BERNHARD GUELLER
Keith strikes me as
the most versatile amateur (if I may use that word about a man to whom music is
life) musician I have met. That came
home to me when I conducted his 70th birthday concert a couple of
years ago at a church in Buitenkant Street.
Many of you will remember how his talent shone through – if memory
serves me well, he conducted the Chichester Psalms, he then played the last
movement of the Organ Symphony on the organ, and the Shostakovich 2nd
Piano Concerto, a feat daunting for fully professional musicians. He also always had interesting comments on
the concerts I conducted with the orchestra in Cape Town over the last 20
years!
We met when he was the
choral trainer of the Symphony Choir and collaborated on, I think, the Schubert
Mass, This led to more collaborations and a friendship that spanned the last
two decades.
He has always played a
large role in the musical life of the city.
SHIRLEY DE KOCK GUELLER
It was the time of
democracy, everyone in my environment was excited, tense, stressed, exhausted
and working hard, not the least the choristers and the management team in the
first Cape Town Caltex Massed Choir Festival.
The music was chosen and hey, we needed some new arrangements of works
for massed choir with symphony orchestra, all of which needed tonic sol-fa
added to the staff notation since many choristers couldn’t read music. Then there was also the new South African
anthem. Who came to mind? Keith Mattison. Whose task was it to commission and
get the works? Mine. Who got the grey hairs? Both of us, I think!
Although my encounters
with Keith had been several over the years
… one notable one was when I, sitting on the platform at a CTSO concert,
watched him rush up at the last moment for the last movement of the Saint-Saens
Organ Symphony, waving people out of his way so that he was able to connect
with the conductor at the right time – but Caltex is when I really got to know
him. And know that he worked best under
pressure. There were many times when,
like Mozart, the ink wasn’t dry when the copies came, but we always got
them. Since then, we have remained friends
and when we went to Canada in 2004 when Bernhard got a job there, Keith and
Ruth hosted a farewell for us. I can’t remember whether it was then that he
gave me a copy of Farley Mowett’s The Boat that Wouldn’t Float, a story of a
sailor in Cape Breton (a part of Nova Scotia where we were to be spending some
months each year for the next few years), it shaped my thinking about Canada,
and when we visited Cape Breton we had to visit the mud flats in Baddeck to see
where the boat ended up. But I can see
why Keith and Ruth ended up here … the weather is far, far better!
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