Return to Chapter 22
23
An Astonishing Period of Growth
Pre-1939 – war-time and post-war increase
in audiences for concerts and opera. Insufficient financial support.
New repertoire – contemporary music. The Institut de Recherche et
Coordination Acoustique et Musique. The future for symphony orchestras.
The Wheatland Foundation. The Orchestra for Europe.
Before 1939 and the outbreak of the
Second World War there were only two full-time symphony orchestras
in Britain, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic.
Though the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra, unlike any of the other
seaside resort orchestras, gave performances throughout the year and
a few of its programmes were of entirely symphonic music it was not
really a ‘symphony orchestra’. The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra,
the Hallé in Manchester, the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
and the Scottish Orchestra in Glasgow all had concert seasons that
only ran from September until the end of April or early May. There
was still no opera house open throughout the year – the seasons of
opera and ballet at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, were also
from September until May. If you did not live in or near one of the
towns with a symphony orchestra there were from 1930 the regular broadcasts
by the BBC orchestras and an increasing number of gramophone records,
albeit in four minute chunks, in the old 78rpm format. The audience
for opera, ballet and symphonic music remained, as it had always been,
predominantly middle and upper-middle class.
The majority of people listened to
‘light’ music and ‘dance’ music, broadcast by the BBC and Radio Luxembourg
– it would be some years before improvised jazz would be broadcast
by the BBC. Until 1940 when the twice daily broadcasts of Music
While You Work started there were broadcasts from a number of
the larger seaside resort orchestras such as Eastbourne, Hastings
and Blackpool, during the summer months, and from the larger Variety
theatres and cinemas that employed a stage orchestra – the best was
probably the one at the Commodore cinema in Hammersmith, London, which
had an orchestra of about 35 conducted by Joseph Muscant and later
by Harry Davidson, who became very well known for his Olde Time Dance
Orchestra which broadcast for about twenty five years and, I’m told,
was Queen Mary’s favourite programme.. There were also many small
ensembles that broadcast regularly – some of the best known were Fred
Hartley’s Novelty Quintet, the JH Squire Celeste Octet, the Cedric
Sharpe Sextet, Albert Sandler and the Palm Court Orchestra. A good
deal of the music played by the Dance Bands such as Henry Hall, Jack
Hylton, Roy Fox and Jack Payne, though syncopated, would now be thought
of as light music. Other opportunities to hear this kind of music
were on the bandstands in parks and at the seaside, in restaurants
and in the theatre. Some of the orchestras at holiday resorts were
paid for by the local municipality and were quite large with as many
as forty or fifty musicians. As well as playing on the bandstand they
gave concerts in the local hall and were quite able to tackle some
of the symphonic repertoire.
The programmes for the Southport Municipal
Orchestra in 1940 were similar to those of most seaside resort orchestras
in the 1930s, which usually gave three performances a day. At Southport
they were at 11.00a.m. and at 3.00 and 7.30p.m., except on Sundays
when, in deference to the prevalence of regular church going, the
morning performance was omitted. Their afternoon and evening performances
nearly always included an overture from one of the popular operas
or a short work from the symphony orchestra repertoire. In one week
as well as such novelties as Dainty Doll by Barnes,
Al Fresco by Herbert, the Serenade Portrait of a Toy Soldier
by Ewing and The Teddy Bears Picnic by Bratton, they included
the overtures Coriolan by Beethoven, Rienzi by Wagner,
The Thieving Magpie by Rossini and Ruy Blas by Mendelssohn.
Their wide-ranging repertoire also included The Dance of the Comedians
from The Bartered Bride by Smetana, the march Pomp and
Circumstance (no.1) by Elgar, Marche Slave by Tchaikovsky
alongside movements from Schubert’s Symphony No.1, Hamilton Harty’s
Irish Symphony, and a movement from the Symphonie
Fantastique by Berlioz. Though hardly ever played now, the overtures
Mignon by Ambroise Thomas, Zampa by Louis Herold and
The Light Cavalry and Poet and Peasant, both by Franz
von Suppe, were all extremely popular and frequently played by symphony
orchestras, on band-stands and, in reduced Tavan arrangements, in
cafes and restaurants.
