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Richard Bratby

~ Classical music writer, critic and consultant

Richard Bratby

Tag Archives: Forward

Potting history

30 Wednesday Oct 2019

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Birmingham, CBSO, Forward, George Weldon, Research, Ruth Gipps

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An unconventional guide to the CBSO’s 1949 season – commissioned by Ruth Gipps and published in “Play On”, the orchestra’s short-lived first in-house magazine.

Forward: 100 Years of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is published by Elliott & Thompson on 29 November 2019, and is available from the CBSO website from 14 November 2019. I will be signing copies at the CBSO concert at Symphony Hall on Saturday 23 November.

A few weeks ago I wrote a short article about the writing process for the CBSO’s in-house magazine, Music Stand. Here it is:


It’s January 2018. Stephen Maddock and Abby Corfan have just asked me to write a new centenary history of the CBSO, to be published in November 2019. And I’m sitting there in Starbucks at Symphony Hall: flattered, of course. Excited, obviously. But also, if I’m honest, feeling a little bit like I’ve just been asked to level Barr Beacon with a teaspoon.

I mean, where to start? There’s already one excellent history of the CBSO. Crescendo!, by Beresford King-Smith, was published in 1995 and it’s a tour-de-force – unsurprisingly, since Beresford was on the CBSO staff for more than half of the orchestra’s entire history, and also created (and for many years curated) the CBSO’s archive. I’d be drawing heavily on his work whatever I did, so I headed over to Sutton Coldfield for a chat. Generous as always, Beresford gave his blessing, and encouraged me to use many of the terrific unpublished anecdotes that never made it into the final version of Crescendo!

Still, the question remained: what could a new book bring to the party? Obviously, I’d need to chronicle the 25 years (a quarter of the CBSO’s existence) that have elapsed since Crescendo! appeared. As a staff member from 1998 to 2015, I’d witnessed many of those years at first hand, but if there’s one thing that a History degree teaches you, it’s that personal memories are unreliable things. Eleven months isn’t a long time to research and write a book, so I began by scheduling interviews with as representative a selection of long-serving CBSO veterans as time and travel allowed.

I was thrilled that each of our living music directors (Simon, Sakari, Andris and Mirga) made time to talk to me – and startled by how candid they were. Former Chief Exec Ed Smith plied me with excellent wine at his London club; Sheila Clarke didn’t hold back (I’d hoped she wouldn’t); Mike Seal spilled the beans on the CBSO football team, and of course Stan Smith – the 96-year old father of our CBSO “family”, who played in the first violins from the 1950s through to the Rattle era – had some irreplaceable memories to share. Hearing about the premiere of Britten’s War Requiem from someone who actually played in it isn’t so much a perk of the job as an unforgettable privilege.

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But as I dug back beyond living memory, the archives took over – and that’s where it got really intriguing. I was too late to talk to Louis Frémaux (even if he’d been willing), but a personal statement, enbargoed during his lifetime, means that for the first time we’re able to read his side of the controversy that led to his sudden resignation in March 1978. Further back, through the music directorships of Hugo Rignold and Andrzej Panufnik, the Holocaust survivor Rudolf Schwarz and the former racing driver George Weldon; well, the more I rooted around, the more vividly they sprang to life. And then on past Leslie Heward (I’d love to have heard him conduct live) and a youthful Adrian Boult, to 1920 and the orchestra’s founder, the brilliant but clearly maddening Appleby Matthews.

I wanted to tell this story in full colour. When I was duty manager at CBSO Centre, I loved chatting to audience members about the orchestra, and I’ve tried to recreate the pleasure of those conversations – to put together a proper 100th birthday present for our audience, a lively and entertaining narrative with no specialist knowledge required. Along the way, we’ve aimed to share as many treasures from the archive as possible. Picking out the illustrations (there are over 120, many unseen for decades) has been huge fun (Maria Howes, of the marketing team, has a real eye for a quirky visual). Stephen was also anxious for me to explore some of the bigger themes of the CBSO’s first century: there are chapters devoted to touring, recording, new music and the Chorus. Much of the established history of UK orchestras is, in reality, merely the story of London orchestras. In the areas of public funding, education work and opportunities for women, Birmingham was decades ahead of the field.

