It rained so hard in Paris for the Olympic Opening Ceremony, I felt wet just watching it. A flamboyant fashion catwalk in the rain, dancers reenacting the French Revolution in the rain, a steel horse sprinting over the Seine in the rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Don’t get me wrong, I thought the whole thing was original and magnificent – un spectacle par excellence. But, yes, it did rain on a biblical scale. At any moment, I feared the Olympic torch might go out; the cameras forced to look away as some poor sod struggled to relight it with a damp box of matches.
€125M it cost. For that much, would it not have been possible to field an umbrella or two? It was spread over such a large area, the whole of central Paris basically, perhaps they would have blown the whole lot on umbrellas?
But the two moments I have been asked about and which are the reason for this blog are pianist Alexandre Kantorow on a Parisian bridge somewhere playing Ravel’s Jeux d’eau (coming from the French ‘Jeux’ as in ‘Jeux Olympiques’ and ‘eau’ as in ‘rain’), his piano spattered and pooled with water, and the French National Orchestra on the rain-sodden Trocadero next to the Eiffel Tower belting out the Olympic Hymn. Of course I was sorry for the performers, but my main thought was for their instruments. Those precious instruments, soaked. Can you even imagine? Well, actually, I can. Here’s how:
A year ago, I wrote a routine for Zeb Soanes, former BBC Radio news and weather reader. I ‘orchestrated’ the shipping forecast – a detailed weather forecast that is broadcast four times a day on BBC radio and regarded as something of a national institution. Zeb read the weather outlook and the Rainer Hersch Orkestra accompanied: the music starting calm enough but building to stormy peaks as the weather got grimmer. At the climax, Zeb by now in a Sou’wester, had a beaker of water thrown over him. Not even a whole beaker mind, more like a half of one of those paper cups you get at office water dispensers.
A day later, I had a polite note from one of my first violinists saying that a drop of the water had landed on her instrument and had left a mark. One drop. Would I pay for it to be taken to a luthier (a string instrument specialist) for removal, she asked. She sent a photo of a whitish smudge on the varnish. Groan – seriously? But, ‘of course’, said I without hesitation, mindful of the need never to upset the real talent without whom I am just some bloke waving a white stick.
From this anecdote you will gather that, faced with the downpour we witnessed at the Olympic opening ceremony, you could have threatened the players of the French National Orchestra with the loss of their jobs, perpetual international infamy, even the guillotine, there is not the slightest chance that, holding their actual instruments, a single one of them would have stayed on stage if so much as a dot of water had fallen from the sky, never mind the downpour we witnessed.
The only person who didn’t get drenched was Lady Gaga who popped up at the beginning of the event. But then her bit was a pre-record. Of course it was! For a start it was all miraculously sunny. So, how do you think Alexandre Kantorow managed to perform his Jeux d’eau or the orchestra their Olympic Hymn? Answer, they didn’t. Live, they didn’t play anything. At. All. And what’s more, they didn’t on instruments someone had bought from Amazon for €200 including the box. Which, by the way, is €200 more than they were worth after being vomited on by the gods.
