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Richard Bratby

~ Classical music writer, critic and consultant

Richard Bratby

Tag Archives: Birmingham Town Hall

Victor Hely-Hutchinson’s Box of Delights

14 Thursday Dec 2017

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

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Birmingham Town Hall, Carol Symphony, CBSO, Christmas, Leslie Heward, Victor Hely-Hutchinson, Wolverhampton

Cropped

The wolves are running

I first published this post about a forgotten giant of Birmingham musical life and his solitary, much-loved seasonal masterpiece a few years ago on an early, now defunct iteration of the CBSO blog, and I’ve reposted it on a couple of subsequent Christmases. I’m hoping to write something more substantial about Victor Hely-Hutchinson in time for the CBSO’s centenary in 2020, but in the meantime, this always seems to draw a reasonably lively response. So in the spirit of the season, I hope you’ll forgive me for putting it up again. Happy Christmas, folks!


 

So here it is, Merry Christmas, and we have it on unimpeachable authority that everybody is having fun. Forgive me: I lived in Wolverhampton for eight years (well, it was good enough for Percy Young) and Noddy Holder is like a god there.

I’m not the world’s greatest fan of seasonal pop music. But I am, however, a fan of Victor Hely-Hutchinson’s A Carol Symphony – a work with a deep connection to the English Midlands, and not just through its association with successive dramatisations of The Box of Delights. Here’s a blogpost I wrote in 2009 about the music and its (largely forgotten) composer. When it was first published I was delighted to receive a charming and kindly email from the composer’s then-78 year old son Christopher, who was living in Ludlow. Hopefully he still is.


Hely-Hutchinson

Victor Hely-Hutchinson (1901-1947)

When I was 11, my younger sister and I were both captivated by the BBC’s TV adaptation of John Masefield’s The Box of Delights. She liked the fantastic story, and the Christmassy atmosphere; I liked the steam trains. But one thing that we both loved, and which seemed to capture the whole wintry magic of the thing, was the signature tune – which we could tell, even then, was “proper” music, not just a typical children’s TV theme (this being the early 1980s, the lack of synthesizers was the giveaway). Here’s that title sequence in full (warning, unseasonably noisy Youtube advert may play first!).

I asked my father if he knew what it was – not realising that a pre-war radio dramatisation of The Box of Delights, with the same music, had become a seasonal classic for an earlier generation. Or that my father – at much the same age – had asked exactly the same question. He pulled out a Classics for Pleasure LP with a snowy landscape on the cover. The piece on it was called Carol Symphony, and the composer was Victor Hely-Hutchinson.

Carol Symphony cover 1

Sleeve art the way it used to be.

The record-sleeve told us that he’d been born on Boxing Day 1901, and had been Regional Director of Music for the BBC in Birmingham. It wasn’t very easy to find out much more back then, but it is now, and for the full story, there’s an excellent online biography by his son John. In short, Christian Victor Hely-Hutchinson was born in Cape Town, studied music with Charles Villiers Stanford and Donald Tovey, and at the age of 12 played a Mozart piano concerto with the LSO. In 1933 he landed the Birmingham job, and rapidly involved himself with every part of the city’s musical life – not least the 13-year old City of Birmingham Orchestra and its then music director Leslie Heward.

Hely-Hutchinson never held an official post with the CBO – but he was a tireless supporter of the Orchestra throughout the 1930s and 40s. The CBSO’s performance record-cards from that period are dotted with the initials VHH – indicating that he’d written the programme notes for a particular work. He gave pre-concert lectures (he took a doctorate in 1941, though he’d held the Chair of Music at Birmingham University since 1934). He appeared as piano soloist with the orchestra, notably in Mozart concertos, and in 1944 he performed his own rhapsody The Young Idea (intriguingly subtitled “cum grano salis”) with George Weldon conducting. It’s recently been recorded by Dutton.

And he did it all with consummate professionalism. The CBO’s manager Gerald Forty (of the piano-makers Dale, Forty) remembered that:

His quiet confidence was most reassuring. I see him in my mind’s eye, sitting at my desk. He knocks out a half-smoked pipe, his inseparable companion: fills it, lights it, takes a few puffs – finds it won’t draw – scrapes it out, refills it, wastes more matches – and so on da capo. While my ashtrays were being filled, his mind was concentrated on the matter at hand, and with a remarkable economy of words, he stated his views and recommended a solution.

