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11
The
Composer as Conductor
Playing
for Benjamin Britten, Malcolm Arnold,
Pierre Boulez, Aaron Copland, Michael
Tippet, William Walton, Ralph Vaughan
Williams, John Cage, Igor Stravinsky.
During
the 19th century, as orchestras became
much larger and the music more complex,
it was necessary for someone to direct
this larger body of musicians. A number
of the finest composers, Spohr, Weber,
Mendelssohn, Berlioz and, in particular
Wagner, whose treatise On Conducting
had such an influence on the conductor’s
role, were all also renowned in their
lifetime as conductors, as well as composers.
Richard Strauss and Mahler were also
famous as conductors. Mahler, in particular,
was so busy as a conductor that he had
difficulty in finding time to compose
between engagements. There have also
been a number of outstanding conductors
who would in fact have preferred to
be remembered as composers. Furtwängler,
Weingartner, Koussevitsky, de Sabata
and Klemperer were all composers whose
compositions were published and received
a number of performances.
I played
for quite a few composers who when conducting
their own music did so extremely well.
There were some others who were excellent
conductors of whatever music they directed:
Constant Lambert, who had a successful
career as a conductor, mainly with the
Sadler’s Wells Ballet and the Royal
Ballet; Benjamin Britten, a wonderful
musician who was also a fine pianist
and an outstanding conductor. The best
performance I have ever heard of the
German Requiem by Brahms was
conducted by him, as well as some very
fine readings of Mozart and Schubert
symphonies. He could be a hard taskmaster
and could be caustic in his criticism.
I played under his direction a number
of times in the orchestra and on one
occasion, the most frightening, I took
part in a performance of the Janacek
Concertino for piano and sextet
at the Aldeburgh Festival, with Britten
playing the piano. Oliver Knussen (the
son of my old friend Stuart, from my
Wessex Orchestra touring days) is another
composer who has done a good deal of
conducting mainly concentrating on his
own music and the music from the second
half of the 20th century,
always obtaining very good results.
Pierre
Boulez who has an international reputation
as a conductor – he was chief conductor
of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1971
until 1975 and the New York Philharmonic
from 1971 till 1978 – and is probably
better known in this capacity than as
a composer. His compositions are yet
to join the main-stream orchestral repertoire
– will he be remembered as a composer
or a conductor? There can be no doubt
that since 1960 Boulez has brought his
composer’s insight, sensitive ear and
analytical mind to his interpretation
of ‘modern’ music from Schoenberg and
Webern to the present day and in the
process demanded from orchestras a degree
of accuracy that had frequently been
absent. In my own experience it was
his conducting of the Rite of Spring
by Stravinsky that was particularly
impressive. The part he played in establishing
a standard of accuracy in the performance
of the Rite of Spring cannot
be exaggerated. It was with him when
he came to conduct the Philharmonia,
sometime in the 1960s, that for the
first time that I can recall, we actually
played what Stravinsky had written,
rhythmically, in regard to note values
and the correct balance of the parts.
Over the years we played a wide-ranging
repertoire with him including Debussy,
Stravinsky, Webern and Messiaen, Haydn
and Beethoven. He always brought clarity
and balance to everything he conducted,
but was most admirably suited to contemporary
music.
Malcolm
Arnold was for some years principal
trumpet in the LPO. He was a very good
player and brought that particular insight
composers have to everything he played
in the orchestra. There were some passages
that, for me at least, when he played
them (he frequently sat just behind
me in the orchestra) made more musical
sense than when played by anyone else.
He was a natural conductor and not only
of his own music. While he was still
in the LPO we did a public rehearsal
of Larch Trees, the first orchestral
composition of his to be performed in
public. It was also the first orchestral
work to be given this opportunity with
funds from the Society for the Promotion
of New Music (SPNM). Later I played
for him many times on film sessions
when we recorded the music he had written.
Some 40 years later I was able to arrange
for Sir Charles Groves and the National
Centre for Orchestral Studies Orchestra
to give the first performance of his
9th Symphony, now a well-respected
work, commissioned by the BBC but which
they refused to broadcast until a good
many years later.
Aaron
Copland, Michael Tippett, William Walton
and Vaughan Williams immediately come
to mind as composers who, though they
lacked technical expertise to a varying
extent as conductors, brought a special
musical insight to performances of their
own music. There were some composers,
of course, who were hopeless as conductors,
having neither the temperament nor the
necessary skill. When Sir Thomas Beecham,
a friend of Frederick Delius and a champion
of his music, was asked in a broadcast
interview, ‘Did Delius conduct his own
music?’ ‘Well’, he said, ‘I have seen
in my time good conductors, not so good,
competent conductors, indifferent conductors
– but I have never come across such
an abysmal depth of ineptitude
as revealed by poor old Frederick.
