An Early Introduction to the Joy of Orchestras

During my schooldays in East Sussex, schools in the county, schools outside the county boroughs, other than private fee-paying schools, were run by, or at least financed by and overseen by, the Education Committee of East Sussex County Council. Instrumental music tuition was provided by peripatetic music teachers employed by the East Sussex Music School (the forerunner of what is now called the East Sussex Music Service). In primary school, when I was seven years old, forms were given out to be filled in and returned by the parents of any children wishing to avail of piano and violin lessons. So I started learning the piano aged seven. It was agreed that if I made sufficient progress I could start learning the violin as well: accordingly I started learning the violin at the age of eight. I had the same teacher for both instruments from the time I started learning in primary school to the time that I matriculated at Cambridge University. She herself had studied piano with Harold Craxton and viola with Lionel Tertis, and had played in the BBC Symphony Orchestra for many years, in particular during the period when Sir Adrian Boult was its conductor, but had been required to leave the orchestra to care for her mother. She subsequently took up employment again as a peripatetic music teacher in the East Sussex Music School, and was often called upon to lead orchestras for many concerts, such as choral society concerts, within the county. She owned a grand piano which she had won as a prize in a piano competition.

I had probably reached Grade IV standard on the piano, and Grade III standard on the violin, by the time I reached the age of eleven, when I left primary school to be enrolled in the county grammar school at Bexhill.

A few months before the start of term, the grammar school organized an induction evening for incoming pupils. There was a general gathering in the school hall before we were divided up into small groups. I was then told that the school had a letter for me. It had been sent to the school by the East Sussex Music School in Lewes, and initially the grammar school could not work out for whom the letter was intended. Then one of the teachers apparently noticed that the name of the intended recipient matched that of one of the incoming pupils. The letter was an invitation to perform in the orchestra for a county arts festival to take place in the autumn of that year, the works to be performed being Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major, and the first two parts of Haydn's oratorio "The Creation". A truly fantastic introduction to orchestral playing!

There wan initial weekend residential course where the orchestra met for the first time to read through the works to be performed. This was held at the Stafford House Residential Further Education Centre, a council-run facility in Hassocks (on the boundary between the villages of Hassocks and Keymer), north of Brighton. A few years later, this part of the county was transferred to West Sussex in a local government reorganization. At its core was a big nineteenth century house to which had been added a modern extension with hall, kitchen, dining room and bedroom wing. In periods of free time, I often used to walk about a mile to the foot of the South Downs and then climb up the steep scarp slope, an ascent of over a hundred metres, to the crest of the South Downs. The entrance to the Clayton Tunnel on the London to Brighton railway line, with its fancy crenellations, was nearby. This residential course was but the first of several that brought me to this idyllic location.

So we gathered in the hall on the Friday evening to rehearse the Beethoven concerto. I was right at the back of the second violin section of the orchestra. The soloist was one of the senior piano students taught by the Music School, and the conductor, Nancy Plummer was, and remained for over a decade, a formidable director of the East Sussex Music School. That concerto has a special aura for me. I can still picture in my mind that Friday evening rehearsal, including specific memories of the passages in the last movement of the concerto as it was played there, together with visual impressions of the appearance of the second violin part. My father subsequently bought for me an LP recording of the first two Beethoven piano concertos, with Solomon as soloist, in addition to a two LP set of Haydn's creation, so that I could familiarize myself with the music between the initial residential course and the performance at the arts festival.

That concerto, Beethoven's First Piano Concerto, was to being even more memorable and significant for me when, aged around 16, I won the piano concerto class at the Hastings Music Festival (the East Sussex equivalent of Dublin's Feis Ceoil), playing the first movement of that concerto, with stiff competition from many of my peers who tended to win lots of classes in other years. (The second prizewinner gave an impressive performance of De Falla's "Nights in the Gardens of Spain".)

But of course the Beethoven piano concerto was not the only work we were required to rehearse and perform. We started rehearsals on the first two parts of Haydn's "The Creation" that we were to perform at the county arts festival. And, for much of it, I was completely out of my depth! I remember we read through the orchestral parts of the chorus "The Lord is Great" at full speed: fast semiquaver passages for the second violins well beyond my Grade III sight-reading abilities! Over the coming months, my violin teacher took me through the difficult passages during my weekly violin lessons at school. But, irrespective of whether I had the technique to perform the oratorio, I felt that I really got to know it inside out.

And the soloists were great! Years later Miss Plummer, the director of the East Sussex Music School, gave me more information regarding the tenor soloist, singing the part of Uriel. A farm manager had been told by his friends that he had such a good singing voice that, rather than making a career in farming, he ought to make a career as a professional musician. Accordingly he was referred on to Miss Plummer, who, after hearing him sing, made contact with the Guildhall School of Music and Drama to arrange for an audition. Accordingly the now former farm manager became a student at the Guildhall and, if I remember correctly what I was told, he was our soloist for the performance of Haydn's "The Creation" at the end of his first year of vocal tuition there. The name of this tenor soloist: Anthony Rolfe Johnson (1940 - 2010)

So, all in all, an amazing introduction to orchestral playing! One of the other young second violin players suggested to me that I ought to join the orchestra which rehearsed every Saturday morning during school terms at the headquarters of the East Sussex Music School in Watergate Lane, Lewes, which I did, playing with that orchestra continuously till the time I left school. Then, during the Easter school holidays, the Music School organized a residental course, lasting a week, and held at the teacher training college at Seaford, located at the eastern end of that seaside town, close to the sea, and very close to the start of the cliff walk to the top of Seaford Head. And, in addition to these orchestras, there was also the school orchestra, though of course its repertoire was somewhat less ambitious, most of the time. But even at school there were performances of musicals and operettas with orchestral parts that made significant demands on the performers.