Rafael Kubelik is watching Wimbledon when I enter his suite at the Savoy. ‘Tennis fan?’ I ask, slightly surprised. He shakes his head. ‘No. Just her.’
It is 1983, the high summer of Martina Navratilova. ‘She will win,’ says Kubelik in the decisive tone that conductors use to save rehearsal time. ‘And one day my country will be free.’
He had flown out of Prague in February 1948 not daring to tell his wife and son until they landed in London that the communists had seized power and they could never return home. Sir Adrian Boult, a gent among time-beaters, offered to hand Kubelik his job with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, but there was no lack of bids for the exiled chief conductor of the Czech Philharmonic.
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Kubelik went to the Chicago Symphony where he lasted three years, run out of town by a poison-pen critic (his version) anda board of directors that hated him performing a black composer’s symphony.
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