The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 25

Page 25 The Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday, December 20, 1986 I tTSATURLA r-7 r-i ri Tl I 1 Miffed dog lovers Art preview AIDS education Christmas fare nnnunBnnBnnnnnBnBnnBnMnnnnnnnnnnnni if 11111 wmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm Race-torn Brixton is an odd place for a conceit pianist to live, but Roger Woodward has done his best work there. MEREDITH OAKES looks at the influences that have shaped this unconventional man. THERE someone in your life who always wins at Monopoly? For his friends, Roger Woodward is that person. His characteristics LJ include unreasonably high spirits jps lr I iV It I I I 7 -It X. Vim-'fv ,.,4 A lot has been written about the manslaughter charge relating to the Brixton riots of which Elroy was acquitted two weeks ago, and about the attempt to protect him which brought Woodward into collision with the law as well.

Woodward has come to feel that he is in fact Elroy's father. It is hard for anyone living in South London not to realise that young blacks have a particularly raw deal economically and that they often encounter irrational levels of suspicion and ill-will from the police. "What I like about the people around here is that you don't have to explain to them about queueing, being poor and being cold; they know. Elroy had been through more by the time he was 15 than many people have when they're 40. He is well-adjusted, warm and bright-faced.

I feel I am his father because that is the response he trusted me to have. He brought this feeling out in me," Woodward says. He has lived in Brixton for 10 years and has done his best work there. Dazzling achievements like last month's performances with the New York Philharmonic in the Lincoln Centre of Bach and of Keqrops. written for him by Yannis Xenakis, take their place beside long tours like the one currently taking him to many of the Australian outback places that he loves, where people are "unbelievably kind, and serious about their music And when they're sitting in a little hall practically on top of you, you know you have to play everything exactly He likes to quote something Rubinstein said about there being a first career and then a second career.

"The first career is where everybody gets to know you and you become very famous, you think. There was such a period in my life in London in the early 1970s, when I played a lot not only in London but all over Europe and in America, and I thought, my God, you've arrived and then I was not doing those things except intermittently. Rubinstein said, 'That's the second career and it's lifelong, the gradient is small, it's a long, slow ascent and the true artist emerges from it. That's true. You're only as good as your last concert, no matter where it was.

"There are a lot of little concerts an artist has to play, as Rubinstein did all his life, and as did Heifetz, Oistrakh, Richter. Richter still plays little places and urges me to do the same. And then when you play in a big place, all that playing is in you. As a result of the sharpening-up process, your art shines. AT LAST! Summer's been a tad tardy this year but here it is in a full, hot flush.

Romantic as it may sound to spend a White Christmas somewhere in the northern hemisphere, it would seem as foreign to me as our sweltering festivities must be to the Finns, the Canadians or the Poms. I have just been perusing a copy of that genteel English publication. Country Life, an issue dedicated to gardens. It contains an article on conservatories advocating the installation of one so that the keen northern gardener can grow plants like tibouchina, zonal pelargoniums, agapanthus, trachelospermum jasminoides, solanum jasminoides, plumbago capensis, buddleia asiatica and other such plants. All of which are growing happily in my garden without the help of a conservatory and are in flower for Christmas.

A NIAGARA of letters has descended on me following my recent items on dirty dogs. Including one coached in the most menacing terms from a dog-loving reader in Lannceston, the PS of which reads: "If you don't lay off dogs, I intend to air freight yon a carton of snap-frozen dog shit every week for the rest of my life." Perhaps the first parcel will arrive in colourful Christmas wrapping. I you feel the way I do about turkey, you might like to consider a lighter, more delicious Christmas alternative in the form of Tasmanian Atlantic salmon. This delectable fish is being commercially farmed in Tassie in vast steel pens moored in the ocean. It has the kind of delicacy of taste that only cold water fish seem to achieve and simply poached and served with a dill-flavoured mayonnaise is just about the best summer luncheon dish I can think of.