From 1930 when
the BBC started broadcasting a wide range of symphonic
music there can be no doubt that the performances by the BBC Symphony
Orchestra in London and the other much smaller BBC regional orchestras,
that also played orchestral music, the relays from public concerts
and the records played by Christopher Stone, the first DJ in Britain,
all played a very important part in creating the audience that between
1940 and 1946, during WW2 led to a dramatic increase in the audience
for ‘serious’ music. Concerts by symphony orchestras began attracting
large audiences.
Until the Third Programme was created
in 1946 there were only two BBC programmes, both with a policy of
mixed programming as favoured by Sir John Reith, the Director-General
until 1938. A comedy show might be followed by a talk or a programme
of light music or one of orchestral music played by one of the BBC
orchestras. It was still possible for anyone to find that without
intending to they were listening to music of a kind they would otherwise
never have heard.
But, probably more than anything else
it was the creation in 1940 of the Council for the Encouragement of
Music and the Arts (CEMA), funded by the Treasury. CEMA was set up
in the first place to provide funding for the arts with the intention
of raising wartime morale, that for the first time provided a state
subsidy for the arts. This enabled the orchestras to do lunch-time
concerts in factory canteens and guaranteed a subsidy for concerts
in smaller halls. The canteen concerts, held in an environment where
people felt at ease were very successful and brought serious music
to a great number of people who would never have considered going
to a symphony concert
The concerts the London Philharmonic
Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra gave all over Britain
throughout the war were another important element in creating an audience
for serious music. I have already written about the concerts the LPO
gave in theatres organised by Jack Hylton. Very few working class
people would at that time venture into an opera house or concert hall
(or be able to afford to do so). But everyone was used to going to
the theatre for variety shows, plays and musical comedies so that
when the Carl Rosa Opera Company, which toured all over the country
played in those theatres, it too attracted an audience from all classes.
It was the same when the LPO started playing in the theatres, often
in towns that did not have a hall large enough for a symphony orchestra.
When I joined the LPO in 1943 and did those weeks in theatres every
one of the eight concerts, each with a different programme, was sold
out. The Wessex Philharmonic Orchestra, which gave concerts all over
Britain from 1942 until near the end of the war, also played a part
in bringing music to many places that had never seen a symphony orchestra
before. It was much smaller and cheaper than the LPO and could be
booked to give concerts in halls that were too small to accommodate
or afford an orchestra the size of the LPO.
Then in 1942 the Liverpool Philharmonic
became independent from the BBC Northern Orchestra in Manchester with
whom it had shared a good many players. They became a full-time orchestra
with financial assistance from the local council and engaged Dr Malcolm
Sargent as their principal conductor. At the same time, by coincidence,
the BBC decided to disband the Salon Orchestra it had formed at the
beginning of the war from a number of the finest players in the country
and some of them, Anthony Pini, Arthur Gleghorn and Reginald Kell
joined the Liverpool orchestra as principals of the cello, flute and
clarinet sections. They and a few other players from the Salon Orchestra
proved to be invaluable in raising the standard of an otherwise provincial
orchestra.
In 1943 John Barbirolli returned to
Britain after being the conductor of the New York Philharmonic for
seven years. I was then in the LPO and when we learned he was coming
back we wanted him to become our principal conductor, but he had already
accepted an invitation from the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester
which like the Liverpool Philharmonic now had the funds to become
independent and full-time. Within a few weeks of hectic auditioning
he assembled an orchestra starting with the small nucleus of players
who had not wanted to remain in the BBC Northern Orchestra when it
went full-time. The following year in May 1944 the City of Birmingham
Council authorised an annual grant of £7000 to the City of Birmingham
Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) for the following five years plus another
£7500 from the Education Committee if the Orchestra would guarantee
to undertake education work 50 days a year. Their first concert as
a full-time orchestra was in October of that year conducted by the
newly appointed young English conductor George Weldon.
