Simon 'Blue' Robinson

So I could laugh at some of the jibes.

And humor became more and more important.

He was because he had to learn conducting and he had been the genius of dance for so many years.

He had to make mistakes.

And worse than that, he made mistakes he didn't know he was making, but the orchestra did.

So he got a nice tight group of four or five individuals just in a small house just outside Vienna, just to give him the basics, to give him the confidence.

And one recurring character in this is a guy called Howard Penney.

australian guy living in working in vienna and he was key to rudolph's success he was very gentle rudolph made a mistake the first day and stopped and froze and if anybody had even raised an eyebrow rudolph would have been out the room bags packed gone but howard said it's okay maestro let's start it again and then rudolph relaxed and carried on and got better and better and more confident

It went really well.

He had so much music inside him.

He had so much, you know, he was infused with Tchaikovsky, infused with Mozart.

You know, Beethoven he loved as well.

He deeply loved Bach.

He played Bach all day, every day on the piano, wherever we were.

So I'd be dusting around him, you know, trying to get some of this sand off, and he wouldn't know I was there.

So I'd be moving around him with a little duster, a feather duster, trying to tidy up the place a bit.

Well, during the orchestral tours, I'd asked for a violin lesson, which nearly broke my arm, and a cello lesson from Howard, which nearly broke everyone's ears.

So I thought, I'd like a dance lesson from Rudolf.

And his island off Positano was owned by Massin, who was a friend of Diaghilev in Belarus.

So it had a dance tower on it.