When a tall tree falls in the forest, the silence lasts longer than the crash. I am not yet able to break my shocked silence about Lord Sacks, except to note that his passing had greater resonance than any other chief rabbi’s and that men and women the world over are listening to Mahler in his memory, knowing that these great works absorbed his musical attention.
In this melancholy November, when the JC’s social and personal pages are filling up faster than ICU beds, I hardly dare to look among the ads for fear of who I might find. I lost two cherished music colleagues last week and the only place I can write about them is here, within their tribe.
When I first shone a searchlight into the murky corners of classical music, the business was dominated by boy trebles who had gone on to public school and Oxbridge. Gentiles, to a man. Any Jews at the mahogany boardroom table wore false names and fake accents. Women were scarce. Outsiders like Victor Hochhauser and Raymond Gubbay were treated as upstarts for putting on popular works of music that the public liked and could actually afford. Not the done thing, old chap.
What a chummy world it was, with liquid lunches stretching into teatime and Sunday cricket at someone’s country place. Musicians were there to make money for managers to have fun.
Then I was summoned by Dvora and knew I was not alone. Dvora Lewis was the public face of the London Symphony Orchestra, which had hopeless managers and was in all sorts of trouble in the 1980s, with rebellion in the ranks and bailiffs at the door, not that you’d ever guess from Dvora’s press releases. What struck me was that she went by a Hebrew name, quickly correcting anyone who called her “Dora”. When the phone rang you heard: “It’s Dvora”. There was no more Jewish greeting in the music world. Latvia-born, she was this country’s first orchestral PR, a pathfinder.
We were often at odds, she and I. Her job was to create an image. Mine, as a journalist, was to look behind the image and break things. Mostly when I heard “It’s Dvora” she was dismayed at something I had written about a client of hers. But she was always courteous and I cannot recall her ever telling me a lie, which must be a first for PR.
People she liked, be they conductors, or photographers, or gofers, she invited home for Friday night with the family, or even for a Seder. The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas said: “She had a way of putting a gentle arm around you and charmingly introducing you to strangers in a crowded room who, in their mutual appreciation of her, found a way to feel at home with one another. She addressed nearly everyone as ‘dear’ and one felt she was completely sincere.”
When Dvora retired in 2016, the LSO made her a life member, even though she had never played a note. She left us last week. Some people you only know how vital they were after they have gone.
My other loss was Rodney Greenberg, a television director who set a gold standard for filming the BBC Proms. With Rodney at the controls, artists could step with confidence into the bearpit of the Royal Albert Hall, knowing that if there was any embarrassment — a slipped strap or a runny nose — Rodney’s cameras would find a point of interest somewhere in the upper balconies until the matter was resolved.
Vastly erudite, he was one of the self-styled “JB boys” who watched John Barbirolli conduct the Halle and came down to London knowing music from the source — Jewish lads like Rodney Friend who went on the lead the New York Philharmonic and the late Sydney Fixman who directed music at West London Synagogue (and prayed second day at my shul). Rodney was the unsung master of the Proms until the BBC cut back on culture. Watch any of his Proms on YouTube and you will see how far the BBC’s sound and vision quality has fallen since.
I commissioned him to write a book about George Gershwin. He turned in a manuscript so thoughtful and immaculate it barely needed an editor. A jolly lecturer and good companion, we became related through my daughter’s marriage to one of his clan and I would see him at simchas. After years of ill-health, he was hopeful that one more operation would restore his quality of life. Sadly, it was not to be. Misaskim Manchester looked after his funeral.
When death comes in clusters, it’s not easy to focus on quiet achievers when the colourful ones command the obit pages. But we cannot let Covid numb our humanity. None should pass unnoticed. Their memory is our blessing.
The film of Norman Lebrecht’s novel The Song of Names is now showing on Netflix
