My very first impression of playing with a foreign orchestra, strangely enough, was at Haringey Arena in north London, in 1948, when for the first and last time in my experience two important orchestras played together as one: the French National Radio Orchestra from Paris and our Royal Philharmonic. The idea was Beecham's brain-child, and it worked remarkably well. We simply 'sat in ' together - six of each woodwind player, ten horns, eight trumpets, trombones to match, and over a hundred string players. I can't recall what happened in the percussion - probably not a lot, remembering the easy-going attitude of most of ours. In some dramatic Wagner, which was by no means the natural musical utterance of either orchestra, but very much the métier of our maestro, the winds all played together, with incredibly brilliant results. Otherwise the French played in the Dukas piece, the British in the Elgar, and there was a lot of toing and froing in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony concerning who would play the solos and who would simply double the loud bits (a circumstance which had some interesting results, and managed to end in one entry being missed altogether through a misunderstanding, and the whole orchestra having to lurch ahead a full beat to catch up with a solo which had come too early because of over-anxiety on someone's part - possibly mine). Interestingly, there was very little jostling or juggling for position in spite of many famous names in both orchestras. The four horns of the RPO, led by Dennis Brain and including Norman Del Mar, happened at the time all to be playing French instruments, while the Parisians were all playing wide-bore German horns. Surprisingly, the resultant sounds were the exact opposite, with the French players giving their typical cor de chasse attack and the Londoners sounding much closer to the Viennese or Berlin schools of production. Obviously, the sound you can get is the one in your head, not the one in your hands! In the woodwinds it was exactly the same, except that the French clarinet sound came from French small-bore instruments, while the British were obviously of a bigger calibre, giving a contrast between the mercurial Parisian technique and the possibly more lyrical London sound. It was, however, in the bassoon section that the greatest contrast existed. The French were playing bassons, the small-bore Buffet bassoons, with soft reeds and a direct, quite buzzy and reedy sound. The British were unquestionably on the side of the phagots or fagots from Germany - the well-known Heckels and Adlers, with their more open tone and even vocally-vibrated production. The twain, in this case, ne'er met. In spite of such differences, the surprising fact was that the attitude of both teams of players towards their work was identical. In off moment all of them red newspapers or did crosswords from the Telegraph or Figaro, and in coffee breaks the conversation was normal - what's in the diary, how much for this or that concert, and sacré bleu, did you see what the so-and-so conductor did in the Berlioz last week? << less