A grey November morning, 9.30am. Inside the Barbican Hall, on a wide wooden
platform, dozens of musicians gather. The air fills with an extraordinary
sonic anarchy — a hundred or more instruments being warmed up, coaxed back
into life; a thousand pieces of vital orchestral gossip being exchanged. Two
days ago those instruments and their owners were playing Russian music in
Japan. Next week they will be playing French music in Italy. But today they
are at home, and Mahler’s Sixth, an Everest of a symphony, looms. It is the
unsurpassable frisson of playing massive scores such as this in packed halls
that binds people to one of the most pressurised and insecure professions on
earth.
From the middle of this chattering crowd, virtually invisible between the
gleaming ranks of brass and the sea of strings, an oboist sounds an A. This
is not just a note to tune to, it is a signal that calls the vast assembly
to order. It marks the moment when a hundred individuals prepare to meld
into a single entity. The faces on the platform may change. The surroundings
shift constantly. But this precise ritual has been repeated four, five or
even six hundred times a year for the past hundred years. It means one
thing: the London Symphony Orchestra has arrived for work.
But today there is an unexpected frisson. Where is the maestro? Clive
Gillinson, the orchestra’s managing director, wanders into the hall looking
mildly perturbed. “He’s never late,” he mutters. Phone calls are made to the
hotel of the absent maestro, the revered Latvian conductor Mariss Jansons.
Nothing, however, ruffles the LSO’s leader, Gordan Nikolitch, and his
invariable platform partner, Lennox Mackenzie. They have been in the
profession too long to allow a little unscheduled delay to bother them. They
stretch their legs out languidly towards the podium, casually skim through
awkward passages from the massive first-violin part that lies open before
them, and swap Serbo-Scottish jokes — sometimes all at the same time.
A sudden commotion at the front of the platform. The maestro has arrived, only
a couple of minutes late, after all. He isn’t happy with his life. “I cannot
sleep, last night, no night,” he says. Jansons, who was born in Riga and
grew up in St Petersburg, speaks English with a fervour that more than
compensates for any grammatical shortcomings. “Eight days since I cross
Atlantic, and still the jet lag. Thank God the symphony wakes me up.”
It wakes everyone up. The LSO loves Jansons, his passionate interpretations,
his vitality and professionalism. “He’s a real musician,” Mackenzie says. An
outsider would imagine that everyone who conducted a great orchestra was a
real musician. Orchestral players know differently. Jansons once had a
massive heart attack while conducting. His doctors constantly urge him not
to exert himself unduly on the podium. There is no chance that he will obey
this injunction — not while he is conducting Mahler Six, anyway. Not even in
a rehearsal on a wet Tuesday morning.
The symphony’s great opening march begins: a colossal emotional journey. The
orchestra hasn’t played it for a couple of seasons, yet it sounds stunning.
Jansons lets it run for 15 minutes or so. Eventually he stops the music and,
in a remarkable demonstration of musical recall, lists everything in the
previous quarter of an hour that has not been to his liking. “You are
repeating bows? Two before eight? I would like it not! Please!”
His remarks create ripples that spread through the ranks of strings. The best
string sections are so closely knit, so unanimous in attack and timbre, that
to an outsider it seems as if telepathy binds them together. The saying goes
that a string player has to keep one eye on the notes, one eye on the
conductor and one eye on his section leader. Most of this apparent
telepathy, however, is the result of hard graft in rehearsal, hour after
hour, day after day. As Jansons speaks, every desk of string players adds
his instructions to the hundreds of “down” and “up” signs scattered through
their parts.
But the strings are not currently Jansons’s major concern. Something else —
much more mundane, yet crucial — troubles him. “The cowbells!” he cries
plaintively. “I don’t hear them. They are here?” The cowbell player is
summoned from his offstage post. Jansons asks him to play the offending
passage by himself, while an assistant opens and closes the door to give the
illusion of a crescendo and diminuendo. The conductor isn’t satisfied.