So when I’ve encountered someone particularly interesting, I’ve paused to enjoy their company. Orchestras attract outsize personalities, and the CBSO story is full of them, from founding father Granville Bantock and his homicidal parakeet Scheherazade, to second oboe Ruth Gipps, who’s only now starting to receive her due as a major post-war composer. I’ve tried to let the audience have its say too – remembering always that this is Birmingham’s orchestra, rooted in its city, and growing and changing with it. Who’s to say that a concert in Vienna’s Musikverein touched more lives than one at Saltley Coliseum – or whether Elgar got a bigger ovation than AR Rahman? (spoiler alert: he didn’t). There are so many tales to tell that we’ll never run out of new perspectives. I’ve chosen the ones that I enjoyed the most; and I really hope that you enjoy them too.

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Andris Nelsons, Birmingham, CBSO, Forward, Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, Sakari Oramo, Simon Rattle

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Forward: 100 Years of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is published by Elliott and Thompson on 29 November 2019, and is available from the CBSO website on 14 November 2019.

It’s been a while since I wrote here, and the only real excuse I can offer is that in January 2018 I was commissioned by Stephen Maddock and Abby Corfan of the CBSO to write a new illustrated history of the orchestra to celebrate its centenary in 2020. It was a thrilling commission to receive, but also an overwhelming one. With a copy deadline of Christmas 2018 – and no relaxation in my usual working schedule – that meant devoting almost all of my free time in 2018 to research in the CBSO Archive, reading some 61 books on the general subject, conducting interviews with over 30 living witnesses of the CBSO story (including Sir Simon Rattle, Andris Nelsons, Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, Sakari Oramo and Simon Halsey), and then untangling various (often conflicting) narratives to write the story – trying all the while to make it both historically rigorous and an entertaining read. The aim was to create a sort of ‘100th birthday gift’ from the CBSO to its supporters: something that they could genuinely enjoy.

And then, after submitting the manuscript, there was almost as much work to be done again: proofreading, rewriting and discussing the design with my brilliantly sympathetic and patient editor Olivia at Elliott and Thompson; then seeking out around 100 historical images and obtaining the necessary legal permissions – a task in which I was helped, with enormous patience, imagination and enthusiasm, by my old CBSO colleague Maria Howes. The CBSO Archive is full of rarely-seen treasures; the aim was to get a few of them out there for people to enjoy. This sort of thing, for example:

Harold Gray grimace

CBSO associate conductor Harold Gray rehearses a group of management and music staff in Haydn’s ‘Toy Symphony’ some time in the 1970s – percussionist Annie Oakley (left) assists.

You wouldn’t imagine how much legwork is involved – even obtaining the necessary permissions for the cover image, Concerto by Alexander Walker, took us about two months of research. Who owns the intellectual property of a deceased Catholic monk, who had taken a vow of poverty? This was exactly the sort of thing I didn’t expect to learn when I started out on this project, and which kept me, Maria, Abby, and Olivia and her team busy right through until the end of last month (Even the index required weeks of work). Whereupon we all breathed an enormous sigh of relief and I, for one, cleared off on holiday to look at more Austro-Hungarian relics in Transylvania.

 

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Even the title took some thought and a few drafts. Forward is the motto of the City of Birmingham, and the book is about the city as much as its orchestra. The two cannot be separated and both share the same ambitious, forward-looking, sometimes impatient outlook – a subject that I’ve written on before now.

Anyway, it’s with the printers now – and rather to my surprise I feel distinctly nervous. It feels a bit like waiting to go onstage; there’s already been some press and part of me is terrified to see what glitches and howlers we missed (there are always some), just as an equal, if quieter, part of me is excited to see how people react. Above all, I hope that readers enjoy it, and that it deepens their enjoyment of and appreciation of the CBSO. It’s on sale from the CBSO website from 14 November and from Amazon and all good real-world bookstores from 28 November 2019. I may well be talking about it again…

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