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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
