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7
Sir
Thomas Beecham
The
Beecham Wind Orchestra – a unique wind
ensemble. Memories and anecdotes from
musicians who played for him, including
my father (from 1912 onwards) and myself
(from 1944 until his last concert in
1960). His rehearsal methods, repertoire
and influence on all who played for
him. Playing for him at concerts, on
recordings, film and TV. His last concert.
The
first really great musician that I worked
with was Sir Thomas Beecham. This was
a quite wonderful experience and a source
of great pleasure that I was to enjoy
for the following sixteen years – for
a year or so in the LPO and then, from
1947, in the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
Those
of us who made music under Sir Thomas’s
direction were extremely fortunate,
because he was a conductor of a particularly
unusual, indeed unique, kind. There
have, of course, been a number of outstanding
and a few ‘great’ conductors – artists
who inspired performances that reached
the heart of the music, bringing it
to life and inspiring players and audiences
alike. But, having played for nearly
all the most renowned conductors between
1943 and 1980 and worked with many,
in a different capacity, for a further
ten years, no one else has seemed to
me to have had the remarkable qualities
Beecham possessed.
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Though
I did not to play for Beecham until
1944, the wonderful records he made
with the London Philharmonic Orchestra,
between 1932 and 1939, were known to
me. His leading players – Reginald Kell,
Leon Goosens, Anthony Pini and David
McCallum, had become my boyhood heroes.
One always heard the solos so clearly
and the players seemed to have such
freedom of expression and an opportunity
to be creative. I was to learn later,
from personal experience, that when
playing for Sir Thomas one never had
to fight one’s way through a barrage
of strings ‘scraping away regardless’,
as Sir Henry Wood used to call it, when
playing a soft, delicate solo passage.
Beecham
formed the LPO in 1932 and from the
start he and the orchestra were a great
success. The audience at the first concert
was stunned and excited by the verve
and virtuosity of the performance of
the very first item Carnaval Romain
Overture by Berlioz. It was also
the first piece Beecham conducted when
he returned to the LPO exactly 12 years
later. It was to remain one of Beecham’s
favourite works.
I first
heard about Sir Thomas from my father.
He had played for Beecham in the short-lived,
but adventurous Beecham Wind Orchestra
in 1912. Later he played for Sir Thomas,
several times, in various orchestras.
As a child I remember him speaking of
these occasions with enthusiasm.
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The
Beecham Wind Orchestra, in contrast
to a military band, is of historical
interest in that it predated the rise
of the wind bands of the 1950s by some
40 years. The Wind Orchestra’s first
concert (I believe the Orchestra only
gave three concerts) took place in St.
Helens, Thomas Beecham’s (as he then
was) hometown. It was billed as ‘The
Mayor’s Invitation Concert’, and was
probably funded by Beecham’s wealthy
father.
The
programme notes for this occasion included
the following information, (first printed
in the Daily Telegraph): Mr Thomas
Beecham, convinced that wind-instrument
playing in this country is – and has
for some time past been – steadily deteriorating,
has founded a new wind orchestra, primarily
with the view of raising the standard
of wind playing and opening a new field
to composers and executants. The formation
of the orchestra is the practical outcome
of several years study of (i) the possibilities
generally of wind-instrument music;
and (ii) the condition of wind-instrument
playing in the British Isles.
Mr
Beecham maintains that with the improvement
of the manufacture of most wind instruments
and the invention of several others
of great beauty, which are still unfamiliar
to the average player, there is a field
for new development both in the practical
reorganisation and theoretical treatment
of wind combinations. It must, therefore,
be made quite clear that this body of
players is not in the least what is
generally known as a brass or military
band; it is essentially a wind orchestra.
Whereas in the brass or military bands
of the Grenadier Guards, the Coldstream
Guards, etc., the proportion of brass
to woodwind is in the approximate ratio
of two to one, in the Beecham Wind Orchestra
the proportion is reversed to one to
two. It is hardly necessary to point
out that this preponderance of a woodwind
quality of sound alters the entire nature
of the combination, and justifies the
description of it as a ‘wind orchestra’.
