Another musician the NAC consulted was Robert Oades, then serving as personnel manager for the musicians at Stratford. This quiet-spoken trumpeter had emigrated from London, where he had played at Covent Garden. In Toronto, despite its core group of “highly competent musicians,”8 he found it difficult as a newcomer to break in. Fortunately, his specialty as a “Bach trumpeter” called for more skill than the usual dance-band standard of playing then common in the city and, before long, he won a $1,000 Canada Council scholarship to play with the Bach Society, a group founded by singer Lois Marshall and pianist Glenn Gould. Before he could perform with the group, however, it collapsed. Finding work at Stratford had been a god-send for him.
Now, when Bernardi asked for suggestions of names for the new orchestra in Ottawa, Oades was surprised that few of the musicians he knew were interested in this steady well-paid work. To many, Ottawa seemed like “the end of the earth” compared with the lively musical scene in Toronto. Oades had played in the capital when the Ottawa CBC Chamber Orchestra, a largely amateur group led by Fred Karam of the University of Ottawa, brought him in for special trumpet works, and he was not so daunted. When he received a telephone call from Ken Murphy informing him that the audition team would be in Toronto the next day and inviting him to try out, Oades jumped at the chance. He was signed up immediately after the audition and agreed to move to Ottawa not only as a player but also as the personnel manager for the NAC orchestra.
Bernardi had played with a number of Toronto musicians at the Canadian Opera Company and had earned a reputation for being “not an easy conductor—very, very demanding.”9 When he invited several of these players to try out as section heads, they declined to apply. Even singers were sometimes put off by him and, while they loved going to Stratford to perform, they became concerned when they learned that Bernardi would be on the podium. Nevertheless, Oades, who had played for him several times as part of pick-up orchestras for the Canadian Opera Company, believed he was the right man for the Ottawa job precisely because of those strong qualities of discipline and toughness.
By the fall of 1968 it was evident that Lea Foli would not be joining the orchestra as concertmaster, so the NAC embarked on a strenuous search to find someone else. The spotlight settled on Walter Prystawski, a Canadian who had been abroad for the previous ten years and was currently living in Basel as co-concertmaster of the Basler Orchester Gesellschaft, a smaller-town version of the Vienna Philharmonic. The orchestra presented three series of symphonic music every year and served as the pit orchestra for the operas, operettas, and ballet performed in the Basel Theatre. Prystawski had become well versed in all the different roles filled by a resident orchestra. The Arts Centre was determined to hire as many Canadian musicians as possible, and finding one with international experience was a bonus. Prystawski and Bernardi had known each other from their Toronto student days, when Bernardi was already earning a reputation and Prystawski had played for him once in a concert with the CBC Orchestra.
By coincidence, Prystawski and his young family had returned to Canada for Christmas 1968 but had heard nothing about the new orchestra. Only after returning to Basel in the new year did he find a letter in his pile of mail inviting him to London to audition for Beaudet and Bernardi. Prystawski recalls having “a devil of a time” booking a flight that would give him time for the London meeting before he was due back in the Swiss city to play a series of concerts.
When he arrived in London he caught up with Bernardi at Steinway Hall, where, settled amid a group of pianos, they spent the afternoon making music together and sizing each other up. It was a pleasant afternoon, both men recalled, as they played through a series of sonatas. Bernardi liked the violinist a lot, and Prystawski had equally positive memories of playing “some Brahms, definitely a Mozart and a little solo Bach.” By the end of the day the conductor told him, “You have the job, but you need a new fiddle!” Prystawski didn’t mind the comment. He also wanted a better instrument.
The two musicians went back to the Dorchester Hotel on London’s Park Lane, where Jean-Marie Beaudet was waiting. The trio ended the day over drinks in relaxed conversation while they talked on about their hopes and dreams for the new orchestra. Prystawski remembered the occasion as “one of the nicer afternoons of my life.”10
The attraction of the job for Prystawski was starting something from scratch. He had loved his time in Europe and being part of a long tradition of music, surrounded by musical icons. In the blue markings on the musical scores from which he was playing he could trace the evolutions of music. When he took over at the Arts Centre, his first few years were spent “marking the scores.” All the musical scores were new, and as Bernardi had too much else on his hands, left the task to the concertmaster. “It sounds like a mechanical job,” Prystawski explained, “but it’s important. It tells people how to divide up their bows, how to play certain notes from a bowing point of view,” and the best way physically to make certain sounds. Marked scores become a history of how specific music was played with a certain conductor and a particular orchestra, and that was to become the case at the National Arts Centre as well. The attraction for Prystawski in coming to Ottawa was that he could have his own “creative input,” that he “would not be bound or constricted” by those very traditions with which European music was imbued. In Ottawa, “the hallways would be so wide that you couldn’t see the sides of them.” And, on a personal level, his small daughter was just ready to start school.
The story of the beautiful Guadagnini violin played by the NAC orchestra’s concertmaster has many versions. Mario Bernardi had made a new and better violin a condition of Prystawski’s hiring and indicated that the Arts Centre would help with funds to acquire a new instrument. Shortly after Prystawski returned to Switzerland, he took a day off to contact “fiddle dealers” and borrowed several instruments to try out by playing them with the Basel orchestra. Unfortunately, the cost of the potential candidates was usually three times the estimated $10,000 budget, the sum that NAC planners had in mind for a good violin. One day when he went to have a bow repaired, the shopkeeper mentioned a “J.B. Guadagnini” violin that was already out on loan to a young violin student for her graduation concert. Prystawski attended the concert and agonized for nearly a week before he could get his hands on the fiddle. There was no question that this was the instrument, and the NAC advanced $12,000 to pay for it. Within a few years it was to become the subject of one of the first financial causes célèbres at the centre.
Prystawski’s recollection was that the NAC would take a pittance from his salary in instalments over the coming years so he could slowly pay for the violin. Bernardi’s remembrance was that a fine instrument had been purchased for the NAC concertmaster and would be available in perpetuity to that position. Whatever the arrangement, no details of it were recorded, although the magnificent violin appeared as a line item in the NAC budget as one of its assets. Some time after the launch of the new centre and when the organization was settling down to regular activity, the auditor general arrived on the scene to review the finances. The matter of the violin was untidy, with a few dollars taken from the musician’s salary while the item itself still appeared as a valuable asset to the centre. The auditor general was especially annoyed that the payoff loan to Prystawski was interest free, yet the value of the violin was rapidly accruing. The trustees resolved to fix things and asked Southam to take care of the matter. After he left the board meeting, he called Prystawski to his office and asked him to “sell the fiddle back to us.” By Prystawski’s account, after a long pause, he refused. He left Southam’s office and quickly