Few, if any orchestra, are so unselfish in their playing as the London Philharmonic

... [achieving an] extraordinary harmonic whole ...

even in troubling times.

Diaries, chronicles, letters are the souls of ages. No music historian would be without the archives or programmes of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Wiener Philharmoniker or the New York Philharmonic, nor the seasons of London’s Philharmonic Society documented so exactly by Myles Birket Foster in 1912 – objective facts of history and music making going back to the beginnings of Classico-Romanticism. But such pages tell only a partial story. It’s the passion of private memory nuancing the moving pen, the response of eye and senses, the psychological twists of the moment, that enliven and colour decades, periods, centuries. Where would we be without William Mason’s Memories of a Musical Life or Felix Aprahamian’s diaries and writings (Felix who was the LPO’s concert director during the Second World War)? Muriel Draper’s Music at Midnight, the golden hours of a charmed life in Chelsea before the First World War, or Max Graf’s Composer and Critic, when the 1892 Viennese premiere of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, which he reviewed as a novice, was ‘news of the day’​?

Laurie Watt’s book is as much a personal memoir of times that were as a portrait of living intimately and professionally with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, ‘my other family’, for fifty years. Not, the author quickens to point out, ‘a formal history’ but one restricted ‘to those aspects of its life in which [he] became involved or even entwined’. Back in the seventies he cut a striking profile in London circles. An elegant Old Tonbridgian with a touch of the young Maurizio Pollini about him. Eminent solicitor, latterly Senior Counsel, with what was then Charles Russell & Co in Old Jewry, founded in 1891. Avid horn player, manning the ranks of the Kensington Philharmonic as and when time allowed. Devoted concert-goer. Cultured English gentleman from ages gone. Member of the Garrick. In his prefatory Welcome note, the Duke of Kent, Patron of the LPO, rightly says that for Laurie ‘music which he loves with a passion is his mistress ... much joy and affection [is] to be found in these pages [but also a] respect, deeply held, for all music-makers’. People, encounters and observations crowd the paragraphs. ‘There is nothing quite like the sound of a very large orchestra all playing very quietly – like subterranean tectonic shifting.’ Sitting in on LPO Decca sessions at Kingsway Hall. The Tchaikovsky symphonies produced by David Mottley with Rostropovich, Nick Busch, poet of the horn who ‘never “played safe”’, lyricising Russian lament. Solti’s Marriage of Figaro. Haitink’s Shostakovich, more electrifying in concert hall than studio. Tennstedt’s Mahler Resurrection – wonderfully special but for Laurie, ever the perceptive, discretely knowing, listening critic educated by score, informed from within, likewise to be surpassed by the concert experience. 

Urging us to re-discover the famed ‘live’ recording of Tennstedt’s landmark February 1989 London account, extraordinarily balanced, is indeed to confront a spiritual/physical traversal ‘defying any form of criticism’ - hallowed, shuddering, consuming, absolving, defining.

Music and remembrances, ‘fun’ hours and harsh realities, the tensions of desk and podium, graciously filter this volume. None more so, given the author’s professional standing, than in the late seventies, defending ‘a simple unfair dismissal claim’ on behalf of the LPO. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘not that simple as the principles established in that case and one that followed rippled through the years for the benefit of a large body of freelance orchestral players throughout the United Kingdom.’ Winfield v The London Philharmonic Orchestra Ltd – ‘a cause célèbre in the wider orchestral world of London at the time’ - and Addison & Others v The London Philharmonic Orchestra Ltd are key chapters, told impartially yet with that urgency of personal involvement – recall re-lived - and dramatised immediacy which makes good reading, unfolding a cinematic scenario. In the orchestral life of the nation in the final quarter of the twentieth century, the outcome of winning these two cases made British legal history, determining the self-employed ‘status of not only the freelance players of numerous small management-run orchestras [but also that of] the extras and associates of all four London orchestras’ (LSO, LPO, Philharmonia, RPO, each interchanging players regularly).