It was quite a common thing for him
to beat five in the bar when it should
be four. He beat 1,2,3,4 and, which
turned it into five. Well, of course,
the orchestra became almost distracted.
The public became restless, ‘What’s
going on? – what’s going on?’ Something
always went on when Delius conducted
a work of his own. But there was a time
when he used to practise many hours
a day – for weeks at a time in front
of a mirror, endeavouring to understand
this mysterious craft, but to no purpose
at all.’
Working
for John Cage was a very different experience
from playing for anyone else. I played
for him for a week when he was conducting
the small group of musicians providing
the music for the Merce Cunningham Dance
Company. The music Cage had written
for this avant-garde dance company and
the music that had been commissioned
from other composers did not use music
notation in the conventional way, nor
were any two performances alike.
In one
piece we were instructed to play as
many notes as possible in the top register
of our instrument in the length of time
of each note value in the part, perhaps
a crotchet or minim (1/4 or 1/2 note).
How many notes each of us could play
depended on the tempo that Cage selected.
In another composition the players had
to decide how much time to allow for
each line of music in their part. Cage
conducted this piece by holding up his
arm as if it was the hand of a clock.
He then moved his arm round the imaginary
clock face, but at varying speeds. He
might on one occasion go from 12 to
1 o’clock very slowly, when one had
allowed a long time for that section,
and then move from 1 to 3 very much
more quickly. Depending on the section
of music, one might have to play a section
with long notes extremely slowly and
the next section, which already had
a good many fast notes, even faster,
perhaps faster than one could manage.
At the next performance it might be
the reverse.
There
was one composition with the instruction
that when another player played a certain
phrase one had to go immediately to
another place in one’s part or perform
some particular action. At one point
in the trumpet part the player was instructed
to make the loudest sound he could.
The player on this occasion had an intense
dislike for this kind of music and resented
having to do things he considered inappropriate.
We were playing in the large orchestra
pit at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, which
has a concrete floor and walls, and,
as always, the normal heavy iron fire
doors. At the appointed point in his
part the trumpeter got up from his seat,
walked slowly and deliberately across
the pit to one of the fire doors and
slammed it shut as hard as he could.
The bang this made was like a bomb exploding.
His intention was that Cage should be
displeased, perhaps upset. Instead,
Cage was delighted and said ‘Thank you.
That is the best I have ever heard it!’
Igor
Stravinsky was an undoubted genius and
to have the opportunity to work with
him even once was good fortune; I had
this opportunity three times. That was
indeed to have been smiled on by the
gods. In 1936 in his book Chronicle
of my Life, Stravinsky writes very
outspokenly about the way conductors
‘interpreted’ his music. ‘With regard
to the Sacre, which I was tackling
for the first time, I was particularly
anxious in some of the parts (Glorification
of the Elect, Evocation of Ancestors,
Dance of Consecration) to give the
bars their true metric value, and to
have them played exactly as they were
written. I lay stress on this point,
which may seem to the reader to be a
purely professional detail. But with
a few exceptions, such as Monteux and
Ansermet, for example, most conductors
are inclined to cope with the metric
difficulties of these passages in such
a cavalier fashion as to distort alike
my music and my intentions. This is
what happens. Fearing to make a mistake
in a sequence of bars of varying values,
some conductors do not hesitate to ease
their task by treating them as of equal
length. By such methods the strong and
weak tempi are obviously displaced,
and it is left to the musicians to perform
the onerous task of readjusting the
accents in the new bars as improvised
by the conductors, a task so difficult
that even if there is no catastrophe
the listener expects one at any moment
and is immersed in an atmosphere of
intolerable strain.’
The
first time I played for Stravinsky was
in 1954, when I was in the Royal Philharmonic
Orchestra. He had come to London to
conduct a programme of his own works
at a Royal Philharmonic Society concert.
He was already 72 and one might have
expected that he would no longer be
at his most vigorous, but though he
appeared physically quite frail his
mind was as agile and incisive as any
I have experienced. His clarity of thought
and certainty of intention was exciting
in itself and he had the ability to
make his wishes as a conductor clear,
both in words and by his gestures.
A feature
of much of Stravinsky’s music is his
use of small note values: sixteenth,
thirty-second and sixty-forth notes.
When combined with the many changes
of time signature, varying through 3/4,
2/8, 7/16, the very small note values
call for great accuracy of performance.
I had already worked with Ernest Ansermet,
praised by Stravinsky, when we recorded
the original version of Petrushka
with the London Philharmonic in 1946.
(I also took part in the recording of
the complete ballet music for The
Firebird when Ansermet conducted
the Philharmonia many years later in
1968, a year before he died). But working
with Ansermet had not prepared me for
the extreme precision that Stravinsky
demanded when he rehearsed his Orpheus.
