Cruise ship quarters

Sergei Prokofiev; Violin Concertos 1 and 2; Joshua Bell, violinist; Montreal Symphony Orchestra; Charles Dutoit, conducting

Okay, here’s what I think. Five minutes before they put down the gangway to welcome passengers aboard the inaugural cruise of a brand new vessel, somebody slaps their forehead with the butt of their hand and yells, “Oh, for crying out loud, we forgot to find rooms for the band!” After disparaging remarks like, “Do we have a band?”, “Do we need a band?” and “Do they need rooms?”, the bartering begins with “We won’t be able to sell that room; the heat is stuck on high. Let’s give that room to the band,” and “The chef is just going to have to find another place to store the rice and pasta, we need that room for the band.” “Isn’t there an extra room next to the morgue?”

When I came aboard the Royal Odyssey on February 11, 1994, in Aukland, New Zealand, the band leader, Mike P., told me that I would be sharing a room with him. It was next to the morgue. But check this out. The room was huge, measuring something like thirty by forty feet with two port-hole windows on the starboard side of the ship close to the bow. We were below the pursers’ offices, above the galley stores, next to the duo that played in one of the smaller lounges, and, like I said, next to the morgue. The bathroom had a claw-foot tub, we were ten seconds away from the staff mess and we had S P A C E ! ! ! ! To top it all off, Mike spent most of his time with his girlfriend who worked in the boutique. So, I essentially had the whole room to myself.

We spent the first six days of the cruise visiting various ports of call in New Zealand. After crossing the Tasman Sea, we docked in the city of Hobart on the Australian island and state of Tasmania. The next day we visited Melbourne. I didn’t really know what to see during the few hours I had available to me in Melbourne, so I just walked around town, seeking out the same three things that I pursued in every port: book stores, local food and CD stores.

The CD store in Melbourne offered me the opportunity to purchase Joshua Bell’s recording and performance of Prokofiev’s Violin Concertos No. 1 and 2. Though both concertos rock, the hopeless romantic in me loves the very lyric, and almost Mendelssohnian qualities of, the first concerto. The beginning and ending of the piece achieve ethereal moments of exquisite beauty. Mr. Prokofiev preferred, it seems, to tone down the sarcastic rhetoric that permeates so many of his other works. As a matter of fact, the whole thing shows an earnest side of the composer that he very seldom let out to play.

I also bought a pair of Sony headphones in Melbourne. My three-year-old ghetto blaster was more than equal to the task of filling the thirty by forty foot room with music, perhaps even loud enough to wake the dead. But sometimes the details in the music don’t make it all the way out into the room. You catch a little more with headphones, while, at the same time, rendering the ambience of the room just as deathly quiet as the room next door. Well, morgue or less.

Credits: To Felix Mendelssohn, on the occasion of his two hundred first birthday. Thank you for the violin concerto and the music to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”.