On a humorous note

By LINDA HERRICK

Playing in an orchestra is a serious business but, as the music flows, watch closely for shaking shoulders.

The Auckland Philharmonia team may be highly regarded musicians but some of them are also adept pranksters.

New Yorker Lenny Sakofsky, the Philharmonia's principal percussionist, says he surrendered to the dark side one night at the final rehearsal for a programme which included Respighi's Pines Of Rome, where the third movement ends with an elegant clarinet solo followed by a recording of delicate nightingale song.

"We used a CD of sound-effects and I was in charge of playing the nightingale song," he recalls with a barely suppressed cackle.

"I had my finger ready to press the play button and then I started looking at the names of the other sound-effects. One of them was donkey.

"A little devil shot into my right hand. When the clarinet solo ended, the conductor gave me the cue for the nightingales and out came, really loud: 'ee-aw, ee-aw, ee-aw'.

"Everyone was wetting themselves laughing. The conductor chuckled, then he threw down his baton and gave me this look, like 'go to your room, young man'."

Sakofsky trained at the Cleveland Institute of Music and came to New Zealand in 1997. He hastens to add that he does take his music and his career seriously indeed - but sometimes he just can't help himself.

"I found a CD with some other sound-effects, a recording of applause in a concert hall. So one night at the end of a show when the crowd was going crazy and applauding, I put that part of the CD on repeat. After the second bow the audience usually dies down but I kept cranking the sound of applause up and down, up and down, so we had five bows up and down, up and down. No one knew what was going on."

Sakofsky could go for the title of resident imp, but he modestly passes that baton to the brass players who, he says, are notorious for fooling around. It's a sentiment echoed by orchestra and artistic manager John Ure, who describes the trombonists as terrorists.

"One night they got a nudie photo and slipped it into [music director and conductor] Miguel Harth-Bedoya's score," says Sakofsky. "We sat there waiting for him to turn the page and when he did, we noticed he did skip a beat."

Ure who has been associated with the Philharmonia in its various forms since 1979, regards the Mercury Theatre's production of Tosca in the early 80s as truly memorable - because of one performance the lead soprano would doubtless like to forget.

"It was a very small pit so we rotated 26 players," says Ure. "One night Tosca came out to sing this particularly tragic aria and her foot got caught in the front of her dress and the whole lot came down. These great big white breasts popped out - you know what sopranos are like. She quickly hitched everything back up again and kept going but everyone in the orchestra had lost their place, their eyes were out on stalks."

Former general secretary and double bass player Lloyd Williams says the Philharmonia is like a family and "one of the reasons a lot of us hold the really funny stories close to our chest is because it is family.

"There have been a lot of relationships broken up and reformed or changed in the orchestra," he says. "It's all just like that Jilly Cooper book Score. People said things like that just couldn't happen - but it's all true."

While reticent on offstage antics, Williams can talk about one strangely unforgettable night when the Philharmonia was performing the St John Passion.

"I was playing principal bass and right at the end of a very quiet part of a long note, the guy next to me kept playing it and playing it, and it was getting louder and louder.

"I looked over and his eyes were rolled back. He was having an epileptic fit.

"I had to put my arm around his neck and the neck of his bass, as well as hanging on to my own bass. One of the bassoon players ran over and put our basses on the floor and I dragged him offstage by his feet. But I couldn't get him far enough off so he was lying there with his feet sticking out on the side of the stage."

When it comes to impromptu emergency action, perhaps none can beat this DIY tale from principal third horn Helen Burr, originally from Memphis.

"It was our millennium concert at the Domain," she says, giggling. "I play the french horn and part of the valve section of the horn is made of string. One of the other horn player's strings broke just before we were ready to start at midnight and none of us had any spares. I had a tampon in my bag so we used the string from the tampon. It worked great."