Chapter Text
January 2010
They say you should never meet your heroes. By and large, they’re right.
For one thing, heroes don’t exist. The only luster they have is what we’ve lent them; the luster dims and disappears once we see that, even if they have a unique talent or outstanding achievement, they’re just people.
For another thing—when heroes do live up to their hype, say one time in ten, we might not like how they got to be the towering figures we admire. What they had to do or give up; what they sacrificed, for themselves or other people.
Third—perfectly nice people can turn into arseholes from being fawned over and accommodated too much. And that’s on us. If people think they deserve everything and should get away with anything, because that’s what happens every day of their lives—that’s on us.
In my line of work, heroes are a menace.
Okay, there are exceptions. Players who bring so much to the table, with so little presumption or pretension that you can hardly believe it; Yo Yo Ma comes to mind. But honestly, they’re more unique than rare. So even though I idolise the playing of Sherlock Holmes, premier violinist of his generation, I haven’t at all been looking forward to conducting the orchestra with him as the soloist.
I’m one of a handful of fulltime orchestra conductors left in the state of California—population 37 million, in this year of our lord 2010. And against all odds, I’m an unremarkable Brit conducting the Mammoth Studio Orchestra, the last orchestra left of the many that Hollywood studio system used to boast. (I call us the LSO, the Last Studio Orchestra, not the London Symphony.) So I’ve met the good, the bad, and the appalling. At first the let-down was sharp, but now I’m just resigned whenever a musician I admire comes to play with us. Maybe it’s the added stress of the operational costs, which make for a gruelling work pace and a grinding sense of hurry. Maybe it’s the absence of a live audience, or the obsessive focus on the recording, I don’t know. Whatever it is, this line of work doesn’t seem to bring out the best in performing musicians.
I’ve got practically Holmes’ whole discography. I’ve never seen him live, but he’s terrifyingly good; in interviews, unsmiling but worth hearing if—big if—he unbends and talks. —Talks. In that voice, my God. As charismatic as his violin playing, oh who am I kidding, as gorgeous as his looks.
Still, it’s the voice of his violin, the voice of his musicality, that makes me such a huge fan. With a quirky musical phrase, or a single one of his signature ornaments or ritards, he makes the most weary, threadbare warhorse fresh and powerful again. When I tune in by chance to a radio programme, I know within a few notes that it’s him playing, and what he’s playing. Recently he’s been pivoting to much earlier repertoire, and he’s opened my ears to some composers I’d thought conventional or played out.
He’s simply my ideal of a violinist. Everything I ever wished I could do with the violin and then the viola, Holmes has done, and surpassed.
It gets obvious pretty fast if a lionised soloist is more flash than ability, or more technique than art. Especially if they’re more hype than substance, which is sadly not uncommon. Music is mechanics, and mathematics; but even more, it’s emotional and aesthetic experience, breathing through body and soul and heart and mind. Nobody does it better than the former child prodigy and now seasoned professional Sherlock Holmes.
He’s known for being serious and accomplished, but so driven as to be humourless. The conductors I know tend to be tight-lipped about him, especially about personal interaction. In a profession as gossip-fuelled as mine, that’s an obvious red flag. I mean, music’s like that; Hollywood’s worse; put them together, and film music gossip is nuclear-powered.
And now, finally, Sherlock Holmes is coming to play with the LSO. Mike Stamford’s been negotiating with his agent for ages, maybe years, trying to get Holmes. Mammoth finally got the right score for a big film, a costume drama in a period that’s right in Holmes’s more recent wheelhouse; he was the only world-famous violinist it made sense to hire for the solo work. It’s a part as central to the film as Joshua Bell’s in Schindler’s List, or even Margalo Schiff’s in Fortune’s Wheel. We have an original Rachel Portman score in eighteenth-century style, with a half-dozen Vivaldi concerti grossi to adorn it, and it looks purpose-written for Holmes’s recent, pre-nineteenth-century focus. For all I know, it was: Portman’s been quite flamboyant in her admiration of his equally flamboyant playing.
Her original score promises to make a standout soundtrack overall, and to make the studio a mint. That’s good for the LSO. I hate having to worry about the job security of an entire orchestra, but bean-counters run the world nowadays; the LSO’s continued existence honestly does depend on us knocking it out of the park every time.
Still, the Sunday before Holmes was to arrive, I find myself more resigned than energised. I’ve listened to his entire backlist, telling myself I’m just doing my homework on his distinctive style in general. But in truth I’ve been bracing myself against being unable to enjoy it the same way, once he’s played with us.
The signs are already ominous. He couldn’t be bothered to schedule a call with me in advance; that first conversation is normally where the guest artist and I lay out our mutual terms and expectations, and set up the polite fiction that we’re on the same page. Not Holmes; he texted that he’d prefer to fly in a day early. Sure, he’s got a hellish schedule most of the year, but he’s made it so we’re starting off not only from scratch, but late.
He was meant to have flown in this afternoon, and he and I were to meet after dinner. But he’s been delayed by completely predictable winter storms in the Rockies; now he’s due in only at noon on Monday, and we’ll have a working lunch before having a first rehearsal. We’ve lost a lot more than those fifteen hours; a cold open could well hobble our chances for an excellent outcome.
Holmes’s time is too expensive for the studio to pay him for more than one week; for that matter, the Orchestra’s time is expensive too.
Well, he'll be in tomorrow, and then we’ll see which variety of nightmare he’ll turn out to be: a larger-than-life arsehole, a smaller-than-life disappointment, or a one-dimensional one-trick pony.