There
were 52 musicians and as can be seen
from the orchestra list it included
a number of instruments not usually
found in a military band: cor anglais,
heckelphone (or bass oboe), 2 corni
di bassetto or basset horns), contra
bassoons (the 2 bassoons have been omitted
from the list, though they are mentioned
elsewhere), bass trumpet, and, rather
surprisingly, celeste.
The
programme has the mixture of classical
and entertainment music one would expect
to find in a programme of that date.
H F Willemson, who had worked as a copyist
and also scored for Brahms, specially
arranged the Wagner overture. I think
he did a number of other arrangements
for the band and these, plus a great
deal more music and a wonderful collection
of Beecham’s personal belongings, are
housed in the Sir Thomas Beecham Archive.
Listening
to some of the Music Preserved Oral
History recordings that have been made
since 1987, it has been interesting
to hear the views of some of the players
who had played with Beecham during the
1930s, when he was much younger than
I ever knew him.
Richard
Walton, his principal trumpet, in both
the LPO and RPO, recalled that ‘he had
authority – and he used that authority.
He could be quite a tartar. It had to
be really good.’ ‘He always implied
a lyrical line – I’m sure both the orchestras,
the LPO and the RPO, had this from Beecham
– the importance of a beautiful, lyrical
line.’ Leo Birnbaum, one of the violas,
remembers the excitement of working
with Tommy, ‘He was one of those few
rare conductors who could really get
better playing out of us than other
conductors. At the first rehearsal Tommy
would conduct the whole work, straight
through. He’d get excited and we’d get
excited, too. At the end we’d all cheer.
I think that sometimes these rehearsals
were even more exciting to us than the
actual performance. Even after the last
rehearsal he’d use a blue pencil to
put in what we call ‘hairpins’ – crescendos
and diminuendos – he was always marking
and re-marking nuances.’
Playing
for Tommy that ‘beautiful lyrical line’
gave me continual pleasure and the changed
‘blue pencil marks’ always gave one
new insight into the music.
In 1946
Sir Thomas formed The Royal Philharmonic
Orchestra and in 1947 I joined that
orchestra, at the same time as Jack
Brymer, Terence MacDonagh and Gwydion
Brooke. When I was reviving old memories
with Jack and remembering some of the
works we had played many times with
Tommy, I recalled how different his
rehearsal methods were from other conductors.
Jack Brymer responded with his own recollections,
‘His rehearsals were more a matter of
familiarisation than anything else –
you hadn’t the faintest idea what the
old man wanted, really, because he didn’t
put it into words. But when you got
to the performance you looked at him,
you looked at those eyes and the whole
body, and the gestures, and you knew
what he wanted, because this was real
conducting, the art of gesture. I remember
one day, Beecham had just returned from
America, and he said, ‘Let’s see what
we can do with this little bit of music.’
and we played the First Cuckoo (On
Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring),
by Delius. If you listen to that recording
– fantastic – it is affection in music.’
And indeed it was. He had such a great
influence on all those who had the privilege
of making music with him that it has
always seemed to me that I could tell,
from their playing, those musicians
who had played for Tommy. Whatever their
own individual ability, their playing
was infused with some special element
of imagination, whomever they were playing
for.
However
many times you played a piece – perhaps
Mozart Symphony 39, which I must have
played dozens of times with him – he
always rehearsed it again. His method
of rehearsal was to say, ‘Oh! Gentlemen,
I think we’ll have a look at Mozart
39.’ After we had played right through
to the end, without any stops, he would
say, ‘Yes, that was very nice, gentlemen.’
and I would say to my friend Jack Brymer,
‘That means we’re going through it again.’
Then Tommy would say, ‘Just one or two
points – it’s going extremely well’
– and we’d play straight through the
symphony again.
But,
of course, you didn’t just play through
it again, because he would do different
things with the baton, he would look
in a different way, his gestures would
change. He knew what he wanted to hear,
he knew what had not gone the way he
wished and he would do what was needed,
in some subtle extraordinary way, that
enabled the players to produce the sounds
he heard in his head and wanted to hear
again. He didn’t tell you what to do,
or explain it. It was at his eightieth
birthday party that he said, ‘You don’t
have to teach musicians – they’re good
musicians – they probably know more
about the music than you do. All that
you can do is help them play that music
together, come together to make a performance.
