Willy and Roy - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 23: Essentially Creative
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Stephen Downes
SAN FRANCISCO AIRPORT lies twenty one kilometres south of the city. A spine of mountains more than six hundred metres high runs for scores of kilometres south-east of the runway, and there are more mountains to the north-east. Because of a navigational error, Captain Dickson turned to land much farther south than he should have and descended into forest. ‘Resolution' scythed through the tops of several redwoods, which can grow more than a hundred metres. The DC6 lost four metres of the left wing and hit the ground half a kilometre farther on.
It burst into flames and all nineteen people on board were killed. One report says Kapell was identified by his sports jacket. Others insist that dental records were used for the first time to identify victims of a tragedy that delivered an eerie coda to the pianist's premonition.
Tributes from musicians and fans around the world were eloquent. Anna Lou and his record company RCA Victor asked the ABC for recordings made during Kapell's last concerts. Mr W.G. James, the Commission's director of music, declared that recordings of ABC concerts were ‘of an ephemeral nature, made for one broadcast only after which they are subject to compulsory destruction'. Staff were told to erase them for the sake of the artists. RCA Victor found it hard to believe.
His widow and children sued the airline, and in 1964 a United States District Court jury awarded them almost a million dollars. Qantas, which had taken over the defunct airline, appealed, and the US Court of Appeals sitting in New York reversed the decision. Celebrity lawyer Melvin Belli, who was Jack Ruby's counsel, based his defence on Kapell's earning potential, and reportedly retained his fee, but Anna Lou and the children got nothing.
IN THE EARLY 1970s, MAURICE AUSTIN MET ROY PRESTON through the Theatre Organ Society of Australia. Although Roy was more than thirty years older than Maurice, they were similar souls. ‘Gregarious loners,' Maurice says. Both were unmarried; men with wide interests and lots of time. They shared a love of music almost to the point of obsession. Maurice was a compositor who set type by hand, evolved with the industry to become a linotype operator, then cut and paste columns for offset printers before finally learning to use a Mac.
About twice a month, the organ society met to hear great players perform on one of Melbourne's handful of world-ranked organs. Maurice lived in Melbourne's outer north-west, and it was no trouble for him to pick up Roy and take him home after the concerts. Roy didn't want Maurice to go to any trouble, so he stood in his long gabardine raincoat and tightly knotted tie, sixteen-inch acetates under his arm at the end of his North Fitzroy street. In thanks for the lift, he gave Maurice half a dozen discs each trip – mostly jazz or organ music.
Roy often wondered what would happen to his thousands of recordings. ‘They'll probably end up down the tip,' he said. Maurice would reply: ‘Not if I can help it!'
Maurice recalls: ‘One night in the early 1990s he's there on the corner and he gets in the front seat of my Subaru with an armful of acetates and there's a big grin on his face. He's holding a CD, and he says: "You'll never guess what I found in Discurio" – the record shop. And I said: "No, I wouldn't." And he says: "It's a CD of William Kapell, and one of my recordings is on it!" Well, he's waving the CD at me and it intrigued me. I couldn't see in the car, but when we got to Malvern Town Hall I had a look at it. And it's William Kapell Plays Chopin. Now, there'd been the odd LP come out of Kapell's recordings – from studio sessions to live concerts. But this one had the second Chopin sonata and a long note on the back saying that it had been more or less taken from an ABC broadcast on October 22, 1953, Kapell's last concert.
‘Well, Roy was chuffed, but I asked him how it got on to a commercial CD. And he said he'd given the acetate to a Melbourne concert entrepreneur ... He couldn't remember his name. Some weeks later he did, though, and it was Clifford Hocking. Clifford had told him that he'd "done something with the acetate". Presumably, this meant that he'd passed it on somehow to one or several small record producers. BMG Music, which claimed copyright, had found it and put it out on a commercial scale. For Roy this was wonderful because it just meant sharing his great love of music.'