Leslie Heward

Leslie Heward

But it was during wartime that Hely-Hutchinson gave his greatest service to the CBO. In early 1940, while working as a volunteer Air Raid Precaution warden, he performed (from memory!) a complete cycle of Beethoven Piano Sonatas at the Birmingham and Midland Institute – in aid of Orchestra funds. Meanwhile, he corresponded regularly with Leslie Heward, then recovering in Romsley Sanatorium from the TB which was to kill him just three years later. When Heward died in May 1943, Hely-Hutchinson rallied to the support of the CBO. As Forty recalled:

birminghamtownhall

Birmingham Town Hall in wartime. Hely-Hutchinson took part in ARP fire drills on the roof.

The problem of finding another conductor at short notice and of maintaining a full complement of players with War staring us in the face, was one of extreme perplexity; but Victor solved it by the apparently simple expedient of doing the entire job himself – including the compiling of programmes, rehearsing the orchestra (which he did anonymously and gratuitously for many years), conducting the concerts and dealing efficiently and decisively with the innumerable emergencies…

Hely Hutchinson was initially unconvinced by Heward’s successor, George Weldon, but with typical fair-mindedness was happy to revise his opinion after Weldon had settled into the post a year or so later:

“I want to tell you how right I think you were about George Weldon – and by the same token, I was wrong – eighteen months ago” he wrote to a colleague in June 1944. “As a pure musician, I cannot think him the equal of Leslie, but then, practically nobody is, and some of George’s performances – notably of Mozart – made me feel that he has the root of the matter in him”.

The following year, Hely-Hutchinson was offered the post of Director of Music for the BBC in London, and swapped his home near Droitwich for one in St John’s Wood. But he remained a familiar face in Birmingham music, and there was genuine shock in the city in March 1947 when the news arrived that he had died of pneumonia, aged just 45. The CBO paid its own tribute three weeks later, when Weldon conducted the first performance of Hely-Hutchinson’s recently-completed Symphony for Small Orchestra. (The concert was broadcast, and an incomplete recording survives in the CBSO archive).

Somehow, in this short but full musical life, Hely-Hutchinson found time to compose around 150 original works. The best known (by a country mile) is the Carol Symphony, from 1927, but there’s also an irresistible setting of Old Mother Hubbard “in the style of Handel”, which amusingly skewers the absurdities of baroque vocal style; and two shorter works, the Overture to a Pantomime and The Young Idea. Both have recently been recorded. They all show superb craftsmanship, a masterly ear for orchestral colour and a warm, thoroughly engaging sense of musical humour. They’d all merit an outing in the concert hall.

But the Carol Symphony has never quite left the repertoire (the most recent Birmingham performance was in December 2000). Far more than a mere seasonal medley, it’s actually a lovely and very English folk-song sinfonietta in four movements, in the spirit of Moeran, Vaughan Williams and John Ireland.

It’s packed with good things: the bustling mock-baroque figuration of the first movement (a sort of chorale-prelude on O Come All Ye Faithful), the jazzy, Walton-esque verve of the scherzo (God Rest Ye Merry); splashes of Handel, Elgar, and polytonal Stravinsky; the way Here We Come A-Wassailing trips in on the woodwind as the fugal finale bounds towards its grand, horn-trilling finish. And above all, that slow movement, in which Hely-Hutchinson sets the Coventry Carol to bleak, frozen harmonies that anticipate Vaughan Williams’ Sixth – and then, with dancing harp, muted strings and finally full orchestra, lightens our darkness with the gentlest and most enchanting setting ever made of The First Nowell.

A Box of Delights, indeed. Whatever else we remember him for, in the Carol Symphony Victor Hely-Hutchinson gave us something very special, and enduringly beautiful. Hely-Hutchinson’s CBO colleague and friend Gerald Forty, once more:

The Carol Symphony has become a standard Christmas piece for the City Orchestra: may it long continue to figure in those programmes as a reminder of the well-loved man to whom the City of Birmingham Orchestra and the Birmingham musical public owes so much.


