Here Comes Treble: A Great Hall
Isabel Bradley recalls experiences in the hall which has played such an important part in her musical life.
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The Wits Great Hall is the theatre at the heart of the University of the Witwatersrand campus. It forms the background to a collection of happy memories:
My first memory of this lovely hall is of attending a production of The Wizard of Oz. One of my mother’s ‘girl friends’ took my brother and me as a treat one summer afternoon. I skipped along in the sunshine, clutching Kay’s hand, as we walked from the bus stop through the campus to the hall and up the wide steps. I must have been very young, as my memory stays at the flag-stone paths, the steps, the imposing pillared entrance, the sun-shine and Kay.
When I was twelve, following a process of audition, success and several rehearsals, I found myself on-stage at the Wits Great Hall, in front of the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra, performing Mozart’s Andante for Flute and Orchestra to a full auditorium. The agitation of butterflies that had been fluttering in my insides for weeks vanished as I took a breath and began to play. This was the first of three Youth Concerto Festivals at which I performed different works over a number of years, and was the beginning of my career as a solo flute-player.
A few years later, in 1975, James Galway came to South Africa. I’d recently bought his superb recording of the Prokofiev and Franck sonatas with Martha Argerich at the piano. As a big fan of the Irish flute player, I made sure that I attended both of his Johannesburg concerts, the second of which was at the Wits Great Hall. The auditorium, which seats over a thousand, was packed. My seat was near the back. I sat in the darkened hall, with a heavy pair of field binoculars pressed to my eyes throughout the performance, barely blinking, mesmerised and thrilled by the fabulous flautist, by every breath he took and every fascinating finger movement. He played his entire programme from memory, allowing his dark eyes to scan the audience constantly. I could have sworn he gazed into my binoculars several times.
At that time, many of my friends were studying music at the University of the Witwatersrand and were members of the university orchestra. For a short while, although I was working as a secretary, I too became a member of the Wits Orchestra. The conductor and Head of the Music Department, Professor Walter Mony, knew me well, and the university at that time had no flute students of the standard required. Soon after I joined them, the orchestra spent a week in the extraordinarily deep pit, accompanying a programme entitled ‘The Bear and Other Animals’. One half of the programme consisted of a little-known one-act opera called ‘The Bear’, performed by students of the music school. The other was a lively performance of Saint-Saën’s ‘The Carnival of the Animals’. In the Saint-Saëns, the bird piece is played by the flute, runs and trills flying up and down the entire scale of the instrument. There was a problem with this piece. No matter how loudly I played it during rehearsals, no-one in the auditorium could hear a note. I was too deeply buried at the bottom of the pit. We eventually solved the problem. Dressed in my long, orchestral black skirt and high heeled shoes, I clambered up on my chair every night to play that challenging little solo.
A few years later, in 1979, the university re-furbished the hall, including giving it an ‘acoustic treatment’ and a hydraulic orchestra lift! These would have been a far safer solution to my problem of being heard than balancing perilously on a chair…
Now, after a long time away, I’m about to return to the Wits Great Hall as a soloist with the orchestra I’ve been a member of for the last twenty years. I look forward to the occasion with delight, and to writing about the thrill of it all.
Until then… ‘here comes Treble!’
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By Isabel Bradley