Laurie’s next LPO assignment involved the replacement of its Managing Director, Eric Bravington, who in 1948 had succeeded Malcolm Arnold as principal trumpet before taking up administrative reins in the 1959/60 season. In the mid-1970s he was diagnosed with a brain tumour. ‘Those in and around the Orchestra,’ we’re told, ‘like the Arts Council and those running the Royal Festival Hall, were becoming concerned about what were perceived to be Eric’s lapses of judgement’. Assuaging the tensions and ferment of a ‘difficult period’ (during which Haitink resigned his position), Bravington was succeeded by the Orchestra’s chairman Stephen Crabtree - the ‘new broom’ of the early-mid eighties on whose watch, in 1983, Klaus Tennstedt was appointed chief conductor, an inspired decision blue lightning the capital. Crabtree also brought Haitink back into the fold. ‘A special, compassionate man of vision ... but a man of commercial acumen [without business training] he was not’, he resigned in 1984, heading for British Hong Kong the following year.

In mid-1981, ‘pulled further into the bosom of the “family”,’ Laurie joined the London Philharmonic Council. Today, forty-five years on, he sits on the orchestra’s Advisory Council, set up in 2012. Laurie’s conversational writing style, like the man, is without desire to impress or pontificate, the facts at his fingertips, the wisdom of time and encounters, an astute, quiet authority, a smiling mellowed humour, transparency, veining the pages. The tone is set early. ‘His mother was an alumna of the Royal Academy, and his father, at the age of forty-two, took up the bagpipes in self-defence, which he practised at the local school for the deaf in Basingstoke.’ Of ‘a lady called Mrs Bebe Steinberg’, a fellow Philharmonic Council member, he muses, glass in hand, open fire flickering, a twinkle in the eye one might almost imagine. ‘I never was quite sure what she did, and I am not sure she did, either, other than she thought the Council somehow ran the Orchestra. How she never explained, but she was always very charming company at our meetings. I never had any idea what her financial status was, nor, I believe, did the Orchestra.’ Professionally and personally, a man to be trusted, his life has been one of integrity and openness. ‘I resolved that I would always try to help where I could but only advise when asked and as an informed, objective bystander rather than, as far as possible, taking any side ... I was always reluctant to get too close to political or commercial issues within the Orchestra, particularly if there was one faction at odds with another.’ His disdain on meeting a likely money-laundering expatriate Greek entrepreneur picked up in Las Vegas - one of a Mediterranean-Levantine-Balkan breed resistant to playing cricket by the rules - is palpable and pungent. ‘He was everything I expected – all greasy hair, not all of it his own; a dubious, feral body odour with an overlay of eye-watering cologne; a Medusa gaze and a limp, wet handshake ... looking anywhere other than at me, he was unable, or disinclined, to answer my very basic questions about the source of heavy, enticing and generous funding, to which he clearly had access.’ Laurie the portrait painter.

The LPO was founded and financed by the industrialist and art collector Samuel Courtauld. Initially called the Courtauld Beecham Orchestra – Thomas Beecham being second choice to Malcolm Sargent – it gave its debut concert at the Queen’s Hall, Langham Place, under the auspices of the Royal Philharmonic Society, on Friday 7 October 1932 at 8.15pm. The programme included Mozart’s Prague Symphony, Delius’s Brigg Fair, and Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. ‘Nothing so electrifying has been heard in a London concert for years,’ reviewed Ernest Newman in the Sunday Times. That same repertory was repeated, to within the hour, at the 50th anniversary concert at the Royal Festival Hall, conducted by Solti, 7 October 1982, Laurie being involved in persuading the RPS, ‘after some hand wringing’, to be jointly involved in the evening.

