London Symphony Orchestra
The London Symphony Orchestra is a British ensemble based in London. Founded in 1904, the LSO is the oldest of London's symphony orchestras. It was created by a group of players who left Henry Wood's Queen's Hall Orchestra because of a new rule requiring players to give the orchestra their exclusive services. The LSO itself later introduced a similar rule for its members. From the outset the LSO was organised on co-operative lines, with all players sharing the profits at the end of each season. This practice continued for the orchestra's first four decades.
The LSO underwent periods of eclipse in the 1930s and 1950s when it was regarded as inferior in quality to new London orchestras, to which it lost players and bookings: the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1930s and the Philharmonia and Royal Philharmonic after the Second World War. The profit-sharing principle was abandoned in the post-war era as a condition of receiving public subsidy for the first time. In the 1950s the orchestra debated whether to concentrate on film work at the expense of symphony concerts; many senior players left when the majority of players rejected the idea.
By the 1960s the LSO had recovered its leading position, which it has retained subsequently. In 1966, to perform alongside it in choral works, the orchestra established the LSO Chorus, originally a mix of professional and amateur singers, later a wholly amateur ensemble.
As a self-governing body, the orchestra selects the conductors with whom it works. At some stages in its history it has dispensed with a principal conductor and worked only with guests. Among conductors with whom it is most associated are, in its early days, Hans Richter, Sir Edward Elgar, and Sir Thomas Beecham, and in more recent decades Pierre Monteux, André Previn, Claudio Abbado, Sir Colin Davis, Valery Gergiev and Sir Simon Rattle. Its current music director is Sir Antonio Pappano.
Since 1982 the LSO has been based in the Barbican Centre in the City of London. Among its programmes there have been large-scale festivals celebrating composers as diverse as Berlioz, Mahler and Leonard Bernstein. The LSO claims to be the world's most recorded orchestra; it has made gramophone recordings since 1912 and has played on more than 200 soundtrack recordings for the cinema, of which the best known include the Star Wars series.
History
Background
At the turn of the twentieth century London did not have permanent salaried orchestras. The main music venues: Covent Garden, the Philharmonic Society and the Queen's Hall had their players engaged for the concert or season.At the time it was also an accepted practice for players to break their contracts for better-paid engagements, and then engage another player to deputise at the concert. The treasurer of the Philharmonic Society, John Mewburn Levien, described the system thus: "A, whom you want, signs to play at your concert. He sends B to the first rehearsal. B, without your knowledge or consent, sends C to the second rehearsal. Not being able to play at the concert, C sends D, whom you would have paid five shillings to stay away."
In 1904 the manager of the Queen's Hall, Robert Newman and the conductor of his promenade concerts, Henry Wood, agreed that they could no longer tolerate the deputy system. After a rehearsal in which Wood was faced with dozens of unfamiliar faces in his own orchestra, Newman came to the platform and announced: "Gentlemen, in future there will be no deputies! Good morning!" This caused a furore. Orchestral musicians were not highly paid, and removing their chances of better-paid engagements permitted by the deputy system was a serious financial blow to many of them. While travelling by train to play under Wood at a music festival in the north of England in May 1904, soon after Newman's announcement, some of his leading players discussed the situation and agreed to try to form their own orchestra. The principal movers were three horn players and a trumpeter, John Solomon.
Foundation
Busby organised a meeting at St Andrew's Hall, not far from the Queen's Hall. Invitations were sent to members of the Queen's Hall Orchestra. About a hundred players attended. Busby explained the scheme – a new ensemble, the London Symphony Orchestra, to be run on co-operative lines, "something akin to a Musical Republic" with a constitution that gave the organisation independence. At concerts promoted by the LSO, the members worked without fee, their remuneration coming at the end of each season in a sharing of the orchestra's profits. A management committee was elected, comprising the four original founders and Alfred Hobday, and E. F James. Busby was appointed chief executive, a post variously titled "Secretary", "managing director", "general secretary" and "general manager" over the years.Borsdorf was a player of international reputation, and through his influence, the orchestra secured Hans Richter to conduct its first concert. Newman held no grudge against the rebels and made the Queen's Hall available to them. He and Wood attended the LSO's first concert, on 9 June 1904. The programme consisted of the prelude to Die Meistersinger, music by Bach, Mozart, Elgar and Liszt, and finally Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. In a favourable review in The Times, J. A. Fuller Maitland noted that 49 members of the new orchestra were rebels against Newman's no-deputy rule, 32 had left the Queen's Hall Orchestra earlier, and the other 21 had no connection with Wood and Newman. In a profile of the orchestra in 1911, The Musical Times said:
Early years
The orchestra made its first British tour in 1905, conducted by Sir Edward Elgar. Elgar's conducting was highly praised; as to the orchestra, Ernest Newman wrote in The Manchester Guardian, "Its brass and its wood-wind were seen to be of exceptional quality, but the strings, fine as they are, have not the substance nor the colour of the Hallé strings." The following year the LSO played outside Britain for the first time, giving concerts in Paris, conducted by Édouard Colonne, Sir Charles Stanford and André Messager. Richard Morrison, in his centenary study of the LSO, writes of "stodgy programmes of insipid Cowen, worthy Stanford, dull Parry and mediocre Mackenzie".In its early years Richter was the LSO's most frequently engaged conductor, with four or five concerts every season; the orchestra's website and Morrison's 2004 book both count him as the orchestra's first chief conductor, though the 1911 Musical Times article indicates otherwise. Richter retired from conducting in 1911, and Elgar was elected conductor-in-chief for the 1911–12 season. Elgar conducted six concerts, Arthur Nikisch three, and Willem Mengelberg, Fritz Steinbach and Gustave Doret one each. As a conductor Elgar did not prove to be a big enough box-office draw, and after one season he was replaced by the charismatic Hungarian maestro Nikisch.
