Page 949 - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Coverage Book 2023-24

I joined the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1990s amidst a wave of
redundancies (a decade earlier, Derek Hatton’s Militant regime had suggested selling off the
Philharmonic Hall to serve as a bingo hall). We watched from Liverpool as Manchester’s
Hallé Orchestra came within hours of insolvency. “Can we get 20 boxes of subscription
brochures to Manchester this afternoon?” asked our then-CEO.

In 1999 the Bournemouth Sinfonietta was defunded into oblivion — ah, that golden New
Labour dawn! By then I had moved to Birmingham and straight into another existential
financial crisis. A couple of years in, redundancies were on the table again. It didn’t come to
that, but later in the decade I sat on the committee that voted to abolish my own pension.

Read the history. It’s the same story all the way back to 1920 — the City Council’s grant
never came close to providing security. The orchestra was in serious trouble as early as 1923,
and financial crises recurred during the Second World War and in the early 1950s.

In 1978, the whole outfit nearly self-destructed when the musicians defenestrated both their
general manager and their chief conductor, Louis Frémaux, in the space of a weekend.
Frémaux, a Frenchman, had fought the Nazis in the Résistance and saw action with the
Foreign Legion, receiving the Croix de Guerre for courage. The CBSO players’ committee
broke him.

What came next was Simon Rattle. Any one of these crises could have finished the CBSO
off, but instead it landed (sometimes painfully) on its feet, and I have to believe that it will
weather the latest blow. Perhaps there’s a strain of pessimism so deep it becomes a weird
kind of optimism. But “seen it all before” doesn’t offer much comfort to those in the thick of
the fight and make no mistake: Britain’s orchestras need your financial help, as well as (from
government — any government) a huge expansion of incentives to cultural philanthropy.

If that sounds a bit beyond you personally, you could always buy a concert ticket. To quote
the CBSO’s great post-war chairman Stephen Lloyd — announcing the imminent (happily
abortive) disbandment of the orchestra in 1952:

The Management Committee regrets that it can no longer maintain the orchestra throughout
the year. If Birmingham people share that regret, the remedy is in their own hands. They
should fill the Town Hall.

Substitute Symphony Hall for Town Hall — and Birmingham for any community in Britain
supporting a professional orchestra or opera company — and that advice still stands.