Visceral in recall, My Other Family is a mosaic of chapters and cameos, some long, others short, many alluding to diary-like sketches or portraits, none indexed, each page a fresh turning. Laurie’s Australian connections – among others his then wife Lyndy and his friendship with Morris Barr, ‘a man of almost limitless connections within the world of music’1 – led to the Orchestra’s February/March 1985 tour of Australia, a mammoth artistic, political, administrative and logistical exercise, ‘nothing [having] been plain sailing’. His significant participation in making this happen, the ups and downs of what proved in the end to have been an ‘amazing ... financially successful’ undertaking, ‘the realisation of a dream’, but which might at several turnings have become a Scylla and Charybdis of a disaster, is recorded in detail, down to the inclusion of his diary day-by-day. Like J B Priestley in his stylistically different but otherwise similarly themed book Trumpets Over the Sea - ‘a rambling, egotistical account of the London Symphony Orchestra's engagement at Daytona Beach, Florida, in July-August 1967’ – it all adds up to an insightful footnote on the life of a big-boned British orchestra visiting foreign climes. Solti had been earmarked to share the tour with Tennstedt but pulled out as early as April 1983, ostensibly ‘feeling the pressure of his age’ (he was then seventy). On the one hand a ‘serious economy with the truth’, on the other, Laurie learnt years later from Solti’s widow, the consequence of ‘a rather unpleasant and avoidable exercise in raw power’ engineered by Solti’s other orchestra, the Chicago Symphony.2 Svetlanov, of LSO association, replaced Solti, only to cancel, the Soviet authorities citing (?spurious) ‘heart problems’. Eventually the Israeli Avi Ostrowski stepped into the breach, disinclined to ruffle feathers. Tennstedt – troubled, tormented, titanic, pushing himself and everyone, seeker after perfection, ‘destroyed by music’ they said but made by it too - conquered all before him, exalting the realms of Valhalla. Kenneth Hince from the Melbourne daily paper The Age reported ‘a stupendous, cataclysmic performance’ of Bruckner’s Seventh. ‘Tennstedt conducted like a man possessed, and I suppose that at the time he was possessed. There was hardly a nuance or an accent in this towering score that escaped his notice ... his fidelity to Bruckner clear in his every gesture.’ ‘All arms, glasses, sweaty, a tall man, very soulful eyes, he had a vulnerability about him. A mixture of ego and vulnerability ... You just wanted to give your soul to him.’3

In ‘Rumblings in the Corridors of Power and A Change at The Top’, Laurie’s participation and reasoned logic in manoeuvres behind closed doors delivers an insider view of the orchestra business at international ‘A’ class level. Strong friendships, committed word of mouth recommendations, knowing the right people mattered. When it came to changing tides, John Willan’s 1985 appointment as the LPO’s managing director succeeding Crabtree, breaking with the tradition of recruiting from within the Orchestra ranks, was a case in point. Tennstedt’s senior EMI producer at Abbey Road, Willan’s taking of office came about through the mediation of Patrick Garvey. Garvey, second horn of the Orchestra (1973-85), and Willan had known each other since school days. He and Laurie, meanwhile, had forged a lasting friendship during the latter’s Articles of Clerkship apprenticeship in Oxford (late sixties/early seventies). ‘Dear old friend’ goes the joint dedication of this book.

Familiar names cross the pages. Uncomfortable, compromising, ill-advised conflicts too. That December Friday in 1986, for instance, when Willan told an unsuspecting Laurie about ‘forcing a merger with the Philharmonia while, at the same time aiming to sideline its managing director, Christopher Bishop’ - a former colleague of Willan’s at EMI and, in the wake of Walter Legge, one of the redoubtable greats of London’s post-war recording industry. Laurie’s reaction was that ‘this was not a happy scenario at all’. No matter, plans proceeded, ‘played out like a battle scenario’. Norman Lebrecht journalised cover in the Sunday Times. The Philharmonia refused. ‘The whole scheme failed and blew over.’ ‘As in politics, where a week is a long time, so things go in orchestral life.’ A sorry tale.

