When David Whelton took on the position of managing director of the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1988, there were some who thought he would not be long in the post. Self-governing orchestras such as the Philharmonia and the LSO can be unruly bodies at the best of times. Soft-spoken, polite, self-effacing: to some, Whelton, then only 34, did not seem enough of a bruiser to enjoy the rumbles of British orchestral management. Seventeen years later, however, not only is he still in the post but his time at the Philharmonia has been something of a triumph. The orchestra—celebrating its 60th birthday this year—is probably playing better than it ever has, not least because of Whelton's work to secure Christoph von Dohnányi as its principal conductor in 1997. As an orchestral trainer, Dohnányi is in the top rank, and his interpretations, especially of the central Austro-German repertoire, have an authority that is now rare on any concert platform. Whelton is conscious of what Dohnányi has brought to the orchestra. "Its sound is richer than it was in the past. His sound is like ebony—it's dark and rich and very beautiful. Coming to a Dohnányi concert you hear playing of a chamber-music delicacy, and he makes you listen because the orchestra itself is listening."
Whelton is not alone in his admiration for what Dohnányi has achieved. Last April the Philharmonia performed Mahler's 1st symphony at the Musikverein in Vienna, and moved the notoriously difficult Viennese audience into a standing ovation. The Wiener Zeitung raved and Die Presse found the concerts "overwhelming": "What this conductor has achieved in London is second to none. He has made his orchestra into a precision instrument, which he is nonetheless able to inspire to utterly relaxed music-making." This was a notable success for Dohnányi and the players, but no orchestra, and certainly no British orchestra, gets to play at this level unless it has an administration of the highest calibre—and an administration that has not allowed convenience or fundraising possibilities to distract from the real goals of the institution it serves.
British universities seem to be littered with the debris of big capital projects for which the underlying rationale was only that someone was willing to put up the money for them. Is there not a similar danger that orchestral managers too will go for big projects because it is easier to raise money for these than to improve general running? "This is a very important point. You have to ask—what is fundraising for? It's for what goes on on the platform. I say over and over again to the orchestra, the board and the trust, all that matters is that we put every penny we have on to the platform, so that when a conductor comes to me and says, 'This is what I'll need,' I can say that he'll get it. There's no point in our going into a Birtwistle festival, for instance, and not rehearsing it properly. You might as well stay at home. And even if it's repertoire the orchestra already knows, it makes a big difference if you have four rehearsals rather than two. It's also about getting the right artists, so that when the orchestra arrives for the rehearsals, they want to be there: they want to work with this or that conductor because it's musically stimulating."
This marks something of a departure in orchestral culture. There was a time when British instrumentalists, famed for their sight-reading, would be irritated by a conductor who spent four rehearsals on familiar material. "Twenty years ago there was a generation that had been brought up to expect one rehearsal and then the concert. But there was then a younger generation of players coming through with higher expectations. And the audiences began to notice the difference, so that in recent years every orchestra has had to raise its game."
It is ironic that as the quality and enthusiasm of orchestral musicians has increased, so the interest in orchestral music within the general culture has declined so markedly. "We're in a period now where the broad population of this country is totally unfamiliar with orchestral music and reluctant to enjoy anything that requires some investment of time and thought. Our world is shrinking by the day because of the overwhelming impact of popular culture. When I was a kid, although I didn't grow up in a musical family, you were always aware of orchestral music on the radio because there was the light programme, and the home service. The musical language you grew up with was the basic harmonic tonality that underpins music from the Renaissance until the present day. Now that language is almost entirely foreign because rap music and garage and house have no harmonic references at all. It's purely linear. People's experience of great music is now negligible. If you put on DvoÆrák's New World Symphony, over half of the audience are hearing it for the first time."
This has consequences for the orchestra's ability to find commercial sponsors. When Whelton first went to the Philharmonia, he found he could raise about £800,000 a year, and spend only half a day a week doing so. "You'd go to one company and put a proposal, and there'd be a yes or a no; if it was a no there'd be another ten companies you knew were interested. Chairmen of boards and managing directors were from a generation that was passionate about music and opera. But those people have retired. In the main, the people in those positions now have no interest in high culture. First of all they're with each company a very short time, secondly they're driven entirely by adding shareholder value, and thirdly what we do is something alien to most of them… they'd prefer to take clients to a football match."