BY THE EARLY 2000s, ROY WAS FRAIL AND IN HIS LATE EIGHTIES. Maurice had become his carer; he retired early partly to look after his friend. As Roy's health deteriorated, Maurice booked him in to hospitals and nursing homes. Roy appointed Maurice executor of his will, and as he weakened, Maurice realised he'd need to tie up the numerous loose ends of Roy's life. Roy couldn't remember, for instance, where he'd put the title of the North Fitzroy house and it had to be sold to pay for his care.
Maurice pushed open the front door of Roy's home and scarcely believed the chaos. Piles of printed material – from weekly magazines to specialist periodicals and secret war documents to concert programs from the 1940s – were stacked willy-nilly. Maurice found a considerable library of books that were mostly about music. And there were records – thousands and thousands of records. Roy's collection of 78s filled fifteen milk crates when Maurice shifted them. About five thousand LPs, several thousand tapes, and almost three thousand CDs were shelved and catalogued. Each included a slip noting Roy's preferred volume and balance settings.
Then there was the rack of acetates – some fifteen hundred. Maurice started going through them. He found recordings of great local jazz exponents such as Graham Bell, ‘Wocka' Dyer and Geoff Kitchen, some of the finest theatre-organ performances ever recorded, and archives of ABC concerts. Among them were recordings of visiting pianistic greats and four more acetates of William Kapell. Maurice knew little about Kapell, and said to himself: ‘Here's this bloke again.'
He googled the name when he got home. There was one Kapell in New York – David, a real-estate agent – and he dashed off an email, asking if he was related to Willy. David quickly replied that he was his son and, his mother Anna Lou, a distinguished sociologist, was alive and living in Manhattan.
Dr Anna Lou Kapell Dehavenon replied to an email from Maurice: ‘How can we possibly describe the thrill we experience reading and re-reading your [email]?' She explained her lack of success in getting recordings from the ABC. Several of the recorded pieces, she wrote, were ‘my most favorite Kapell performances', including Prokofiev's Seventh sonata and Chopin's Barcarolle opus 60. She wanted the acetates cleaned up and transferred to CD for possible inclusion in Kapell's discography. In return, she offered to send a Sony BMG nine-CD collection of Kapell's recordings that had been released in 1998.
Maurice read the email exchanges to Roy at his bedside in late 2003. Roy was ecstatic. Using basic software, Maurice remastered the acetates as best he could, transferring them to CDs, and sent them to New York. Some months later friends of Anna Lou took the four precious Kapell acetates as cabin baggage to New York.
They were released by Sony BMG last year under the RCA Red Seal label to enormous critical acclaim. The two-CD set is called William Kapell reDiscovered – The Australian Broadcasts. They contain three important new items: a dream-like interpretation of Debussy's Suite Bergamasque, a stupendous performance of the devilishly difficult Prokofiev Seventh sonata and the Barcarolle his widow loved so much. They reveal a musician of rare genius.
ROY WHISPERS THAT HE WANTS TO GO OUT WITH MUSIC IN HIS EARS. Maurice links infrared headphones to a CD player. Roy can't use his hands so he tells Maurice what he wants to hear. Bach is number one. He's not religious, but three days before he dies he listens to a recording of Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring he'd made of Stanfield Holliday playing the Capitol Theatre Wurlitzer in 1952. The next day, though, he is on morphine and Maurice bends close to jot down the name of a piece Roy wants to hear. He doesn't know it, but looks through the CD collection and finds the Turangalîla-Symphonie by French composer Olivier Messiaen. It's a sprawling modernist work of ten movements, drafted just after World War II. Its title comes from Sanskrit words meaning variously ‘love song, hymn of joy, time, movement, rhythm, life and death'. Few rank it among their favorite listens but it was the last music Roy heard – not Bach, a Wurlitzer, or jazz. Not even his home-made recordings of William Kapell. ♦