The middle third of the book journeys into the millennium and a ‘new era’. Unbeknownst to concert-goers and rank-and-file journalists, the ambience and polish of cultured concert nights or the rituals of opera at Glyndebourne - the LPO’s summer residences in Sussex going back to 1964 and John Pritchard’s tenure – was not without political backcloth or turbid cabals. The passion of music and music-making may have been the job people signed up for. But what most often comes across, reflecting situations and moment, is executive tensions and hours of negotiation, of musicians, broadly untrained for the task, tussling with business roles, organisational models and conflicting interests, the author’s wise hand and guidance needed to calm tempestuous waters. Increasingly, Laurie’s was to be the penetrating, dependable, consoling voice of clarity, counsel and resolution. In September 1987 he was appointed a Trustee of the newly established London Philharmonic Trust – an initiative he’d created and assembled after lengthy discussions with Willan.

Masking words or indulging euphemisms isn’t Laurie’s style. Relating facts, a principled prince of fair play and adroit judgement, evaluation before recommendation or action, he introduces the critical South Bank residency issues of the 60s-90s bluntly. Progressively he was to become a key player, ‘very much in the picture’.

Over the years there have been various reports of variable vacuity on the state of orchestral provision in London [Goodman 1965, Peacock 1970, Figgures 1977/78, Hoffmann 1993]. “Vacuity”? Yes, without exception, on no occasion were the London Orchestras themselves, either collectively or individually, consulted in any depth about what should be considered in these reports ... Their conclusions have usually revolved around the fact that there were, [additional] to the BBC Symphony Orchestra, four long-standing, jealously independent orchestras of international quality [tending] to exist, hand to mouth, with a reducing pot of public subsidy, provided by the Government and doled out by the Arts Council each year. 'Why not,' says, for example, Frank Figgures,4 'scrap some of these orchestras and build a properly-funded super orchestra?' Pigs might fly.

The dramatis personae make for high theatre in a field of long protracted moves, attacks and parries ... draws, losses and compromises ... volatile personality conflicts ... tedium ... confusions, compromises, clarifications.

The South Bank Board wanted two irreconcilable things: on the one hand, interesting programmes with a significant element by living composers and, on the other, full houses ... with a normal-sized symphony orchestra playing a normal programme, attracting full occupancy at the Royal Festival Hall for an evening, in order to break even, the ticket prices needed to be at least 50% higher than the maximum that it was felt could be charged to get people filling all the seats. This meant obtaining sufficient public funding or sponsorship to fill the funding gap. Making the London Philharmonic, or any other orchestra, play 'programmes with a significant element by living composers' neither attracted sponsors nor bottoms on seats. Typically, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, paid for by the BBC ... in turn funded by its Licence Fee, did not need public subsidy on the same basis as the independent orchestras, and it could occasionally afford to have audiences of 20-30%, or even less, for its often enlightening and contemporary programmes.

Laurie reminds us that while, commercially, the LPO may have been the RFH’s ‘terrific success’ story, its executive relationship with the South Bank Board was ‘dire’ despite the concert departments of each side enjoying cordial rapport. Ronald ‘Ronnie’ Grierson, of Black Watch/SAS background, Chair of the South Bank Board, looms unsettlingly, a man ‘particularly vehement with his views about the management style of John [Willan] and his team,’5 well known for ‘never tolerating anyone who was audacious enough to stand up to him ... One significant unhappy trait ... was his irascibility, at the smallest perceived slight.’ Neither the ‘grossest indiscretion’ nor ‘tall tales out of school’ were beyond him. He resigned from the Board in 1990. Laurie found himself ‘in the thick, not only of the discussions but also, with the helpful assistance of the South Bank’s lawyers, mediating between the rock and hard place of, respectively, the London Philharmonic and the South Bank, before even the tenders went in.’ If ‘all went wrong and unravelled,’ the legal ramifications for the London Philharmonic would have been ‘huge’. In the event no calamity transpired, the whole protracted saga being resolved initially in 1990 when the LPO was awarded a ‘Sole Residency’ subject to the appointment of a Music Director (Franz Welser-Möst) – ‘hotchpot’ times. Then in 1995 when the LPO and Philharmonia finally assumed joint sharing of the Royal Festival Hall facilities, the LSO having departed for the Barbican in 1982. (The RPO acquired Cadogan Hall as its permanent home only in 2004.) 