Any copyrighted material is included as “fair use”, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Review: I Fagiolini at Birmingham Town Hall

21 Tuesday Nov 2017

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

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Birmingham Town Hall, I Fagiolini, Monteverdi, Reviews, The Birmingham Post

605

Rainy day in Venice

 The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (ideally you should go out and buy the paper) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Birmingham Town Hall on Thursday 9 November 2017.


“The Other Vespers” was the title of this concert by I Fagiolini, and it was a bit of a tease. I Fagiolini approach everything with a twinkle in their eye, and the photos in the programme showed them in Italy, larking about on Vespa scooters (get it?) and generally enjoying la dolce vita. The point was that this wasn’t the famous Monteverdi Vespers of 1610: but a sequence of sacred music by various Italian baroque masters that Monteverdi is known (or plausibly assumed) to have directed in Venice some decades later.

Cue baroque music on a truly luxurious scale. The eight singers of I Fagiolini under Robert Hollingworth were accompanied by a continuo of chamber organ plus various sizes of theorbo, as well as two violins and the six-strong English Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble. Together, the sound they made was refulgent, and glowed rather than dazzled: in works like Gabrieli’s 14-part Magnificat, the harmonies built and shimmered like clouds of incense.

Elsewhere, the ensemble was used more sparingly, and there were some delightful discoveries: an Ave Verum by Palestrina had a warbling solo cornetto (just one) added by the Milanese vocalist Bovicelli – a sound halfway between a cor anglais and a duck-call. Instrumental items, including a marvellously florid violin sonata by Uccellini were interspersed with the sacred numbers.

But everything, sacred or profane, was informed by the same sense of playful inventiveness. It danced, as well as sang, and singers and instrumentalists alike improvised and ornamented their melodies. And if (to modern ears) it felt slightly anticlimactic to end with a solo item – Monteverdi’s Salve, O Regina, sung with languishing sweetness – it was a useful reminder that the real stars here were the composers.

Review: Orchestra of the Swan

02 Friday Jun 2017

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Birmingham Post, Birmingham Town Hall, Orchestra of the Swan, Reviews

Orchestra of the Swan

Orchestra of the Swan

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (ideally you should go out and buy the paper) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Birmingham Town Hall on Wednesday 24 May 2017.


A change, they say, is as good as a rest. It’s rare that we get to hear the Orchestra of the Swan conducted by anyone other than David Curtis. But it’s no reflection upon Curtis’s tireless work to say that under the American guest conductor Franz Anton Krager, they sounded like a band renewed. Krager served as OOTS’s principal guest conductor back in the noughties, but this was his Town Hall debut, and on the strength of this performance it’d be good to have him back rather sooner next time.

True, Schubert’s Fifth Symphony and the teenage Mozart’s Third Violin Concerto aren’t the stuff of which ovations are made. Still less, the symphony formerly known as Mozart’s 37th – actually a work by Michael Haydn to which Mozart, for reasons known only to himself, added a short introduction. Under Krager, OOTS played it in big, buoyant phrases, propelled by buccaneering horns and a real feeling for this underrated music’s ebullient personality.

That verve and sense of colour were even more noticeable in the Schubert, with some of the most stylish playing I’ve heard from OOTS. Krager brought out the shadows in this usually sunny symphony, letting woodwind lines sing through the texture, and weighting the stormier string passages towards the basses to generate a powerful momentum. It all went with a terrific swing, as did Jennifer Pike’s larger-than-life account of the concerto – delivered by Pike with a glinting tone and a series of brilliant, startlingly Romantic cadenzas. Krager and the OOTS were more than ready to meet her on the same terms. Played by a symphony orchestra, these three pieces can seem like miniatures. Here, they became whole worlds.

Victor Hely-Hutchinson’s Box of Delights

22 Tuesday Dec 2015

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Birmingham Town Hall, Carol Symphony, CBSO, Christmas, Leslie Heward, Victor Hely-Hutchinson, Wolverhampton

I first published this post about a forgotten giant of Birmingham musical life and his solitary, much-loved seasonal masterpiece a few years ago, and I reposted it last Christmas. It always seems to draw a reasonably lively response, so in the spirit of the season, I hope you’ll forgive me for putting it up again. Happy Christmas, folks!