During the war the Bournemouth Municipal
Orchestra struggled on as a skeleton orchestra, reduced to only 24
players but by 1947 it was back to 60 musicians and had appointed
Rudolf Schwarz as its conductor. After a number of financially bumpy
years the orchestra’s management was taken on by the Western Orchestral
Society and it became the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. The first
concert under its new name was conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham and
Charles Groves, who continued as its principal conductor until 1961
when he left to become the conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic.
By1958, under his direction, the management were able to enlarge the
orchestra to 75 players and it started to establish a considerable
reputation.
By 1946 with the formation of the
Philharmonia in 1945 and the Royal Philharmonic in 1946 as well as
the orchestras in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and Bournemouth,
the number of full-time symphony orchestras, not counting the BBC
orchestras had grown to six. The Scottish Orchestra, which had had
such successful seasons pre-war with John Barbirolli and then Georg
Szell as principal conductors had to wait until 1950, when its name
was changed to the Scottish National Orchestra (SNO), before becoming
full-time.
When the Royal Opera House, Covent
Garden, reopened it was as a fully-fledged Opera House, even though
there was still no opera company. On 20 February 1946 the House opened
with a performance of The Sleeping Beauty danced by Ninette de Valois’s
Sadler’s Wells Ballet, which became the resident ballet company. David
Webster, the General Administrator and the Music Director Karl Rankl
built an opera company – a remarkable achievement in such a short
time – and in December 1946 the opera and ballet companies shared
their first production, The Fairy Queen. The first performance,
on 14 January 1947, given by the Covent Garden Opera Company, which
in 1968 became The Royal Opera was Bizet’s Carmen. The ballet
company had already become The Royal Ballet in 1956.
The establishment of the Third Programme
in 1946 was another boost for serious music. Unfortunately it was
also the start of ghettoised radio. From then on the Home Service
and the Light and the Third programmes each had their separate identities.
Then in 1967 the BBC was obliged to replace the banned pirate radio
stations – in fact, illegal commercial radio stations. They had been
broadcasting the current pop hit records and commercial advertising
– ‘jingles’. The new station, Radio 1 was born and the separation
of the radio programmes became even greater. It was now extremely
unlikely that anyone would inadvertently stray from Radio 1 into the
hallowed realms of Radio 3.
I remember the discussions we had
with the Government at that time. The Government were asking the BBC
to establish a programme to replace the pirates. Of course this would
involve a considerable increase in the number of records the BBC would
need to broadcast. The Musicians’ Union still had the ‘needle-time’
agreement with the BBC that restricted the number of hours they were
permitted to broadcast commercial recordings. The MU was unwilling
to discuss an increase in needle-time until it was convinced by the
Government that it was really necessary. The Postmaster General, who
led for the Government was a rather dour and humourless man, Edward
Short. He assured us that it was absolutely necessary as MPs had all
received thousands of requests – indeed demands – from listeners to
the pirate broadcasts and he said that the Government were obliged
to respond. When I asked him if the Government would now respond in
the same way if the many viewers of the pornographic films that were
being beamed from overseas were encouraged to write to their MPs in
the same way, he responded rather gloomily ‘that I was being unfair’.
It was a foregone conclusion that
the MU would have to agree to an increase in the number of hours that
commercial recordings could be broadcast and, as I have written earlier,
it did a deal with the BBC that resulted in more employment for free-lance
musicians in broadcasting and the creation of the Training Orchestra.