Running a large orchestra, the home stage, the paperwork of touring, facing unpredictable situations, dealing with egos, negotiating crises, finding ways to sooth and surmount difficulties, crafting posterity’s small print, the ‘joys and frustrations’ - no season without old ground or precedents being varyingly re-addressed – continues across the next hundred pages. Surviving a draining lifestyle, coexistent orchestral obligations and a high profile legal career requiring fine balancing, the author, unfailingly loyal, enthused and energised, chronicles an era of musical highs in the concert hall but brittle currents and interrupted cadences in the office. ‘Storm clouds’ of one kind or another shadowed successive seasons, metaphorically reminiscent of those Southern Ocean turbulences old mariners recall – think of Eric Newby’s The Last Grain Race - testing if not sinking the fittest.

Especially distasteful was the Arts Council 1993 proposal to withdraw RFH orchestral funding in favour of a single orchestra or ‘super’ orchestra (leading to job losses), despite the LPO already being in residency, the resultant Hoffmann Report being ‘sharply critical of both the Council and the South Bank Centre’.6 ‘The Philharmonia, unsurprisingly, saw its unexpected chance to get its back on its failure to win the residency last time round. There were reports from their camp of all sorts of scheming, from player poaching, alleged secret deals with conductors to knowingly inaccurate conclusions leaked to the press about Lord Hoffmann’s Report.’ Laurie quotes one unnamed player at the time as saying what most believed: ‘The [Conservative] Government’s attitude appals me. It should treasure the musicians it has. This has had a very bad effect on morale in all the orchestras. It’s a very small world, music.’ By a majority decision of 3 to 2, dismissing the Arts Council’s Music Panel favouring the Philharmonia, ‘the Hoffmann Committee found it impossible to make a recommendation between the Philharmonia and London Philharmonic on the basis of superior merit’. ‘A state of chaos then reigned at the Arts Council [backfiring] into a mass falling on swords of its entire Board!’

Subsequently there was the case won against the Musicians Union, a changed organisation since, for failing to distribute a fund, in excess of £15 million, which did not belong to them, representing media royalties accrued through ‘the playing of any and all tracks of all recordings “on air” or wherever and passing them to those who had earned them’.

It was our case that this money was held, effectively in trust, for those to whom it [belonged but that] the Union was using it for its own purposes. Despite many requests at various levels the Union had refused to distribute it to the orchestras, large and small, and also individual musicians [some 5,000] ... The Musicians’ Union fought tooth and nail, including some very unpleasant and discreditable behaviour by its lawyers, to prevent an account being taken of the funds which they held, [only giving in at] the Court door ... We achieved that which we were claiming ... the raising and distribution of funds] thereafter revolutionised, [computerised] and resolved. I suppose this huge issue was a sort of Chicxulub7 moment for [the way] the MU old guard, if I can call them that, treated its members.

Half a century at the coal face tackling the difficulties and diplomacies (or lack of) of top tier London orchestral manoeuvres has placed Laurie in a unique position to document and comment. The fraud case against the LPO’s former Australian finance director, Cameron Poole, for having ‘dipped his hand in the till’ to the tune of ‘the devil’s own number’, £666,000, was an especially disquieting episode, artfully handled. Legal action, it was reported, ‘saw the [LPO] recover £1.2m of lost funds and [Poole] jailed for four years. The [Charity] Commission praised the Orchestra's action following the case, including the forensic investigation and the tightening of its financial controls’. With the ‘Trustees of the London Philharmonic Orchestra [cleared] of any wrongdoing ... the Commission said that it was satisfied that [they] had "fulfilled their legal duties and responsibilities in responding to the fraud"’8

In the United Kingdom, compared with the rest of Europe, when it comes to Government funding, the Arts usually tend to draw the short straw ... those in power in our land [disincline] to give appropriate financial support to enable music in education and performance to flourish, to the extent that it should ... In Berlin, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a bigger subsidy from government sources than the combined total subsidies that are given through the Arts Council to all four London orchestras.

