Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt... His first appearance with us was a miniature occasion, at the Edinburgh Festival in 1954, when he directed Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat in an informal on-stage version, nine of us sitting around on upturned beer crates wearing our oldest clothes to reconstruct the sort of immediate postwar performance for which Stravinsky had written this strange work. Robert Helpmann was the Devil, Moira Shearer the Princess, with the title role played by Terence Longdon and Anthony Nicholls as the Narrator. It was an all-star cast, and I can still recall the way in which Hans, in old clothes like the rest of us, used to distinguish himself by carefully unfolding a scarlet silk handkerchief and placing it with great affection upon his own upturned beer crate. It wasn't in the script but it seemed most natural for him to do so. << less