So here it is, Merry Christmas, and we have it on unimpeachable authority that everybody is having fun. Forgive me: I lived in Wolverhampton for eight years (well, it was good enough for Percy Young) and Noddy Holder is like a god there.

I’m not the world’s greatest fan of seasonal pop music. But I am, however, a fan of Victor Hely-Hutchinson’s A Carol Symphony – a work with a deep connection to the English Midlands, and not just through its association with successive dramatisations of The Box of Delights. Here’s a blogpost I wrote in 2009 about the music and its (largely forgotten) composer. When it was first published I was delighted to receive a charming and kindly email from the composer’s then-78 year old son Christopher, who was living in Ludlow. Hopefully he still is.


Hely-Hutchinson

Victor Hely-Hutchinson (1901-1947)

When I was 11, my younger sister and I were both captivated by the BBC’s TV adaptation of John Masefield’s The Box of Delights. She liked the fantastic story, and the Christmassy atmosphere; I liked the steam trains. But one thing that we both loved, and which seemed to capture the whole wintry magic of the thing, was the signature tune – which we could tell, even then, was “proper” music, not just a typical children’s TV theme (this being the early 1980s, the lack of synthesizers was the giveaway). Here’s that title sequence in full (warning, unseasonably noisy Youtube advert may play first!).

I asked my father if he knew what it was – not realising that a pre-war radio dramatisation of The Box of Delights, with the same music, had become a seasonal classic for an earlier generation. Or that my father – at much the same age – had asked exactly the same question. He pulled out a Classics for Pleasure LP with a snowy landscape on the cover. The piece on it was called Carol Symphony, and the composer was Victor Hely-Hutchinson.

Carol Symphony cover 1

Sleeve art the way it used to be.

The record-sleeve told us that he’d been born on Boxing Day 1901, and had been Regional Director of Music for the BBC in Birmingham. It wasn’t very easy to find out much more back then, but it is now, and for the full story, there’s an excellent online biography by his son John. In short, Christian Victor Hely-Hutchinson was born in Cape Town, studied music with Charles Villiers Stanford and Donald Tovey, and at the age of 12 played a Mozart piano concerto with the LSO. In 1933 he landed the Birmingham job, and rapidly involved himself with every part of the city’s musical life – not least the 13-year old City of Birmingham Orchestra and its then music director Leslie Heward.

Hely-Hutchinson never held an official post with the CBO – but he was a tireless supporter of the Orchestra throughout the 1930s and 40s. The CBSO’s performance record-cards from that period are dotted with the initials VHH – indicating that he’d written the programme notes for a particular work. He gave pre-concert lectures (he took a doctorate in 1941, though he’d held the Chair of Music at Birmingham University since 1934). He appeared as piano soloist with the orchestra, notably in Mozart concertos, and in 1944 he performed his own rhapsody The Young Idea (intriguingly subtitled “cum grano salis”) with George Weldon conducting. It’s recently been recorded by Dutton.

And he did it all with consummate professionalism. The CBO’s manager Gerald Forty (of the piano-makers Dale, Forty) remembered that:

His quiet confidence was most reassuring. I see him in my mind’s eye, sitting at my desk. He knocks out a half-smoked pipe, his inseparable companion: fills it, lights it, takes a few puffs – finds it won’t draw – scrapes it out, refills it, wastes more matches – and so on da capo. While my ashtrays were being filled, his mind was concentrated on the matter at hand, and with a remarkable economy of words, he stated his views and recommended a solution.

Leslie Heward

Leslie Heward

But it was during wartime that Hely-Hutchinson gave his greatest service to the CBO. In early 1940, while working as a volunteer Air Raid Precaution warden, he performed (from memory!) a complete cycle of Beethoven Piano Sonatas at the Birmingham and Midland Institute – in aid of Orchestra funds. Meanwhile, he corresponded regularly with Leslie Heward, then recovering in Romsley Sanatorium from the TB which was to kill him just three years later. When Heward died in May 1943, Hely-Hutchinson rallied to the support of the CBO. As Forty recalled:

birminghamtownhall

Birmingham Town Hall in wartime. Hely-Hutchinson took part in ARP fire drills on the roof.