Welcoming change, breaking moulds, but critical of Britain’s ‘overreaching bureaucracy’, Laurie quotes Sionaidh Douglas-Scott’s familiar (if unattributed third-party) words: ‘"Constitution-building is a bit like dentistry: there’s never a good time for it; no one does it for fun; but it’s sometimes necessary and, when it’s done right, it prevents greater pain in the future." On any view, the orchestral scene in London has long needed to have its metaphorical mouth examined. In this context, the various reports into orchestral provision over the years in London had been merely troublesome bureaucratic halitosis.’ ‘In its way’ the establishment in May 2012 of the new London Philharmonic Board which Laurie joined, comprising ‘a minority of players against a majority of former trustees’ plus ‘well-qualified others’ – elected from up to ‘eleven Non-Executive Directors and seven Player Directors’ – guaranteed that ‘history was made’.

Lawyer by profession, musician by soul, Laurie’s ‘private passion’ interludes alleviate the tensions and bruises of day-to-day legal case histories. There’s for instance his and Willan’s establishment in 1989 of the LPO’s Recording Archive, laying the foundations for the orchestra’s in-house recording label established in 2005, six years after LSO Live but nine years before the launching of the Berliner Philharmoniker’s own label in 2014. Laurie continues to look after and catalogue the Archive, some of his own recordings from BBC Radio Three relays generating core content for the label, amongst them the rarity of Tennstedt’s May 1981 RFH Mahler Resurrection led by David Nolan with Heather Harper (replacing Felicity Lott) and Doris Soffel – celebrated Mahlerians - released in 2015. Inaugurating the new Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards scheme ran hand-in-hand, Laurie joining Lord Birkett, John Hosier and Humphrey Burton on the committee. Early on Laurie it was who idly designed the elegant silver lyre physically manifesting the Award, doodled on the agenda sheet of a Curzon Street meeting in June 1989. ‘My lyre.’

Following the dismantling of the apartheid state, an LPO trip to South Africa in 1993, under Welser-Möst, occasioned the first foreign orchestra to visit that country, educational/outreach elements underlining the agenda. ‘With the tour balance sheet a bit short of £100,000 in the black,’ it was a healthy success. Another tour followed in 1995. Ensuing travels to Vienna, the United States, China, Oman, Mexico and the Canary Islands (1996-2017) offered Laurie an enlightening cultural and geographical itinerary ... Picturing one particular ‘bush paradise’, the chrysalis of a poet glows suspended:

The Manyeleti Game Reserve, a corner of the huge Kruger Park on the western side of South Africa, north of the Drakensberg mountains up against the boundary with Mozambique, a wonderful sanctuary of the mind and from life ... that evening it was cathartic to sit over dinner in warm silence, overlaid with a slight chill as dusk fell. The sky was deep black with stars lighting up the clouds. Clouds? That seemed odd, as these celestial beacons appeared both in front as well as behind the clouds. Of course, the clouds were not in our sky; they were made up of a mere trillion or so stars in our local corner of the Universe, the Milky Way, shining down on us as they had done since the beginning of time. The moon then rose, its light eclipsing, one by one, the stars, which turned off as though the Universe itself was going to sleep.