It's available in Sydney from Mike Cook Fishworks at Seaforth, Eastpoint Fish Shop at the Edgecliff Centre and Doyles and De Costi's at the Sydney Fish Markets. it THE Lord Mayor of Woollahra. Charles Widdy and his wife threw an elegant party at Council Chambers last Wednesday to raise funds for the restoration of Juniper Hall in Paddington. Highlight of the evening was a recital by five musicians, some of them players with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, who style themselves on the Australian Brass Quintet. One of the items on the program was a splendid baroque Rondeau by Jean-Joseph MOuret.

1682-1738. who was a court musician to Louis XIV of France. As they began to play, a ripple of recognition ran through the audience. During the interval a lady asked why. and I explained that that particular piece of music was played over loudspeakers at every Club Med worldwide to summon holidaymakers to meals and a number of the guests must have remembered the tune.

"Oh." she said thoughtfully. "I suppose Club Med commissioned it." THOSE hard-working Volunteer Guides at the NSW Art Gallery held their annual Christmas party mid-week and guests were given a preview of paintings selected for this year's Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes. Artists whose work had been chosen for hanging also were invited along to explain their works to the curious, and most turned up including the distinguished Donald Friend and Joshua Smith, still recognisable as the model for Dobell's controversial portrait that won the Archibald in 1943. The entries are a pretty mixed bag, as one of the Volunteer Guides acknowledged. "Here," she whispered, pressing a drink on me, "this might help make the paintings look better." 7 tvrsfc'vi'" A i Roger Woodward working at his home in Brixton.

and an espresso machine. There is a long wall with Col Levy's plates on it, a 1710 grandfather clock, a table with green baize. The famous five cats are usually concealed in parts of the furniture. Roger has extended the ground floor at the back: windows all round, and a fine Polish brick stove built by a Polish friend. Roger's bed is there now: on the floor above is a bathroom- and a big studio with the piano in it, and the floor above that is Elroy's (Elroy Palmer is Woodward's foster son).

spends as much time with both children as he can. He doesn't like to be too close but he doesn't like to be alone either. The Brixton house is never empty; the neighbours are always there playing table tennis. The street is a flat-fronted terrace row which, on a sunny day, can remind one of Glebe or Leichhardt. Brixton does not feel like a place where people riot.

It is one of the least miserable places in London: crowded and vivacious. Inside Roger's house are oak parquet floors, open space, plants, an Italian-looking kitchen with tiles while playing; a delight in handling piles of paper money; an endless capacity for deals around the table; a determination to own Park Lane; and luck so strong that it begins to look supernatural. Actually the Monopoly craze was over years ago; there have been many other board games since. Suggest a game of whatever it was last month or last year and he looks at you in mild indulgent surprise, as if trying to understand how an intelligent person could enjoy these childish things. When he moved to England after studying in Poland, he used to play chess.

He believed, like the Russians, that chess built character and fighting spirit, two themes which are dominant in his music and his life. Going to Poland to study, as he did, was unprecedented for a young Australian musician in 1965, but there were excellent reasons: the presence in Warsaw of an outstanding teacher, Zbigniew Drzewiecki, the Chopin tradition and the newly famous composers, notably Penderecki and. Lutoslawski. Woodward has vivid memories of his first day in Poland: "It was autumn, all the leaves were off the trees, it looked miserable and very cold and there were long queues. I stayed one night with this man and his wife and daughter, on an excruciatingly uncomfortable camp stretcher.

It was clearly inconvenient for them. The next day I enrolled for the school year, though I hadn't auditioned with The Ministry of Culture put me in the house of a lady who was divorced and had a friend at the She said no piano was to be moved in there." To practise, he had to go to the Conservatory. "I used to arrive with a cheese roll and a bottle of milk about ten to seven in the morning. The doors opened at seven and there was a huge queue. I made friends with a Cuban studying there, Jorge-Luis Herrero-Dante, who's now director of the Conservatorium in Havana.

Jorge and I had a deal going because colourful stamps were being printed in Australia and Cuba at that time and the doorman, in return for colourful stamps, would let us in to the best pianos first. It wasn't long before he was wanting to play concerts. He says: "I had $50 a month from Australia, but I spent it all on books, so I asked if I could play any concerts. It was not because I thought it might be a nice thing to do, but because I had to eat. They liked me and they liked my playing, but I was no favourite; 1 played a lot of modern things they didn't like.