As I get older I’ve learnt to do less
and less.’ Some people might think that
he didn’t really mean it, but it was
absolutely true. He did do less and
less, that is he got in the way less
and less. He conducted like a man bowling
a hoop along. He tapped the hoop only
when it was necessary. When he came
to a corner he tapped it so that it
started to go round and left it alone
until it had gone round. Then he tapped
it again. Others tap it all the way
round the corner, and as likely as not
it goes into the wall.
No other
conductor, that I have known was able
to get an orchestra to play with such
a degree of rubato and yet at
the same time, achieve outstanding precision
of attack and ensemble. There was something
so inevitable in his rhythm, that however
wayward his beat might appear you always
knew what was happening. In the 1947
recording of Ein Heldenleben,
by Richard Strauss, there are some wonderful
examples of this talent. In particular
towards the end of that work where there
is a lovely duet between the violin
and the horn that is of breath-taking
loveliness. On this first recording
(we recorded it again with him in 1958)
this passage is played with great sensitivity
by the then Leader, Oscar Lampe, and
the late, great Dennis Brain. It was
taking part in performances like that,
when Beecham combined masculine tenderness,
subtle rubato, sensitive phrasing
and dynamic outbursts of energy, that
made working with
him something very special indeed.
Sir
Thomas was a man of many sides and moods.
Not withstanding his autocratic style,
more usually with managements, the press
and those he wanted to impress, Beecham
was always popular with musicians who
felt considerable affection for him
and always referred to him as ‘Tommy’
when they spoke of him. Although he
had a reputation for being a martinet
– perhaps this was true when he was
younger – he was always extremely pleasant
and courteous to the orchestra during
the time I played for him. However,
he did not respond well if players,
especially those he held in high regard
and who he wanted always to be available
to him, decided to follow their own
interests and not his. I remember that
on one occasion Dennis Brain had
told the orchestral manager he would
not be available for a concert when
Ein Heldenleben, which has a
very important part for the principal
horn was on the programme, because he
had already accepted an engagement to
play one of the Mozart Horn Concertos
with another orchestra.. When Beecham
was informed. he said, ‘Please tell
Mr Brain that he either makes himself
available for our concert, or he will
not play with the orchestra again.’
Dennis Brain did not do the concert
and though Brain was one of Sir Thomas’s
favourite players he did not play in
the orchestra again for a year or more.
Beecham would rather let him go than
have his authority challenged.
Of
course, Beecham provided a great deal
of employment, paid well and from time
to time put his own money, as well as
other people’s, into his musical enterprises.
But that was not the main thing – it
was, as always, the pleasure everyone
got from taking part in magical performances
that made the difficult and often unrewarding
life of an orchestral musician really
worthwhile.
Rehearsals
could also be enjoyable because he was
usually in a good humour when making
music. His reputation for off-the-cuff
ripostes and asides is not something
I experienced very often. It was more
his timing, his tone of voice, and his
manner of speaking that led to quite
ordinary remarks being greeted with
howls of laughter. He could make ‘pass
the salt’ sound amusing. There are two
anecdotes that I can vouch for and one
must have been spontaneous. It was when
my father played for Sir Thomas for
the first time, about 1910 or 1911.
He had been engaged as deputy principal
clarinet in one of the orchestras Sir
Thomas was conducting. During the rehearsal
Beecham wanted to make a musical point
to my father. Not knowing his name he
turned to the principal second violinist
and asked him, ‘Who is playing principal
clarinet today?’ Unfortunately this
player suffered with a quite dreadful
stammer. ‘It’s Mr ch – ch – ch – chhh…
…’. ‘Oh! dear!’ said Sir Thomas, ‘I
didn’t know we had a train with us today.’
The
other time was when we were doing a
TV programme that Sir Thomas was presenting
as well as conducting. We had already
rehearsed everything that morning and
had reassembled for a short rehearsal
before the actual telecast – this was
still in the 1950s when TV broadcasts
went out ‘live’. As usual Beecham was
very late arriving and as we neared
the time of the transmission the studio
manager was becoming more and more agitated.