The problem of finding another conductor at short notice and of maintaining a full complement of players with War staring us in the face, was one of extreme perplexity; but Victor solved it by the apparently simple expedient of doing the entire job himself – including the compiling of programmes, rehearsing the orchestra (which he did anonymously and gratuitously for many years), conducting the concerts and dealing efficiently and decisively with the innumerable emergencies…

Hely Hutchinson was initially unconvinced by Heward’s successor, George Weldon, but with typical fair-mindedness was happy to revise his opinion after Weldon had settled into the post a year or so later:

“I want to tell you how right I think you were about George Weldon – and by the same token, I was wrong – eighteen months ago” he wrote to a colleague in June 1944. “As a pure musician, I cannot think him the equal of Leslie, but then, practically nobody is, and some of George’s performances – notably of Mozart – made me feel that he has the root of the matter in him”.

The following year, Hely-Hutchinson was offered the post of Director of Music for the BBC in London, and swapped his home near Droitwich for one in St John’s Wood. But he remained a familiar face in Birmingham music, and there was genuine shock in the city in March 1947 when the news arrived that he had died of pneumonia, aged just 45. The CBO paid its own tribute three weeks later, when Weldon conducted the first performance of Hely-Hutchinson’s recently-completed Symphony for Small Orchestra. (The concert was broadcast, and an incomplete recording survives in the CBSO archive).

Somehow, in this short but full musical life, Hely-Hutchinson found time to compose around 150 original works. The best known (by a country mile) is the Carol Symphony, from 1927, but there’s also an irresistible setting of Old Mother Hubbard “in the style of Handel”, which amusingly skewers the absurdities of baroque vocal style; and two shorter works, the Overture to a Pantomime and The Young Idea. Both have recently been recorded. They all show superb craftsmanship, a masterly ear for orchestral colour and a warm, thoroughly engaging sense of musical humour. They’d all merit an outing in the concert hall.

But the Carol Symphony has never quite left the repertoire (the most recent Birmingham performance was in December 2000). Far more than a mere seasonal medley, it’s actually a lovely and very English folk-song sinfonietta in four movements, in the spirit of Moeran, Vaughan Williams and John Ireland.

It’s packed with good things: the bustling mock-baroque figuration of the first movement (a sort of chorale-prelude on O Come All Ye Faithful), the jazzy, Walton-esque verve of the scherzo (God Rest Ye Merry); splashes of Handel, Elgar, and polytonal Stravinsky; the way Here We Come A-Wassailing trips in on the woodwind as the fugal finale bounds towards its grand, horn-trilling finish. And above all, that slow movement, in which Hely-Hutchinson sets the Coventry Carol to bleak, frozen harmonies that anticipate Vaughan Williams’ Sixth – and then, with dancing harp, muted strings and finally full orchestra, lightens our darkness with the gentlest and most enchanting setting ever made of The First Nowell.

A Box of Delights, indeed. Whatever else we remember him for, in the Carol Symphony Victor Hely-Hutchinson gave us something very special, and enduringly beautiful. Hely-Hutchinson’s CBO colleague and friend Gerald Forty, once more:

The Carol Symphony has become a standard Christmas piece for the City Orchestra: may it long continue to figure in those programmes as a reminder of the well-loved man to whom the City of Birmingham Orchestra and the Birmingham musical public owes so much.


Any copyrighted material is included as “fair use” for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Amati Magazine: Essential Reads

14 Thursday May 2015

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

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Amati Magazine, Birmingham Town Hall, Jessica Duchen, Raphael Wallfisch

My colleague and greatest living Korngold fan Jessica Duchen took over editorship of The Amati Magazine earlier this year, and has quickly turned it into one of the must-read classical music blogs – which will come as no surprise to anyone who follows her own long-running music blog. Anyway, I was incredibly flattered to be asked to contribute, and delighted that Jessica was willing to indulge me with a project I’ve been keen to undertake for years – a series of articles about my favourite classical music reference books. Three have appeared so far – Cobbett’s Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music (crazy name, crazy book); The Well-Tempered String Quartet (if you’re an amateur quartetter yourself you’ll know it, if not…well, my thoughts are here) and the Pelican Guide to Chamber Music.