"But they gave me concerts. First of all in a park. Second in a faraway place called Luckow, near the Russian border, and then in progressively nearer places. I had a half concert in the Chopin Society, which is the prestige place there, but I chose to play Scriabin and Prokofiev. They were not very pleased about that Then Rostropovich fell ill in March 1967, and cancelled with the Warsaw Philharmonic I got those concerts and played Mozart.

After that I played all over Poland." There also were crucial musical I ASKED Donald Friend bow on earth anyone would go about choosing three winners from such a diverse collection of paintings and styles without creating controversy. "God knows," be said. "I think you'd just pick three winners and then take the train to Darwin and stay there for a while till things cool down.1 IT'S CHRISTMAS AT 2001 LEATHER LEATHER LEATHER PRIMARY school teacher, Robert Sanders, son of Commonwealth Bank managing director designate Don Sanders, last week entered a talent quest in CofT Harbour. He took out second prize with a lively recitation of Lewis Carrol's nonsense poem, Jabberwocky, which so captivated the audience that he was immediately engaged for repeat performances at several local clubs. Sseatsr $1399 214seater $1259 2seater $1079 Chslr $759 Better comfort Better leather Better construction Half the price of imports! Direct from manufacturer IgkWTWJ, mm msmm 5l THE English National Opera has just mounted a production of Carmen that sounds even more innovative than their recent Rigoletto which was updated to contemporary Manhattan.

Setting for the opera is a car dump and the stage is littered with clapped-out 1960s gas guzzlers. Appropriately enough the sponsor of this arresting new version of operatic warhorse is Esso. I 515 Pacific Highway Crows Nest Phone: 439 4866. Open Mon-Sat 9.30am to 5.30pm. Sun 1pm to 5pm Bob Carr is to decide the fate of Katoomba's fabulous Carrington Hotel early next year.

The best suggestion I've heard is that the Government should resume it and I understand that approaches have already been made to State Minister for Sport and Tourism, Mike Geary, to lend weight to this proposal. Not only does the building have inestimable heritage value, it could be the key to a new tourist boom in the Blue Mountains. FOR ME Summer starts when I siak my first Pimm's, knocked up with equal parts lemonade and ginger ale, thick with ice and with all the frills strips of cucumber rind, slices of lemon, lime and orange, cherry and mint. It was the world's first gin sling and has, of course, been around for over a century, but it seems the young are only just now discovering it. A colleague's son returned breathless from a holiday in Surfer's with news of "this great new "What's that?" his mum asked.

"Pimm's," he replied, triumphantly, adding that np north they also like to drink it mixed with champagne or milk. A much earlier formative influence was the Australian potter Col Levy. Woodward says he met Levy when he came to the family home in Chatswood to take out his sister Maureen. He says Levy would often sit on the piano stool in front of the Beale upright for more than half an hour, without playing anything, while he waited for Maureen to get ready. "He brought in a lot of second-hand records from Ashfords Bartok and Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

At that age it made a profound impression. I was convinced this person was a genius who played the piano but didn't want to just then. When I found out he was a potter I was shocked. He didn't play the piano, and had no knowledge of music at all except what he listened to. "I played every single one of the records he brought into the house, secretly in my sister's room when she was out I helped myself to all her Sobranie cigarettes and read all her Bertrand Russell books, then I would climb out of the same window I'd come in by, and shut it so it looked as if I hadn't been in there.

Little old 78s of Boyd Neel with Bach. It was a treasure, that room of my sister's. She gave me my intellectual freedom, so I'm very close to that sister." As a boy Woodward painted as much as he played music, and played the organ as much as the piano. Through playing in church he met Kenneth Long, then the organist of St Andrew's Cathedral, and came to know Long's friends, the musicians who surrounded Sir Eugene Goossens. The subsequent Goossens scandal, and the persecution that followed, shocked him deeply and probably helped to intensify his impression that artists and society exist, for the most part, in an uneasy state of truce.

When he later went to Poland he was making what can now be seen as a typical Woodward move, governed by artistic considerations with little regard for convention or career. Around 1971, when it became obvious that he would have to base himself more in London if he wanted to play in the West, he encountered a new financial crisis. Everything the Poles had given him was in zlotys, which cannot be exchanged for Western currency. Months were spent in assembling the elements necessary for survival: a place to live, a piano, an agent, work. There already was an agent, and an imminent booking at the Elizabeth Hall.