Nikisch was invited to tour North America in 1912, and despite his long association with the Berlin Philharmonic and Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, he insisted that the LSO should be contracted for the tour. The orchestra, 100-strong, was booked to sail on the Titanic, but the tour schedule was changed at the last minute, and the players sailed safely on the Baltic. The tour was arduous, but a triumph. The New York Press said, "The great British band played with a vigor, force and temperamental impetuousness that almost lifted the listener out of his seat." The New York Times praised all departments of the orchestra, though, like The Manchester Guardian, it found the strings "brilliant rather than mellow". The paper had a little fun at the LSO's expense: from the viewpoint of a country that had long enjoyed permanent, salaried orchestras such as the Boston Symphony, it gently mocked the LSO's "bold stand for the sacred right of sending substitutes"
First World War and 1920s
Shortly after the beginning of the war the board of the orchestra received a petition from rank and file players protesting about Borsdorf's continued membership of the LSO. Although he had done as much as anyone to found the orchestra, had lived in Britain for 30 years and was married to an Englishwoman, Borsdorf was regarded by some colleagues as an enemy alien and was forced out of the orchestra.During the war the musical life of Britain was drastically curtailed. The LSO was helped to survive by large donations from Sir Thomas Beecham, who also subsidised the Hallé and the Royal Philharmonic Society. For a year he took the role, though not the title, of chief conductor of the LSO. In 1916 his millionaire father died and Beecham's financial affairs became too complicated for any further musical philanthropy on his part. In 1917 the LSO's directors agreed unanimously that they would promote no more concerts until the end of the war. The orchestra played for other managements, and managed to survive, although the hitherto remunerative work for regional choral societies dwindled to almost nothing.
When peace resumed many of the former players were unavailable. A third of the orchestra's pre-war members were in the armed forces, and rebuilding was urgently needed. The orchestra was willing to allow the ambitious conductor Albert Coates to put himself forward as chief conductor. Coates had three attractions for the orchestra: he was a pupil of Nikisch, he had rich and influential contacts, and he was willing to conduct without fee. He and the orchestra got off to a disastrous start. Their first concert featured the premiere of Elgar's Cello Concerto. Apart from the concerto, which the composer conducted, the rest of the programme was conducted by Coates, who overran his rehearsal time at the expense of Elgar's. Lady Elgar wrote, "that brutal selfish ill-mannered bounder ... that brute Coates went on rehearsing." In The Observer Newman wrote, "There have been rumours about during the week of inadequate rehearsal. Whatever the explanation, the sad fact remains that never, in all probability, has so great an orchestra made so lamentable an exhibition of itself." Coates remained as chief conductor for two seasons, and after the initial debacle is credited by Morrison with "breathing life and energy into the orchestra".
After Coates left, the orchestra reverted to its preferred practice of engaging numerous guest conductors rather than a single principal conductor. Among the guests were Elgar, Beecham, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Wilhelm Furtwängler and Serge Koussevitzky; soloists in the 1920s included Sergei Rachmaninoff, Artur Schnabel and the young Yehudi Menuhin. Revenues were substantial, and the orchestra seemed to many to be entering into a golden age. In fact, for lack of any serious competition in the 1920s, the LSO allowed its standards of playing to slip. In 1927 the Berlin Philharmonic, under Furtwängler, gave two concerts at the Queen's Hall. These, and later concerts by the same orchestra in 1928 and 1929, made obvious the poor standards then prevailing in London. Both the BBC and Beecham had ambitions to bring London's orchestral standards up to those of Berlin. After an early attempt at co-operation between the BBC and Beecham, they went their separate ways. In 1929 the BBC began recruiting for the new BBC Symphony Orchestra under Adrian Boult. The prospect of joining a permanent, salaried orchestra was attractive enough to induce some LSO players to defect. The new orchestra immediately received enthusiastic reviews that contrasted starkly with the severe press criticisms of the LSO's playing. According to the critic W. J. Turner the LSO's problem was not that its playing had deteriorated, but that it had failed to keep up with the considerable improvements in playing achieved over the past two decades by the best European and American orchestras.