Have a look, and while you’re there, have a browse around – The Amati Magazine is full of good things these days. Jessica’s typically insightful and engaging interview with Raphael Wallfisch gave me quite a few nice talking points when I interviewed Raphael prior to the Orchestra of the Swan’s concert at Birmingham Town Hall yesterday.

Victor Hely-Hutchinson’s Box of Delights

22 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

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Tags

Birmingham Town Hall, Carol Symphony, CBSO, Christmas, Leslie Heward, Victor Hely-Hutchinson, Wolverhampton

So here it is, Merry Christmas, and we have it on unimpeachable authority that everybody is having fun. Forgive me: I lived in Wolverhampton for eight years (well, it was good enough for Percy Young) and Noddy Holder is like a god there.

I’m not the world’s greatest fan of seasonal pop music. But I am, however, a fan of Victor Hely-Hutchinson’s A Carol Symphony – a work with a deep connection to the English Midlands, and not just through its association with successive dramatisations of The Box of Delights. Here’s a blogpost I wrote in 2009 about the music and its (largely forgotten) composer. When it was first published I was delighted to receive a charming and kindly email from the composer’s then-78 year old son Christopher, who was living in Ludlow. Hopefully he still is. Happy Christmas!


Hely-Hutchinson

Victor Hely-Hutchinson (1901-1947)

When I was 11, my younger sister and I were both captivated by the BBC’s TV adaptation of John Masefield’s The Box of Delights. She liked the fantastic story, and the Christmassy atmosphere; I liked the steam trains. But one thing that we both loved, and which seemed to capture the whole wintry magic of the thing, was the signature tune – which we could tell, even then, was “proper” music, not just a typical children’s TV theme (this being the early 1980s, the lack of synthesizers was the giveaway). Here’s that title sequence in full (warning, unseasonably noisy Youtube advert may play first!).

I asked my father if he knew what it was – not realising that a pre-war radio dramatisation of The Box of Delights, with the same music, had become a seasonal classic for an earlier generation. Or that my father – at much the same age – had asked exactly the same question. He pulled out a Classics for Pleasure LP with a snowy landscape on the cover. The piece on it was called Carol Symphony, and the composer was Victor Hely-Hutchinson.

Carol Symphony cover 1

Sleeve art the way it used to be.

The record-sleeve told us that he’d been born on Boxing Day 1901, and had been Regional Director of Music for the BBC in Birmingham. It wasn’t very easy to find out much more back then, but it is now, and for the full story, there’s an excellent online biography by his son John. In short, Christian Victor Hely-Hutchinson was born in Cape Town, studied music with Charles Villiers Stanford and Donald Tovey, and at the age of 12 played a Mozart piano concerto with the LSO. In 1933 he landed the Birmingham job, and rapidly involved himself with every part of the city’s musical life – not least the 13-year old City of Birmingham Orchestra and its then music director Leslie Heward.

Hely-Hutchinson never held an official post with the CBO – but he was a tireless supporter of the Orchestra throughout the 1930s and 40s. The CBSO’s performance record-cards from that period are dotted with the initials VHH – indicating that he’d written the programme notes for a particular work. He gave pre-concert lectures (he took a doctorate in 1941, though he’d held the Chair of Music at Birmingham University since 1934). He appeared as piano soloist with the orchestra, notably in Mozart concertos, and in 1944 he performed his own rhapsody The Young Idea (intriguingly subtitled “cum grano salis”) with George Weldon conducting. It’s recently been recorded by Dutton.

And he did it all with consummate professionalism. The CBO’s manager Gerald Forty (of the piano-makers Dale, Forty) remembered that:

His quiet confidence was most reassuring. I see him in my mind’s eye, sitting at my desk. He knocks out a half-smoked pipe, his inseparable companion: fills it, lights it, takes a few puffs – finds it won’t draw – scrapes it out, refills it, wastes more matches – and so on da capo. While my ashtrays were being filled, his mind was concentrated on the matter at hand, and with a remarkable economy of words, he stated his views and recommended a solution.