On these tours, at home, we meet with Laurie eagerly, ‘gleefully,’ following up musical opportunities, drawing on his amateur playing youth. Doing a sound/balance check for Jurowski in the Strathmore Center in Bethesda – thus allowing him his ‘own volume control on various bits’ of Also sprach Zarathustra. Discussing percussion issues in Holst and Vaughan Williams scores. Reminding us of the Czech Philharmonic tradition of having unison horns accompany the fortissimo 12 bars before Letter H in the finale of Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony – ‘a wonderful, joyful effect, albeit quite wrong, a bit naughty, and, indeed, apocryphal’, absent in the copyist’s manuscript (RCM) and published edition though ‘written [alternativo] in the LPO’s own library parts’.9 (Mackerras obliged in concert though not the recording studio.10)

Principal and guest conductors of the orchestra enter, Beecham heading the list – Laurie arguing a case for restoring his Handel-derived ballet and orchestral suite, The Great Elopement/Love in Bath. Quoting Beecham’s wartime autobiography, A Mingled Chime, ‘there is a heretical belief in many quarters that 18th Century composers were frail and delicate creatures who liked tenuity of sound and should be treated today with tender concern. This is against all historical evidence, particularly in the cases of Handel and Mozart, both of whom revelled in resounding splendour of tone, as we know from the complaints of the former and the correspondence of the latter.’ Boult – lamenting the fact that EMI’s original digital sessions of his otherwise analogue 1978 Planets have never been released.11 Haitink – galvanising his players ‘without any particular histrionics’. Solti – for whom ‘things did not always go completely smoothly’ (Henze’s Imperator Heliogabalus Rex falling badly by the wayside, not that the critics noticed). Tennstedt – whose last LPO performances, of Mahler Seven in May 1993, were ‘how to bow out as a conductor’. Welser-Möst – honing skills not to fully bear fruit until his Cleveland dynasty took off in 2002-03, about whom and about whose Austro-German repertory Laurie is understandably admiring. Masur – ‘tough and severe, but not a bully’, ‘musical royalty’, ‘a close friend and great admirer of Klaus Tennstedt, both having grown up under the East German communist regime’. Jurowski – Soviet-born and initially trained, ‘a thoughtful and questioning interpretive mind ... never satisfied with the “everyday” or “routine”,’ a questing, innovative programmer whose relationship with the LPO wasn’t without birthing tensions but who in the end was proud, like Tennstedt, to embrace them as ‘his’ orchestra.

Among podium guests there's Jesus Lopez-Cobos – the ‘superbly structured’ breadth of whose 1983 RFH Verdi Requiem made it onto the LPO label. Christoph Eschenbach – ‘whose technical qualities as a conductor occasionally left a bit to be desired’. Vernon ‘Tod’ Handley – affectionately remembered. Avi Ostrowsky – ‘as long as a conductor makes clear how he wants a piece to go, it often matters much less what he does with his stick’. Rudolf Barshai – personal friend and Soviet legend who lived through Stalin’s time and was an intimate of Shostakovich’s. His interpretations of Shostakovich’s ‘devastating’ Eighth Symphony12 are critically compared with Haitink’s earlier 1982 Concertgebouw version. Haitink is perceived to be ‘pervading [with a] most powerful sense of despair’ but Barshai ‘goes even further ... encompassing a sense of complete end-of-the-world desolation, at times ... almost unbearable.’

'Whenever we played Strauss's Last Four Songs with Lucia Popp, she would turn to softly blow him a kiss after “September”, as one great artist to another' ...13 Friend, hero of the post-60s LPO, Nick Busch, thirty-three years with the orchestra, was the plain-speaking judge of its stick-wavers.

He ‘really did not like conductors,’ we learn, ‘whom he regarded as a waste of time’. Haitink and Tennstedt were his gods, Solti and Masur his devils, Klemperer, Boult, Barbirolli, Giulini, Jochum his admirers. He was an artist to be handled with care. After all, Laurie reminds, quoting Simon Rattle, horn principals are the traditional stuntmen of the orchestra, risk-taking personalities challenging slippery slopes: ‘you don’t eyeball stuntmen just before they’re about to [dice with] death’.14