But the booking was for a Chopin recital indistinguishable from those of other pianists. This did not suit Roger at all. It was probably mixed motives intense idealism, shrewd attention-seeking, compulsive risk-taking that led him to decide that the standard piano recital was a straitjacket and that he would play an entirely contemporary program, including the forbidding Barraque Sonata. It is to the credit of James Murdoch, then a promoter in England, now back in Australia as an arts consultant, that he took over the running of the concert. For Woodward it did pay off.

Critics who would not have bothered with another Chopin recital came for Tak-emitsu, Meale and Barraque. He played brilliantly and they said so. He secured a London footing which has lasted. He owns a house in Brixton, and also the Paddington house where his daughter Asmira lives with Prue, her mother. Asmira, 13, plays the violin exceptionally well and is likely to become a musician too.

He talks about her a great deal and has many photographs of her in his house. But Woodward was even less good at living with Prue than he is with Trish Ludgate, mother of his new son Ben and the person he is most able to be close to for long periods. She stays in Coogee, he in London, though he 60 ANTIQUE SHOPS A MILLION GIFT IDEAS FOR CHRISTMAS 4 -1 AI DS is not a pleasant subject to be writing about at this time of year but I continue to have the sinking feeling that our politicians don't have any idea of the enormity of the problem. A report by the Harvard School of Public Health, commissioned by the US Secretary-General for Health provides some chilling statistics between a million and a million and a half people already infected with the disease in the United States; seven thousand heterosexuals and three thousand children affected by 1991; and the development of a vaccine at least five years off. Surely one of the keys to controlling the epidemic is education.

It's difficult to understand why there is any resistance at all to a widespread, explicit campaign to inform ALL members of the community about risks. It's unrealistic to expect, as conservatives do, that people will abstain from sexual intercourse. What is needed is for people to clearly understand how the disease is transmitted and what steps they need to take to avoid transmission. Ignorance can only lead to discrimination and disaster. n.

I I i I 4sn WHILE it's encouraging to see the Health Minister. Peter Anderson, announcing a low priced five-pack of syringes and needles available through pharmacies, he's surely missing the point. These should be free. In Amsterdam where needles are available at no cost to addicts, the spread of AIDS among this particular group has been significantly stemmed. A PROGRAM, to be broadcast on 2MMM-FM tomorrow evening at 8 pm, covers the entire range of problems associated with AIDS.

It's remarkably frank and pulls few punches. And it's presented in direct non-scientific language so that all listeners can understand the message. Interviews for the program have been gathered from all over the world including die Soviet Union. Woodward he arrived last month with a new-look shaven haircut. encounters with Rubinstein, who was a friend of Drzewiecki, and with the great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter.

Woodward recalls the circumstances of his first encounter with Richter: "A totally unknown young pianist from Australia, practising the Prokofiev Third at the Krakow Spring Festival in 1968, hears the Mozart minor, the trills at the end of the exposition of the first movement, being practised by an unseen Russian. Just these trills for an hour and a half, in various slow rhythms, and I thought, 'Who is this maniac? And it turned out to be Richter "I learned from that morning how to practise. Before that no-one had been able to tell me. I thought you just played through the difficulties. But I learned from Richter that you isolate difficulties, that you can spend a day just working on certain problems." Richter, who lives for music, exemplifies Woodward's own artistic principles and is extremely important to him.

SO the Cahill Expressway is to stay, despite promises of its removal when the harbour tunnel project was annooaced. Oh well, it was a nice thought while it lasted. '1 V.s".;' 10.30 A.M. TO 6 P.M. OPEN 7 DAYS MAY I take this ODDortunitv of wishina Aldernerson Markham.

Laurie 531 SOUTH DOWLING ST, SURRY HILLS I Brereton, Neil Glasser, Barrie Unsworth, everyone at the Australia Council, TEL: (02) 33 3244 ana ail oi you, genteel readers, including all the dog lovers among you, the best of all possible Christmasses..