Leslie Heward

Leslie Heward

But it was during wartime that Hely-Hutchinson gave his greatest service to the CBO. In early 1940, while working as a volunteer Air Raid Precaution warden, he performed (from memory!) a complete cycle of Beethoven Piano Sonatas at the Birmingham and Midland Institute – in aid of Orchestra funds. Meanwhile, he corresponded regularly with Leslie Heward, then recovering in Romsley Sanatorium from the TB which was to kill him just three years later. When Heward died in May 1943, Hely-Hutchinson rallied to the support of the CBO. As Forty recalled:

birminghamtownhall

Birmingham Town Hall in wartime. Hely-Hutchinson took part in ARP fire drills on the roof.

The problem of finding another conductor at short notice and of maintaining a full complement of players with War staring us in the face, was one of extreme perplexity; but Victor solved it by the apparently simple expedient of doing the entire job himself – including the compiling of programmes, rehearsing the orchestra (which he did anonymously and gratuitously for many years), conducting the concerts and dealing efficiently and decisively with the innumerable emergencies…

Hely Hutchinson was initially unconvinced by Heward’s successor, George Weldon, but with typical fair-mindedness was happy to revise his opinion after Weldon had settled into the post a year or so later:

“I want to tell you how right I think you were about George Weldon – and by the same token, I was wrong – eighteen months ago” he wrote to a colleague in June 1944. “As a pure musician, I cannot think him the equal of Leslie, but then, practically nobody is, and some of George’s performances – notably of Mozart – made me feel that he has the root of the matter in him”.

The following year, Hely-Hutchinson was offered the post of Director of Music for the BBC in London, and swapped his home near Droitwich for one in St John’s Wood. But he remained a familiar face in Birmingham music, and there was genuine shock in the city in March 1947 when the news arrived that he had died of pneumonia, aged just 45. The CBO paid its own tribute three weeks later, when Weldon conducted the first performance of Hely-Hutchinson’s recently-completed Symphony for Small Orchestra. (The concert was broadcast, and an incomplete recording survives in the CBSO archive).

Somehow, in this short but full musical life, Hely-Hutchinson found time to compose around 150 original works. The best known (by a country mile) is the Carol Symphony, from 1927, but there’s also an irresistible setting of Old Mother Hubbard “in the style of Handel”, which amusingly skewers the absurdities of baroque vocal style; and two shorter works, the Overture to a Pantomime and The Young Idea. Both have recently been recorded. They all show superb craftsmanship, a masterly ear for orchestral colour and a warm, thoroughly engaging sense of musical humour. They’d all merit an outing in the concert hall.

But the Carol Symphony has never quite left the repertoire (the most recent Birmingham performance was in December 2000). Far more than a mere seasonal medley, it’s actually a lovely and very English folk-song sinfonietta in four movements, in the spirit of Moeran, Vaughan Williams and John Ireland.

It’s packed with good things: the bustling mock-baroque figuration of the first movement (a sort of chorale-prelude on O Come All Ye Faithful), the jazzy, Walton-esque verve of the scherzo (God Rest Ye Merry); splashes of Handel, Elgar, and polytonal Stravinsky; the way Here We Come A-Wassailing trips in on the woodwind as the fugal finale bounds towards its grand, horn-trilling finish. And above all, that slow movement, in which Hely-Hutchinson sets the Coventry Carol to bleak, frozen harmonies that anticipate Vaughan Williams’ Sixth – and then, with dancing harp, muted strings and finally full orchestra, lightens our darkness with the gentlest and most enchanting setting ever made of The First Nowell.

A Box of Delights, indeed. Whatever else we remember him for, in the Carol Symphony Victor Hely-Hutchinson gave us something very special, and enduringly beautiful. Hely-Hutchinson’s CBO colleague and friend Gerald Forty, once more:

The Carol Symphony has become a standard Christmas piece for the City Orchestra: may it long continue to figure in those programmes as a reminder of the well-loved man to whom the City of Birmingham Orchestra and the Birmingham musical public owes so much.