When Tommy eventually arrived the studio
manager by then extremely flustered
rushed up to him and said ‘Oh! Sir Thomas
it’s so terribly late we really must
have some voice levels.’ ‘There’s nothing
to worry about my boy.’ said Tommy as
he went towards the microphone and in
his most serious voice started to recite:
Mary
had a little watch,
She swallowed
it one day.
She took a box
of Beecham’s Pills,
To pass the time
away.
Beecham
was able to rescue music that had been
neglected, often because it required
someone with his special kind of imagination
to bring it to life. One such work that
I enjoyed very much, to which Tommy
brought his magic, was Fifine at
the Fair by Granville Bantock. This
employs a very large orchestra, in the
Strauss/Mahler tradition. Though rather
too long, it has some fine dramatic
moments and lyrical interludes, which
Beecham realised to their full potential.
Goldmark’s
Rustic Wedding Symphony, surely
deserving of more performances, was
another of Tommy’s favourites. In the
recording he made with the RPO, the
slow movement is played with particular
sensitivity and beauty of tonal colouring.
One hears the lyrical, firm yet infinitely
flexible rhythm Beecham brought to everything
he conducted. The music moves forward,
never dragging, always unhurried and
timeless. The Last Sleep of the Virgin,
by Massenet, usually consigned to the
‘lollipop’ category, is a small gem.
It was intensely moving when the recording
he had made with the RPO was played
at his reburial in St. Peter’s Churchyard,
Limpsfield, close to his beloved Delius,
on the 29th April 1991.
His
championship of Delius is well known
and his recordings of the very large
works, The Mass of Life, A Village
Romeo and Juliet, and many smaller
works remain a touchstone for performance
of these great compositions. The sounds
he drew from the orchestra were transparent
and airy, supported by an extraordinary
rhythmic spine that moves the music
along, never letting it become shapeless,
as it can become in other hands. I remember
very clearly the week of performances
of Irmelin in Oxford. The cast,
the scenery and the production were
not of the highest standard. Indeed,
it was even rumoured that the scenery
for the previous year’s pantomime, Cinderella,
had been called into service. The opera
was unknown and with the poor notices
the first performance received the audiences
were very thin. Box office taking were
nowhere near sufficient to cover the
costs incurred and it took a long time
for the deficit to be paid off. There
is so much lovely music in this opera,
though no doubt it would benefit from
some cuts (it is said that the best
operas are known by their cuts), that
it is a shame it is not heard more often.
Beecham’s love and understanding of
the music shone through every performance.
Without his magic could it ever be the
same?
Though
Beecham had been an innovator for the
first thirty or more years of his career,
he showed little sympathy for music
written after 1940. Nonetheless his
programmes were extremely varied. He
loved French music – especially Berlioz
and Bizet, Cesar Franck, Saint-Saëns,
Bizet, Massenet, Debussy and occasionally
Ravel.
The
performance of Ravel’s Daphnis and
Chloe Suite No 2 at a Royal Festival
Hall concert remains as a memory of
what, in other hands, would have been
a major catastrophe. Not withstanding
his wonderful sense of rhythm Tommy
had no liking for 5/4 or 7/8 time signatures.
He was frightened of the 5/4 section
towards the end of Daphnis and Chloe
and therefore barely rehearsed it. At
the concert one player, with an important
solo entry, came in a bar early. Some
sections of the orchestra followed him,
some did not. Beecham bellowed and wagged
the baton frenetically under the conductor’s
stand. Gradually the music fell apart.
At one point I think only the two flutes
were still ‘wiffling’ away. But the
orchestra rallied and we finished together,
always an asset. ‘How about that for
a near disaster’ I said to Norman Del
Mar, when I met him after the concert.
‘Well,’ he replied, ‘it was a bit untidy
in one place, but, my goodness, what
an exciting and splendid performance!’
As well
as Richard Strauss, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky
and regular performances of his beloved
Mozart, and to a lesser extent Haydn,
we played a good deal of Brahms and
Beethoven. Beecham is sometimes thought
to have ignored the German masterpieces.