The Home Service, the predominantly spoken word programme became Radio
4, with Radio 1 broadcasting pop music, Radio 2 ‘middle of the road’,
or light music (nearly everything not contemporary pop or classical
music), and Radio 3 mainly for serious music and drama. Until 1993,
when the target age range changed from 13 – 40 to 13 – 25, Radio 1
had been known as Britain’s Favourite Radio. As a result of
this change of age range it lost nearly a third of its audience and
Radio 2 replaced it as the most listened to station.
The twenty years or so after the end
of WW2 were probably the best years musically and financially there
have ever been in Britain for a large number of orchestral musicians,
whether they were free-lancing or playing in one of the London orchestras.
In addition to the four major London orchestras and the BBC orchestras
resident in London there were orchestras at the Royal Opera House
and Sadlers Wells Theatre, which had reopened in 1945 with the first
performance of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes. It was decided
in 1968 that the Sadlers Wells company should move to the London Coliseum,
a very much larger House and provide the full opera repertoire in
English. Six years later in 1974 it became the English National Opera
(ENO).
There were also a number of other
orchestras. One, never a full-time orchestra, was the short-lived
National Symphony Orchestra, formed in 1942 by Sidney Beer, a wealthy
amateur conductor. During the war he was able to engage the services
of the finest young wind players who were then serving in the RAF
Central Band, stationed at Uxbridge, or in one of the Guards Bands.
Before the orchestra was disbanded
in 1946 it gave a series of concerts in the Royal Albert Hall and
made several recordings for Decca as well as going on a European tour.
Some of the recordings were well reviewed – not surprisingly since
the orchestra comprised the very best musicians then working in London.
While it lasted Sidney Beer was able to attract a remarkable number
of the most outstanding players – nearly all of them went on to be
principals in the Royal Philharmonic and the Philharmonia: two leaders
of the RPO, David McCallum and Oscar Lampe, Leonard Hirsch, leader
of the Philharmonia, the violist Leonard Rubens, the cellists Douglas
Cameron and Cedric Sharpe, and most of the wind principals who joined
the Philharmonia when it started: Alec Whittaker (oboe), Reginald
Kell (clarinet), John Alexandra (bassoon), Dennis Brain (horn) and
Harold Jackson (trumpet).
Another short-lived music enterprise,
that while it lasted provided a very high standard, was the New London
Opera, which the entrepreneur Jay Pomeroy started in 1942 at the Cambridge
Theatre. With Alberto Erede as musical director he was able to attract
international stars of the calibre of Margharita Grandi, Giuseppe
di Stefano and Mariano Stabile. But by 1949 with the Royal Opera House
and Glyndebourne able to mount much better productions he decided
to leave the stage.
As well as the symphony orchestras
there were an increasing number of chamber orchestras and chamber
music ensembles. The Boyd Neeli Orchestra formed in 1932 was already
well established and particularly famed for premiering a new work
especially written for the Salzburg Festival, Benjamin Britten’s Variations
on a Theme of Frank Bridge, which did a good deal to establish
Britten’s reputation and also made the orchestra well-known internationally.
The orchestra was disbanded during the war but restarted again soon
after. Some years later it was renamed the Philomusica of London with
Thurston Dart, who played a leading part in arousing a renewed interest
in Baroque and early Classical music, conducting and leading from
the keyboard. When, in 1959 the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields
(ASMF) was formed by a group of eleven musicians it had no conductor.
It was led by Neville Marriner (later Sir Neville), who until then
had for some years been leader of the second violin section of the
LSO. Very soon the Academy outgrew its original eleven players and
its baroque repertoire and it became necessary for Neville Marriner
to take on the responsibility of conducting the orchestra in an ever-expanding
repertoire. It is now one of the most recorded groups in the world.