“Please, again.” Still not right. The orchestra is intrigued and amused by
this jangling interlude. When the cowbells are rehearsed for the third time,
some wits in the brass section start making mooing noises. Jansons shushes
them, but grins at the same time. Conductors don’t get very far with the LSO
if they don’t develop a keen appreciation of English schoolboy humour.
This time the cowbell virtuoso excels himself. The strings tap their bows on
their musical stands — perhaps in mock appreciation of his artistry, perhaps
out of genuine empathy with a fellow player under pressure. Everyone on this
platform knows about pressure. Every orchestral player has his or her
symphonic bête noire — the piece with the tricky, exposed passage that is
the stuff of nightmares.
The music has now reached an apocalyptic climax. Searing through it all comes
an unmistakable sound: a clarion call so brazen, so thrilling that it
proclaims its creator as surely as a signature on an artist’s canvas.
Maurice Murphy has occupied the hottest seat in British brass — principal
trumpet with the LSO — for 27 years. He is supposed to have retired, twice.
Not a chance. Every orchestra needs its talisman, an embodiment of its
collective voice and character. For more than a quarter of a century —
whether launching Mahler Five with a fanfare that seems to summon the dead,
or soaring over the credits of Star Wars — Murphy has been the LSO’s
calling card.
“In my job,” he says, “you’re either scared to death or bored to death.” It is
a great remark, but, in his case, manifestly untrue. He has been playing the
trumpet for 61 of his 67 years, and seems simply indestructible. More than
that, however, his career is one of the great rags-to-riches stories in
orchestral music. He left school at 15, not to go to some grand
conservatoire but to work as an office boy with the National Coal Board. He
joined a succession of increasingly distinguished brass bands in the North
of England, while earning spare cash as a freelance trumpeter. It is said
that Yorkshire choral societies used to stagger the times of their Christmas
Messiahs so that Murphy could play The Trumpet Shall Sound in all of
them.
Only in 1976, after 15 years in the comparatively humble BBC Northern
Orchestra, did the LSO lure him to London. His impact was immediate and
dramatic. To see that ruddy face peering out from the middle of the brass
section is to be assured of a rollercoaster ride. Colin Davis, the LSO’s
principal conductor, likes to recount how the orchestra was struggling
through Sibelius’s Second Symphony at the end of an exhausting Russian tour.
“What we desperately needed, with the orchestra and myself so tired, was a
lift from somewhere,” he says. “I looked at Maurice. He gave me this big
smile, picked up the LSO and made me a present of it.”
The orchestra has reached the third movement now. Jansons starts it four
times. He isn’t satisfied that the players have caught the malice and
sarcasm of the piece. When his English fails him, he stamps his foot and
makes growling noises. One rubato catches a clarinettist out. As the other
players hold back — responding with mercurial reflexes to Jansons’s tiny
hand movement — the errant note pops out with comical clarity. Everyone
giggles. The clarinettist lifts a hand in apology. He won’t make the same
mistake again. That is how a great orchestra works.
Jansons ends the rehearsal a courteous five minutes before its scheduled
conclusion. Conductor and orchestra will resume this intensive process —
polishing, refining, digging deeper and deeper for meaning — in just 35
minutes. The next morning they will add finishing touches. Then the
accumulated debris of rehearsal will vanish from the platform, the male
players will clamber into their penguin-like costumes, the audience will
gather in the Barbican’s angular foyers and a buzz of expectation will fill
the air.
Orchestral players often seem embarrassed at their collective power to inspire
profound emotions, usually dismissing it with a shrug or a joke. Yet the
evidence must confront them every time they perform. “A friend of mine came
to one of our concerts the other day,” says Christine Pendrill, the LSO’s
cor anglais player since 1986. “I told him I didn’t think he would like it.
The first half was very modern and then it was Mahler Nine. His idea of
classical music is Spanish Eyes. Anyway, afterwards he was ecstatic.
“That was brilliant,” he said. “It makes you realise how useless your stereo
is.”
From Orchestra: The LSO: A Century of Triumphs and Turbulence, by
Richard Morrison (Faber and Faber), £20. Offer, £16 plus p&p
(0870 160 8080)
