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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