euphemism for lavatory, originally just meant a place where women refresh their make-up and that the nudge-nudge interpretation arose in the dissolute 1980s. In his new book on derivations, On the Tip of My Tongue, Tom Read Wilson says that the phrase has been linked to drug-taking for a century. The actress Tallulah Bankhead would often take both powders on her loo trips. “Cocaine isn’t habit forming,” she said. “I should know, I’ve been using it for years.”
Audiences expected Dolly Parton’s A Smoky Mountain Christmas Carol, which finishes its London run this weekend, to be saccharine but there was surprise at how jaunty Tiny Tim was. “He sauntered on like Burlington Bertie, almost twirling his crutch,” a reader says. Apparently Tim was not allowed to walk with a limp unless the show cast a child with a real disability.
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Great Scott, wrong Scott!
My item yesterday on F Scott Fitzgerald’s prodigious alcohol intake reminded a colleague of a story Michael Parkinson tells about starting out as a sports writer on the Barnsley Chronicle. In an attempt to show his erudition, he described a footballer as bearing a distinct resemblance to F Scott Fitzgerald. Parky opened the paper the next day and was surprised to see this had been changed to Scott of the Antarctic. When he complained, the editor told him that nobody in Barnsley had a bloody clue about the author of The Great Gatsby, but they had all heard of the explorer, even if he looked nothing like Barnsley’s inside right.
