I was driving back to Vancouver from Nelson, British Columbia one October afternoon and had decided to take the route up past Ainsworth Hot Springs towards Nakusp and on through the mountain to Vernon. It was a day and night of torrential rain. I stopped and soaked in the Springs, visited the sweet little town of Kaslo and was fiddling with the CD player in the rental car when I came to New Denver.
The afternoon was darkening and the mountain range that lined my route was disappearing into low cloud. I pulled into New Denver in the hope of finding a cup of tea and a decent cake, and soon saw that this was a small one-street town. The autumn colours gave it charm. As I was driving down the main street, my eye was drawn to a photo of a man in a shop window. His was an Edwardian face that I thought I knew: CS Lewis? Elgar? What on earth would they be doing in the middle of rural BC? I did a U turn, parked the car and got out to look.
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The Edwardian man was none other than Arturo Toscanini - his face gazing sternly out from a CD cover. But by now, it was the adjacent window that had my attention. The Dream Ring" was the title of a box CD sitting in dead centre. Somebody, whoever it was who owned this surprising little shop, had, as far as I could make out, created his or her idea of a perfect Ring by mixing various singers into one dream performance.
The shop also served as the information centre for the nearby provincial park which went by the name of, and I am not making this up, the Valhalla provincial park. The shop was closed but a lone woman was walking along the street and seemed to be heading towards it. I watched her approach. It was one of those rare days when we seem to be aligned with whatever it is that runs our universe. Of course, this lone woman would be headed to this particular store, of the score of businesses on the street. And she was. But she was the wife of the maker and mixer of all that recorded music. I sensed that she didn't quite share my enthusiasm (not surprising really. I was in a state of high excitement. Toscanini and Richard Wagner in the shadow of the Valhalla Provincial Park!) She let me in and let me look around. Her husband, Richard Caniell, had worked for RCA in New York, where he had attended most of Toscanini's concerts. Caniell is the founder of Immortal Performances Recorded Music Society www.immortalperformances.org - a non -profit organization that offers some stunning Toscanini performances along with that Dream Ring - Mr Caniell's fantasy mix of the greatest voices of the Golden Age of the Met into a virtually seamless recording. Kirsten Flagstad, Lauritz Melchior and Friedrich Schorr's Wotan. I had maxed out the Visa and couldn't afford the Ring but I decided to take that 'Edwardian man' that I'd glimpsed in the window, along for the rest of my ride through the driving rain and the mountain passes. I purchased an "Arturo Toscanini - all Wagner" featuring Tannhauser, Tristan, Walkure, Lohengrin and Gotterdammerung with a rehearsal segment from 1947.
As dusk settled, Arturo Toscanini and I set off - he giving fairly good-natured instructions to the orchestra and croaking along with the music, I, negotiating some hair-raising bends in the battering wind and rain ad zero visibility. The maestro, Lauritz Melchior, Helen Traubel and I arrived safely several hours later. I like to think that some other great spirit, the creator of all that glorious music was overseeing our progress. After all, surely he must , waft by the Valhalla Park from time to time.
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