Even earlier than the Philomusica,
Karl Haas, a refugee from Germany, had in 1943 started the London
Baroque Ensemble, which he continued to conduct until 1966. Though
now largely forgotten Haas was an early enthusiast and performer of
baroque music and made a number of recordings of music by Handel,
Bach and Boyce. At that time performances of baroque music were not
always historically accurate in style or instrumentation. I remember
taking part in a performance in the late 1940s under Karl Haas’s direction
of the Overture by Handel for two D clarinets and horn with
Jack Brymer and Dennis Brain. In those days no one had D clarinets
and so the parts had been transposed so we could play it on our Bb
instruments.
Later, in the 1960s Karl Haas and
the London Baroque Ensemble recorded and broadcast quite a lot of
wind music. He was a lovely man and a fine musician: unfortunately
he was an appalling conductor. I particularly recall taking part in
the Baroque Ensemble recording of the Dvorak Serenade and in two BBC
broadcast performances of the Richard Strauss Sonatina No. 2 ‘from
a Happy Workshop’, or Wind Symphony. We recorded the Dvorak
without too many problems. However, the broadcasts of the Wind
Symphony – ‘live’, as was still normal in the 1950s, were not without
incident. The first performance went extremely well until we came
to the last movement. Haas managed to conduct a considerable part
of this quick movement giving the down beat on the second beat of
each bar when we were playing on the first. Fortunately he had as
always engaged a very good and experienced group of musicians and
though the performance was not perfect it did not ‘come off the rails’.
Between the two performances, which were a few days apart, poor Karl
had a nasty fall and injured both his arms. He arrived for the second
broadcast with both his arms in slings. With a few nods of his head
to start off each movement and without any further involvement on
his part we were able to give a faultless performance.
Two more orchestras were started in
the second half of the 1940s, both of them still active today, though
one is now famous under another name. The Goldsbrough Orchestra was
created by Lawrence Leonard and Arnold Goldsbrough in 1948 and was
the orchestra with which the very young Colin Davis gained his early
experience as a conductor. Until the orchestra changed its name to
the English Chamber Orchestra (ECO) in 1960 it concentrated mainly
on the baroque repertoire. As the ECO it gave its first concert in
the Royal Festival Hall with a programme of Monteverdi opera extracts.
Within a short while it made its first recordings and toured Britain
with Colin Davis conducting and in 1961 became the resident orchestra
for Benjamin Britten at Aldeburgh and has gone on to become one of
the most successful chamber orchestras.
At just about the same time Harry
Blech, a very well known violinist, formed the London Mozart Players
concentrating on performances of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. This
orchestra, too, has survived to the present day though it no longer
has the reputation it gained under Blech, who though extremely musical
and able to produce excellent results with his own orchestra was a
disaster when he came to conduct the Philharmonia. He
just could not control a large symphony orchestra.
As important for London musicians
as the increased number of established orchestras was the enormous
amount of free-lance work available: in broadcasting, both radio and
TV. There were also a lot of sessions recording the background music
for the films made in Britain as well as the music for many Hollywood
films. Not only were session rates lower in Britain than in America,
but because of their famed sight-reading skill British musicians recorded
the music much more quickly, requiring fewer sessions and thereby
reducing the cost to American producers even more. The many light
music orchestras such as Mantovani’s and George Melachrino’s were
still making recordings and there were a lot of sessions backing popular
singers and some of the pop groups, when free-lance orchestral musicians
(and a few of the best players from the London orchestras) and the
best of the dance band and jazz musicians would be engaged.
Although the future for professional
orchestral musicians in Britain in the late 1940s and into the 1950s
looked much better than at any time in the past, especially for the
musicians working in London, the effect of insufficient state and
municipal funding, a lack of contemporary orchestral repertoire capable
of attracting audiences, and the new communication technologies, were
in the following fifty years to bring about a gradual decline in interest
and support for serious music that by 2000 had become extremely worrying,
Not enough Money
Ever since the contract symphony orchestras
in Britain became full-time, the managements and the musicians playing
in them have complained that the funds provided by the state and their
local municipality have been insufficient for their needs and the
cause of the problems they have always experienced. By 1950 the musicians
were already beginning to have financial problems. As the years have
gone by, because the increases in subvention have never matched the
rising cost of living and mortgages, the situation has continued to
get worse. The Musicians’ Union’s attempts to respond to the demands
of their members for better salaries and conditions when negotiating
with the Association of British Orchestras have never satisfied the
players.