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Christopher Hogwood and Handel’s “Flavio”

26 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

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Academy of Ancient Music, Birmingham Town Hall, Christopher Hogwood, Handel, Metro

It’s still hard to credit that Christopher Hogwood is no longer with us – for anyone of my generation, he’d been at the front of the Historically Informed Performance movement for as long as we’d even known about it. I still recall, as a teenager, borrowing his L’Oiseau-Lyre box-set of Mozart symphonies with the Academy of Ancient Music from West Kirby library and being outraged at what I heard (there’s nothing more conservative than a 17-year old).

Years later, he directed concert performances of three major Handel operas with the AAM over three years in Birmingham – an experience that, with encouragement from Annette, would launch me on an ongoing exploration of a genre I still (if I’m honest) find problematic. Shortly after Flavio we booked our first trip to Drottningholm. Meanwhile, in April 2008, I’d interviewed Christopher Hogwood for Metro, and found a warmth, a charm and an enthusiasm strong enough to persuade any sceptic. Here’s the article:


Birmingham Town Hall has heard a lot of Handel. The Victorians couldn’t get enough of his oratorios, and Ex Cathedra’s recent performance of Messiah is just the latest in a line that stretches back to the Hall’s opening in 1834 – and beyond. Indeed, if the city fathers who designed the Hall had any particular vision in mind, it was surely a temple to the cult of old Georg Frideric. But still, it’s unlikely to have heard anything quite like this – as the Academy of Ancient Music, seven singers and the conductor, harpsichordist and Handel biographer Christopher Hogwood take the stage for a full concert performance of Handel’s sumptuous 1723 opera seria Flavio, Re De’ Longobardi.

“Handel was a great opera writer – the theatre was his first and greatest love” explains Hogwood. “The Academy of Ancient Music was looking for a project to span the three years prior to Handel’s anniversary in 2009, and I wanted to do something coherent – all my career, I’ve been working to try and bring some coherence to our picture of Handel. So we’re performing three Handel operas over the three years. Last year we did a very early Handel opera, Amadigi; next year we’re doing one of his very last, Arianna, and this year we’re doing one from his middle-period”.

But there’s rather more to the choice than that. To the majority of music lovers, who know Handel for Messiah, the Water Music and the ITV Champions League theme tune, it can come as a surprise to realise that he wrote over 40 operas. With a field this wide, Hogwood made his choice with a view to its impact.

“Flavio has a large cast, and quite an amusing subplot – there’s a surprising amount of light comedy, as well as all the usual high dynastic politics that you get in opera seria. It’s dramatic – one of the characters actually dies on stage, which is exceedingly rare in baroque opera. And there’s a running storyline about the difficulty of governing Britain. Handel’s London audiences would have enjoyed that, and I think ours will too”.

That’s important when you’re trying to revive a work that’s barely been staged in 285 years. The very fact of Flavio’s neglect is a reminder of an inconvenient truth about baroque opera seria. Its reputation for stilted classical plots, high-flown emotion and flashy but superficial singing has proved a hard one to shake – and for Hogwood, the popularity of Handel’s oratorios is partly to blame.

“This idea that the operas are statuesque and undramatic is a misconception created by opera companies who’ve tried to stage the oratorios as if they were operas. They don’t work – you just end up with a chorus of 50 on stage and nowhere to go. Handel’s oratorios are a completely different conception from his operas. He understood the theatre; his operatic music reflects that. And a lot of modern directors who do stage the operas don’t really trust Handel’s music, it seems to me. So they fill the stage with guns, helicopters and nudity. But it’s not TV opera – it has to have a certain studied formality. And it needs great singers”.

No problem on that front, with a cast that includes Iestyn Davies and Robin Blaze. “We haven’t got costumes and sets” says Hogwood “but we’ll certainly have action; people walking on and off, enough to show that these are characters in a drama. That spares us the hypodermic syringes and helicopters – which to me is an improvement. It’s less expensive too!”

And his advice to beat those other misconceptions? “Read the words! You have to know what they’re singing about – there are moment-by-moment changes of mood and emotion. And be ready to rise to some really big themes: themes of honesty, loyalty, power and love.” Big themes, powerful drama and great music…maybe it’s time,once again, to rediscover a Handel we’ve all forgotten.

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