Laurie finished this 103,000-word book - an important (transiently corrective) supplement to Edmund Pirouet’s Heard Melodies are Sweet – A History of the London Philharmonic Orchestra (1998), as well as Philip Stuart’s The London Philharmonic Discography (1997) - in December 2024. A few months earlier, the Charity Commission’s report for the LPO’s financial year ending 31 August 2024 detailed the orchestra’s standing and accountability, Laurie’s godfather legacy and status entrenched in its annals. Total income: £12,736,854 (including two Government grants of £1,928,716). Total expenditure: £11,885,064. 43 employees, 19 trustees. Active in the arts, culture, heritage and science domains. Helping ‘children, young people, the general public, mankind.’15

14 February 2026

1 A jovially supportive Melburnian, member the Britain-Australia Vocational Exchange, former director of the Melbourne Conservatorium. His wife, Shirley ‘Dee’ Barr (1927-2025), was administrative secretary of the Royal Philharmonic Society. London's vibrant Australian community and visitors during the ’60s-’80s included Ruth Nye (an Arrau disciple), her equestrian husband Ross (Daily Telegraph obituary, 22 August 2020), her older brother and his wife Ronald and Rosslyn Farren-Price (also pianists, he since ‘the grand old man of the piano in Australia’ [Ian Burk, 2018]), Leslie Howard, and the young Piers Lane. Malcolm Williamson and Charles Mackerras were also a presence. Similarly Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge who in 1966 together with the LPO recorded excerpts from  Bonocini’s Griselda and Graun’s Montezuma (Kingsway Hall). Non-musically, Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes, Barry Humphries and Clive James blazed other trails (Guardian,  31 May 2014).

2 On the word of Solti’s widow, Valerie (Pitts that was), accountability for this decision is attributed to Henry Fogel. In 1983, however, Fogel was executive director of Rostropovich’s National Symphony Orchestra in Washington. He only took up his Chicago appointment in August 1985, suggesting that responsibility ought more probably be laid at the door of John S Edwards, at the time Chicago’s long-serving General Manager/Executive Director/President.

3 Rachel Masters, LPO principal harpist (1988-2024), quoted in Georg Wübbolt translated Jennifer Stephens, Klaus Tennstedt - Possessed by Music (2023).

4 First secretary-general of the European Free Trade Association, 1960-65.

5 ‘John [had] a tendency to run things on the basis that, if you ask, you don’t get. Therefore, he would just get on with it and ask afterwards, which occasionally involved a certain amount of damage limitation.’

6 David Lister, Independent, 16 December 1993.

7 The iridium-bearing impact asteroid presumed responsible for the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, Walter Alvarez, T rex and the Crater of Doom (1997).

8 Hannah Bewley, Civil Society, 20 January 2011.

9 Norman del Mar omits mention in his Orchestral Variations (1981).

10 Henry Wood Hall, April 1992, EMI Music for Pleasure - the last of his eighteen recordings with the orchestra, going back to 1970.

11 Boult's Planets was taped peacemeal in Abbey Road Studio 1 and Kingsway Hall between May and July 1978, initially overlapping with Tennstedt's Mahler Five (May 12th - 'Venus', 'Jupiter'). Rejecting the 'experimental digital recording' (Philip Stuart), Boult, Christopher Bishop (producer) and Christopher Parker (balance engineer) agreed for only the analogue version to be released, in April 1979, HMV ASD3649. On the sale of EMI control of the music catalogue was acquired by the Warner Music Group in July 2013, Abbey Road Studios having meanwhile been taken over by the Universal Music Group in September 2012 with its operations and library archive coming under the umbrella of Virgin Records Ltd.

12 Recordings: Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, 1985; WDR Sinfonieorchester, 1994/95. Concert: Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, BBC Proms, 24 July 1985.

13 Patrick Garvey, LPO programme book, RFH, 28 September 2013.

14 Jasper Rees, theartsdesk.com, 30 January 2013.

15 https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk

Paintings, Drawings © Laurie Watt 

© Ateş Orga 2026

not to be reproduced without permission