For nearly twenty years from 1960,
I was one of those involved in negotiations on behalf of the contract
orchestras and had to face the fact that the managements just did
not have the money required to pay their musicians a more appropriate
salary. After one set of negotiations, when we were obliged to agree
an increase in their salaries that was very much less than we had
been asked to settle for, the members of the orchestras were extremely
dissatisfied and accused the MU of not really trying hard enough.
One orchestra in particular was extremely vociferous. We arranged
a meeting with the members of this orchestra and as one of the negotiators
who was an orchestral musician, it fell to my unhappy lot to try to
explain why we had not been able to obtain a result more to their
liking. I told them that we were convinced there just was not the
money available and that in the end the choice we had been forced
to take was whether to accept less than a satisfactory increase or
put the orchestra out of business. If any of them felt they could
do better than we had I would be happy to let them take my place.
Accompanied by a good deal of muttering and grim faces this orchestra
reluctantly agreed, as the other orchestras had, to accept the increase
offered by the management.
The managements were in a similar
position in relation to their paymasters as the musicians were with
them. Understandably, local authorities, battling with demands for
improved services and lower rates, did not put requests for more money
for the orchestras high on their list of priorities. In Britain there
had never been a tradition of supporting orchestras, as there had
been for so long in a number of other European countries, and though
shortly after the war it was agreed that up to sixpence (2½p) in the
pound could be raised for the arts from the rates, never more than
one penny (less than a ½p) was ever raised.
The situation for musicians in the
London orchestras was for many years very much better. The managements
of each of the orchestras and the players in them were both able to
benefit from the great deal of commercial recording and the film sessions
for which the whole orchestra would be engaged. The rates for recording
and film sessions were higher than for concerts and therefore welcomed
by the musicians. The advantage for the management was that instead
of incurring the cost involved in putting on a concert they received
a booking fee for supplying the orchestra. But all good things must
come to an end and as time went by the amount of recording and film
work declined.
Because London audiences demanded
nothing but the best as far as conductors and soloists were concerned
and the fees for engaging these artists were generally greater than
the total cost of the whole orchestra, even if the concert was sold
out it was not possible to break even let alone make a profit. Without
additional funds it would not be possible for any of the orchestras
to continue to provide concerts with the international conductors
and soloists needed to bring in the audience and with sufficient rehearsals
for the orchestras to match the orchestras elsewhere with which they
were being compared.
Each of the orchestras, with varying
degrees of success, sought sponsorship from corporations or other
commercial organisations. As audiences tended to be largely middle-class
it was usually organisations and companies with a well-heeled clientele
that were willing to enter into schemes of this kind. The advantage
to the sponsors was that they received considerable exposure in the
press and from advertising in the programmes where they were seen
to be supporting cultural events. They also usually received a number
of seats for each concert they supported.
The expression ‘there are no free
lunches’ has never been truer than where sponsorship is concerned.
Sponsors nearly always wanted to have some influence on the programmes
of concerts they were sponsoring. The senior members of their management
and their most favoured clients who attended the concerts were as
a rule not enthusiastic about 20th century and contemporary music.
This also played its part in making it more difficult to programme
new music. Perhaps because orchestras were in receipt of some financial
assistance from the Arts Council and municipalities, post-war music
lovers did not continue the patronage from which the LPO and other
concert giving bodies had benefited and which had enabled new music
to be programmed in the past. The situation in this respect has remained
much better in the USA to the benefit of their national composers.
