My story…..well, an episode

Playing and teaching music for a living is a real privilege, and I’ve had a wonderful time (and it’s continuing) performing great music in exciting places.

There have been so many highlights, but I shall never forget my first professional engagement which happened while I was still a student at the Royal College of Music in London. After several days of rehearsals I performed with the London Classical Players conducted by Roger Norrington in a whole day of concerts and seminars at the Queen Elizabeth Hall at London’s Southbank. It was called The Beethoven Experience and the centrepiece of the final concert was a performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.

It was not just any old performance of Beethoven 9. This was the first modern day performance using both original instruments and period performance practices; and it was startlingly different! The aim was to get back to the sound which Beethoven himself would have known, cutting through more than 150 years of grime, like an old master painting being restored to it’s original vivid colours after centuries of candle smoke had dramatically darkened it. The tempos seemed extraordinary compared to the ever slower and sedate versions to which we had become accustomed. Opinions were divided between those who rejoiced to hear the unbridled revolutionary force which Beethoven created into a Europe ravaged by Napoleon, and those who were disturbed to hear an old friend such as The Choral Symphony played with such edge and intensity.

The day after The Beethoven Experience we began recording the symphony at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios. Everything about this overwhelmed my senses and changed my musical perspective for ever. After recording a movement we in the orchestra were invited to listen to the playback in the control room, and I just marvelled at the power, beauty and clarity of the period instruments. Violins played using gut strings and without vibrato were somehow more expressive, not less, as one would have expected. The woodwind instruments of the period each had an even more individual character, and together as Beethoven’s woodwind chorus the result was quite magical. The timpani showed one of the most dramatic differences compared to modern counterparts. These were so much smaller that a set of three would fit into the back of an estate car. The calf skin heads on the small timps produced a focused and direct sound which Beethoven would have known and for which he wrote.

For me playing as the new boy in a section of six double basses behind five absolute stars, it was unimaginable! Suppose you are used to driving a Nissan Micra and by some fluke you suddenly find yourself at the controls of the latest Ferrari. You tweak the gas pedal and an immediate roar erupts from twelve cylinders. That’s what it is like to be part of such a double bass section! The hairs on the back of my neck were exhausted at the end of a day, but the sound of that section can still be heard on the recording.

This recording of Roger Norrington conducting the London Classical Players playing Beethoven’s 9th Symphony (EMI label) is truly ground breaking and began a process which lasted some twenty years of late Classical, and Romantic repertoire being brought back to their vibrant and exciting best.