This was not so. Brahms’s Second Symphony
and the St. Anthony Variations
were regularly in his programmes and
the other symphonies rather less frequently.
We often played Beethoven’s Second,
Fourth and Sixth symphonies. The Pastoral
was rather slower than usual, but the
Second and Fourth were the best renditions
of these works that I can recall. He
also liked the Seventh Symphony, which
we played quite frequently. The Ninth
Symphony was scheduled several times,
but for some reason Beecham seemed to
be heir to ill-health on most of these
occasions and his place was taken by
someone else.
Beecham
was a conductor who always needed to
be musically ‘in charge’. He was a wonderful
accompanist, within the framework of
his own conception. For players and
singers who shared his view of a work
he was a delightful collaborator: with
those soloists who did not the collaboration
could be less happy. His recordings
of Magic Flute, Carmen, and La
Boheme are ample evidence of his
powers as an opera conductor and the
rapport he had with singers. For his
concert performances he used soloists
rather infrequently. I recall an outstanding
performance with Clifford Curzon, who
put his subtle artistry at Beecham’s
disposal in a magnificent reading of
Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto. There
were a number of performances of the
Sibelius Violin Concerto with Isaac
Stern, who also made a splendid recording
of this work with him. The recording
of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with
Jascha Heifetz was a less happy occasion.
At one point it seemed unlikely that
the recording would ever be completed
satisfactorily. Heifetz had decided
that he wanted to play the last movement
extremely quickly. Certainly much faster
than Sir Thomas was inclined to think
correct. Heifetz played at one tempo,
Beecham conducted at another. The rest
of us, in particular the woodwind, had
to do the best we could. The result
is interesting, if not quite orthodox.
When we travelled to
Portsmouth in May 1960, none of us thought
for a moment that this would be the last
concert that Sir Thomas would conduct.
He was in good shape and it seemed he
would go on for ever. We all hoped he
would. As on the occasion that I first
encountered Sir Thomas, when he put the
baton through his hand, this concert had
strange and unusual events connected with
it. For some reason he decided to invite
the whole orchestra to luncheon when we
arrived in Portsmouth. This was extremely
unusual, indeed unique in my experience.
Though always polite and courteous, Beecham
never became familiar with members of
his orchestras. He neither travelled with
the players nor indulged in any kind of
social relationship with them.
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However, this was a very pleasant occasion
and he was at his most benign. After lunch
we went to the concert hall and rehearsed
for about twenty minutes. Then, another
surprise. A large television set was brought
on to the platform and Sir Thomas invited
the orchestra to join him in watching
the cup final. Liverpool, the football
team closest to St. Helens where he was
born, was playing that year. There was
no more rehearsal and after the match
we went our separate ways.
It was
a splendid concert and it was received
with enthusiasm. The concert ended with
a characteristically ebullient performance
of the Bacchanale, from Samson
and Delilah by Saint-Saëns.
Tommy was loved by audiences and he
in his turn loved them and was generous
with his encores. He loved music and
enjoyed it more than any other conductor
I have played for. It was this enjoyment
that was so infectious, affecting audiences
and players alike. Shirley, Lady Beecham,
told me that Tommy had related to her
how on an occasion, when he was very,
very young, there was a little concert
in his hometown. He was terrified of
the audience. His nurse led him to the
curtain and let him peep through. ‘Now,
Master Thomas, you mustn’t be nervous’
she said ‘out there are all your little
friends.’ On this occasion, in Portsmouth,
a great many of his friends, in the
audience and all of us in the orchestra,
were treated to an encore, Sleigh
Ride by one of his favourite composers,
Frederick Delius. It was the last piece
he was to conduct.
Beecham
has left a treasury of incomparable
recordings to enrich the listening hours
of all music lovers. For those of us
who were fortunate enough to make music
with him, he has left a gap that remains
unfilled. Though I was fortunate enough
to play under the direction of a number
of other outstanding conductors, none
gave me the continuos musical satisfaction
I enjoyed when working with Beecham.
Even when he conducted music that he
was not suited for temperamentally the
spontaneity and the feeling that the
music was being recreated in performance
was exhilarating.
Chapter
8
