Those meddlesome people who like to straighten things out have always been offended by the untidy arrangement under which London has four permanent subsidised symphony orchestras. London does not need so many orchestras, they say. Can't it make do with just two or three, like other places? And surely fewer would mean better?
There is no logical answer to these questions. If you were designing London from scratch, you probably wouldn't give it four symphony orchestras, any more than you would allocate it 11 railway terminuses or five airports. But the plain fact is that, unlike with the airports, having four orchestras works. So I say: stop trying to fix something that isn't broken. Actually, I say something much more than that. Judged by the quality of the conductors now being attracted to all of the London orchestras—to say nothing of those working with the other British orchestras too—we are fortunate to be living in a golden age of orchestral playing and stick-waving. As someone once said in another context: just rejoice at that news.
Consider the constellation of talent. At the Barbican centre, the London Symphony Orchestra is buzzing under the protean Valery Gergiev, now in his first full season as chief conductor. Across the river at the Festival Hall, the London Philharmonic is on a high under Vladimir Jurowski. Sharing that hall with the LPO, the Philharmonia excitedly awaits the arrival of Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2008. In 2009, a veteran maestro, Charles Dutoit, takes over from Daniele Gatti at the Royal Philharmonic. No other city has anything to compare. London may not have the best orchestra in the world, but it has the best orchestral life.
And that is just the start of it. Jirí Belohlávek is establishing a better era with the BBC Symphony Orchestra than it has enjoyed in a while. Mark Elder and Ivan Volkov are presiding over an orchestral renaissance in Manchester. Marin Alsop has put the Bournemouth Symphony back on the map. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the London Sinfonietta are about to move to a new venue in King's Cross. Meanwhile, there are the not negligible matters of Antonio Pappano's outstanding tenure at the Royal Opera and Edward Gardner's exciting start at the helm of English National Opera.
When I first started listening to orchestras, I had the impression that all the great conductors were dead. Arturo Toscanini, whom earlier generations generally accounted the greatest of them all, was dead. So were Wilhelm Furtwängler and Bruno Walter. As a boy I heard Thomas Beecham conduct and later John Barbirolli, Otto Klemperer and Leopold Stokowski, but they soon passed away too.
Then, sometime in the 1970s, a penny dropped. These greats had gone, but I was going to concerts conducted by the likes of Leonard Bernstein, Herbert von Karajan and even, once, Evgeny Mravinsky. At the opera there were performances by Georg Solti, Carlo Maria Giulini and, very occasionally, Carlos Kleiber, the most remarkable of them all. What was this, if not a new golden age of conductors worthy to rank with those of the prewar era?
And now that first postwar generation is dead too. Yet the one that came after it—the still living and still active generation of Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Colin Davis, Bernard Haitink and James Levine—has repeated the same process in our own era. When I started going to concerts regularly, these were the tyros. Today they are the doyens. I remember being knocked out by an Abbado concert with the Hallé in the mid-1960s and thinking that with luck I might find myself listening to him in 50 years' time. Well, 42 years on and counting, I still am. Abbado conducting Mahler's 3rd symphony at the Proms in August was one of the most wonderful concerts I have ever been to.
Nevertheless, I would be extremely wary of saying that the past was better. Today is outstanding too. And no one who heard the 26-year-old Gustavo Dudamel (pictured, right) with his Simón Bolívar National Youth Orchestra over the summer can doubt that the future looks pretty enticing as well.
A half-price ring
In opera, the great event of this autumn is the new Covent Garden Ring cycle under Pappano, which officially opens on 2nd October. I say "officially," because in August, Covent Garden took the innovative decision of moving the daytime final rehearsals to the evenings and marketing the performances to the public as a "preview" cycle, starting on 24th September. This was great news for those of us who had failed to get tickets for the three official cycles, not least because the preview cycle was put on sale at half price and advertised directly by email to those who had been unlucky first time round. Having now paid £101 for an entire Ring cycle, I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself—though even with inflation it doesn't compare with the £3.60 I paid to sit in the balcony for the whole Reginald Goodall cycle at ENO in 1973. Still, half-price previews are a great idea for the opera houses. They should become a fixture.