One felt his intelligence was like
a razor sharp blade, stripping away
everything that was inessential and
dross.
In the
interval of that concert he was presented
with the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic
Society. Perhaps because only that which
is true and without blemish was acceptable
to him, he pursued this ideal with his
usual concentration of purpose. When
he was presented with the medal by Sir
Arthur Bliss, he put it between his
teeth and gave it an examining bite.
Fortunately for the honour of the Society
and the composure of Sir Arthur, the
medal passed this rigorous test and
received Stravinsky’s approbation.
On the
29th May, 1963 Pierre Monteux’s
long association with Stravinsky was
celebrated at a concert given by the
London Symphony Orchestra at the Royal
Albert Hall. On that date, exactly 50
years previously, Monteux had conducted
the first performance of the Rite
of Spring. In 1913 the work created
a scandale; the audience were
so inflamed and noisy that Nijinsky
had been obliged to stand on a chair
at the side of the stage and shout out
the numbers to the dancers. On this
occasion Stravinsky, who earlier that
evening had attended a gala performance
of The Marriage of Figaro by
Mozart at the Royal Opera House, Covent
Garden, only arrived in time to hear
the second half of this work, which
even in 1963 was not often performed
and one that orchestras still found
difficult, and to witness the tremendous
ovation this previously controversial
music received.
The
orchestra were unaware of his presence
and it came as a surprise to them to
see the very elderly Pierre Monteux
leave the platform to make his way through
the audience to greet Stravinsky who
was sitting in one of the boxes. I have
been told that the sight of these two
veterans of 20th century music embracing
with such affection was a very moving
and unforgettable sight.
However,
despite what Stravinsky had written
in 1936 in his book Chronicle of
my Life, it seems that Monteux was
indeed one of the conductors who later
in life decided to cope with the metric
difficulties of bars of varying values
by changing the way they were written
and therefore conducted. Though Stravinsky
did not show his displeasure, it is
reported that he was rather unhappy
with the performance.
The
next time I played for Stravinsky was
in the summer of 1963 when the Philharmonia
was on an extensive tour of South America.
To our surprise, in the middle of the
tour, we suddenly found we were scheduled
to do a concert in Rio de Janeiro with
Stravinsky and his close associate Robert
Craft. The programme consisted of Fireworks,the
Symphony in C, and
the ballet music for Le Baiser de
la Fée, which Stravinsky
conducted. In the years since 1954 he
had become even more frail, but his
mind was as clear and precise as before,
and the performance was exact and memorable.
The
third and last occasion when Stravinsky
enriched my experience was in September
1965. He was now a mere wisp of a man,
ill, and it seemed somewhat dejected,
or perhaps just tired. He had flown
to London from Hamburg to appear at
the Royal Festival Hall for the European
premiere of his Variations in Memory
of Aldous Huxley. The other works
in the programme were, Fireworks,
The Rite of Spring and The Firebird
Suite, in the infrequently performed
1945 version. Stravinsky conducted Fireworks
and The Firebird Suite
and Robert Craft, his
associate conductor again, the rest
of the programme.
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Though
he was unwell, during the interval of
the rehearsal, as he sat, cosseted by
his wife and wrapped in towels and blankets,
he was kind enough to inscribe a copy
of his Conversations with Robert
Craft for me. A copy of that signature
is testimony to the energy that still
propelled this remarkable man, now 83,
through a creative life spanning over
60 years, during which he had startled,
affronted, and delighted generations
of audiences.
I
remember that it was a wonderful
performance. The orchestra played at
its very best; in fact above its best,
as can happen on very special occasions
when in the presence of someone inspirational,
someone for whom everyone has respect.
Every member of the orchestra took risks:
played softer and louder than was safe,
attacked entries with abandon.
Now,
nearly forty years later it is no longer
necessary just to rely on the ageing
memories of elderly musicians or members
of the audience who were present on
that historic evening. The second half
of the programme was televised by the
BBC who several years ago made a video
copy of this wonderful performance available
to Music Preserved, on Licence, for
its archives (at the Barbican library,
within the Barbican Centre, and the
Jerwood Library of the Performing Arts
at Trinity College of Music). Now a
commercial video has been issued of
Stravinsky conducting this performance
of The Firebird. On the video
in the Music Preserved archives the
whole of the BBC programme is available:
Robert Craft conducts the Variations
in Memory of Aldous Huxley, twice,
with Stravinsky in the audience, and
the concert ends with Stravinsky conducting
his Firebird Suite. It is really
moving to see how the performance and
the audience’s standing ovation reanimated
and delighted him. The audience demanded
so many bows, obviously hoping for an
encore, that in the end they would only
let him go when he returned with his
overcoat on, making it clear he was
leaving.
Chapter
12