New Repertoire – Contemporary
Music
In the early 1950s there were already
those, mainly critics, academics and other commentators on the state
of the arts and music in particular, complaining that there was insufficient
performance of 20th century music. However, when the orchestras attempted
to programme works written thirty years earlier by the atonal and
serial composers, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg,
they played to very reduced audiences. Although Alban Berg’s two operas,
Wozzeck and Lulu have become part of the operatic repertoire,
fifty years later the general concert-going public still cannot be
persuaded to attend concerts that includes this ‘new’ music, not even
when most of the rest of the programme is made up of established popular
favourites.
When music by the next generation
of composers, Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, Karlheinz
Stockhausen and Hans Werner Henze and others started to appear from
1950 onwards, to begin with for small or unusual groups of instruments
and later for orchestra, though quite often not for the standard symphony
orchestra layout, the demand that they should be given a hearing increased.
Again, when music of this kind was programmed only very small audiences
attended. The orchestras were unable to afford to play to less than
half-full houses so that few orchestral concerts included contemporary
music.
Only the BBC in Britain was in a position
to perform music for which there was a relatively small audience.
In 1959 they appointed William Glock (later Sir William) as Controller
of Music. It is probably fair to say that no one tried to educate
the public to understand and enjoy the music of their own time more
than he did during his tenure as Controller between 1959 and 1972.
Before going to the BBC he had been a critic for the Daily Telegraph,
and then at the Observer until 1945. In 1947 he went to the first
Edinburgh Festival to hear Artur Schnabel, with whom he had studied
for several years, give a piano recital. Schnabel suggested to him
that there should be a summer school in England where audiences and
young musicians could have classes and listen to performances by outstanding
artists, and said he thought that Glock should direct it.
Glock managed to raise the necessary
finance and the following year a Summer School was established at
Bryanston in Dorset. Later, in 1953 it moved to Dartington where it
is still held each year. Many wonderful musicians have taught and
given lectures there: including the composers Boris Blacher, Georges
Enesco, Paul Hindemith, Benjamin Britten (who also came as a performer
with Peter Pears) and even Igor Stravinsky. In the first year, the
Amadeus Quartet was formed there and in the 1950s Elisabeth Schumann
came to give recitals on several occasions as did Artur Rubinstein
and Clifford Curzon. This tradition, started by Glock, has been carried
on to the present day with the best composers, instrumentalists and
quartets continuing to inspire generations of musicians and music
lovers.
Glock’s thirteen years as Controller
of Music at the BBC were far more controversial. When asked what he
thought as Controller he should offer listeners, he famously replied
‘What they would like tomorrow.’ Though he transformed the annual
Prom seasons and the regular broadcasts by the BBC Orchestras by introducing
music by contemporary composers who were writing atonal music and
using ‘progressive techniques’ and infrequently broadcasting music
by composers writing more ‘conventional’ music, his efforts in this
direction do not seem to have had much effect on the general music
public’s willingness to listen to the music he felt they should like.
By 1953 the then young Pierre Boulez
was already establishing himself as the most radical and fiercely
polemical of all the young avant garde composers born in Europe
during the mid-nineteen twenties. As a young man Boulez was extremely
outspoken. In the 1960s his impatience at what he saw as the conservatism
and inflexibility of music organisations, symphony orchestras in particular,
led to two of his best-known quotes from that period: ‘It is not devilry,
but only the most ordinary common sense which makes me say that, since
the discoveries made by the Viennese, all composition other than twelve-tone
is useless.’ He claimed that the simplest solution to the opera
problem would be ‘to blow up the opera houses.’ He must have been
glad his advice was not taken before he agreed to conduct in the opera
houses in Bayreuth, Paris and the UK.
As part of his campaign to influence
what audiences ‘would like tomorrow’ Glock decided in 1963 to appoint
Boulez as the Guest Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and then,
in 1972, as their Chief Conductor. This appointment was welcomed in
the music press but met with a very mixed reception from the orchestra.
A few players, including my old friend Jack Brymer who went to the
LSO, left the orchestra to find employment in a less austere environment.
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