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On tour with the BBC SSO – a Groupie’s Tale by Lowri Potts

There are two great pleasures about sharing your life with a classical musician. Lovely people and lovely music. This was especially true last week, when I went on tour with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and their chief conductor, Ilan Volkov to the Prague Autumn Festival. While the band rehearsed Janacek and Martinu in the magnificent Rudolfinum, I set out across the shining cobbles of the Charles Bridge clutching my street map in search of an extraordinary music school for the blind. The Czech Republic has a long tradition of specialist music education for the sight handicapped. In 1910, an outstanding eye specialist, Dr Jan Deyl, founded the Deyl Institute. The blind and partially sighted students demonstrated great skills in listening, concentrating and learning by heart. Gradually, music came to take up more and more time in the curriculum.

Now it is called the Jan Deyl Conservatory and Secondary school for visually impaired and is housed in the Strakovsky palace in a picturesque corner of the Malá Strana. Abandoning my map, I followed the sound of flute practice to an elegant arched building set round a pretty paved courtyard.

Here, one hundred gifted youngsters receive a secondary education with specialist music teaching. The sumptuous rooms are now soundproofed and equipped with equally beautiful instruments. About eighty students take the seven-year music course, in which they study piano and two other instruments. One can be Voice.

On completion, they gain a higher vocational qualification that enables them to teach elementary music at any of the art schools that can be found all over the Czech Republic. These schools feed the Czech hunger and thirst for music and can provide satisfying careers for the Jan Deyl graduates. Others choose to go on to University or music college to further their studies or perform.

The Tuning School can accommodate about twenty young students. Over five years they learn the intricacies of pianos, spinets, harpsichords, and cimbalons – a very popular instrument with the Czechs. When they leave, they can be found working as private or orchestral piano tuners. Some go to piano workshops and factories, or theatres or recording studios throughout the country and abroad.

The English teacher and the deputy director, Ema Gallova, interpreted for me as the deputy director, Jan Balcar, took me on a tour of some of the classes. In addition to normal secondary school subjects, they all have to learn computer skills including traditional typing as well as Braille typing and music notation. Keyboard lessons always involve two instruments so that students can learn music by heart. Their patience and determination is encouraged by an affectionate and supportive staff ethos.

It was hard to believe that just over a year ago, these beautiful buildings were badly damaged by the sudden floods that destroyed 23 grand pianos and much more – including the boarding house and classrooms. Water crept up to two and a half metres high and caused damage amounting to two and a half million Euros. That the school could re-open only one month later is proof of the high esteem in which it is held by the Department of Education and generosity of private sponsors.

Informal concerts are held weekly and ten public concerts given throughout the year. As if to prove the point, I found myself seated in the richly painted school hall and introduced to one of their star pianists and composers, Peter Parizek. A brilliant impromptu recital of Debussy’s ‘La cathédrale engloutie’ was promptly followed by his own arrangement of themes by Steve Reich. A sparkling performance was made more memorable by the incongruous Baroque setting complete with attentive cherub swinging one leg from his perch on the wall just above the piano.

I didn’t need the map to find my way back to the Rudolfinum. Band members were spilling out into the sunshine hungry for lunch. Their needs on tour are surprisingly simple. Good food comes pretty high on the list. And as we toured the Baroque excesses of this musical city in search of goulash, I was glad that there was a corner of it devoted to those who could hear – but not see – its architectural splendours.

Contact Director: Milada Rybarova

Konservator a Ladicska skola Jana Deyla

Maltezske namesti 14

Mala Strana

118 44 Prague