More fundamentally, it requires orchestras to rethink how they can build and maintain their audience. "Most people's only relationship with orchestral music these days is in the cinema and occasionally the television. We gave a concert of film music in the Festival Hall recently that was sold out, and in the middle of it we did the Adagietto from Mahler's 5th Symphony and the overture to Figaro. The people listened to those pieces with just the same level of concentration as they did Star Wars. They loved the emotional impact of that music—that's their starting point now. I wrote to a critic the other day who complained that we were putting the Rachmaninov 2nd piano concerto in a concert and I said look at the symphony it's with, which was Prokofiev's 5th. Now, I think that's central repertoire but 3,000 people probably heard it for the first time that night. Familiarisation is the only way to build the audience. If you can get the public from film music to, say, Pictures from an Exhibition and then to the Rachmaninov 2nd piano concerto and then on to Prokofiev's 5th, they've got one more piece in their repertoire. If we don't succeed in doing that, our audience will become narrower and narrower. When I came to the Philharmonia, it was the last season that you could do even very mainstream concerts at the Festival Hall that would be packed to the gunnels."
The Philharmonia still fills 82 per cent of capacity in the Festival Hall for its concerts on average, but Whelton is concerned about the London audience. "London has changed dramatically in my time. No one can afford to live here. The majority of people from London who come to our concerts are Europeans, because they come from a more culturally aware background, also they come from a society that is used to going out to things where this country isn't, and thirdly, they're posted to London, one of the cultural capitals of the world and they want to take advantage of it. At any Festival Hall concert given by a big orchestra, you'll hear seven or eight languages spoken and if those people weren't here, it would be almost empty, I'm afraid."
In July the Festival Hall will close for 18 months to undergo a major refurbishment, which should result in a greatly improved acoustic. But the closure will be a period of uncertainty. Apart from some choral concerts at Westminster Cathedral, the orchestra's London programme will move to the much smaller Queen Elizabeth Hall next door. This limits the range of works that can be played, it will also reduce income from ticket sales and the orchestra will receive no money to make up the shortfall. Even when the Philharmonia returns to the hall, it is not clear what the effects of the closure may be. "We're going into the unknown: all the patterns of audience behaviour could change. It's a risk."
Whelton thinks that the Festival Hall's problems will not be entirely resolved even by a completely successful physical renovation. "If you were to list the difficulties of the South Bank Centre (SBC), they'd be in terms of its physical structure, its lack of basic amenities for its customers and the orchestras, and its acoustic, but above all the confused message it puts out to the outside world about what it is. Is it a palace of varieties or is it a great concert hall? If you look at what goes on there, it's astonishing—the Philharmonia, the London Philharmonic, the visiting orchestras, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the London Sinfonietta—I don't know of another hall in the world that has that range of quality of music. And yet that message is not communicated clearly to the outside world. Over the years there have been so many changes in the SBC's view of what it is. I think revitalised, rebuilt, well funded, and with properly structured relationships with its resident orchestras it would provide a phenomenal arts complex for London. But at the moment we're at the nadir of the SBC's knowing what it's about."
Damaging too is what he sees as the failure of the SBC's management to allow its artistic programming to flourish—which explains, he thinks, why the Barbican now has a stronger programme of visiting orchestras. "Even given the Festival Hall's acoustic, the Barbican is a far less suitable venue. It only has 1,990 seats for goodness' sake. But because the art has been at the heart of the planning, it has enabled their artistic administrators to achieve this. The Festival Hall doesn't have these conditions because at the SBC the art has always been separated out from the board. Miracles are constantly performed by their musical administrators, and it's just tragic that they don't have the resources to seek out and create these major relationships."
Shouldn't the Arts Council play a stronger hand in this? "We would hope that the Arts Council is saying all this, but I'm not sure it is. The council thinks of the SBC as this great beast the other side of the river and doesn't know how to deal with it. I think a lot of the difficulties in working with the SBC have been the result of the Arts Council's own relationship with the hall."
More generally, however, he is warm about the way the Arts Council has addressed the issues of arts funding. (The orchestra's main public subsidy is a £1.7m annual payment from the Arts Council, supplemented by £8m from box office sales and fundraising.) "At the end of the 1990s and just after there was a brief moment when people began to address funding questions in terms of meeting need and demand and quality and so forth—the confused route they had gone down before was resulting in failure at a spectacular level. The deficits in the orchestral sector were running at probably £30m. The late 1990s stabilisation enabled the orchestras and theatres and opera companies to be put back on the straight and narrow. The Arts Council under Gerry Robinson has been a spectacular success, even though everyone was very sceptical at first."
What does concern him is the future of the arts outside London. "The 1970s and early 1980s were a time of great optimism, energy and drive, and saw the setting up of a number of major companies, such as Opera North. What is worrying now is the way in which local government is squeezed. They are such big investors in arts."
This is of particular concern to the Philharmonia. Although one thinks of it as a London orchestra, it is a thoroughly international institution, with residencies in Paris, Bruges and Athens. Its work over the last decade or so at the Châtelet in Paris has been of special importance since it has been able to work as an opera orchestra performing some of the richest and most demanding of the 20th-century repertoire. As importantly, however, the Philharmonia is as close to being a national orchestra as we have in this country, giving about 65 concerts a year in Britain outside London (and 45 in London). Central to its domestic activity are its provincial residencies. "It started ten years ago in Bedford. That was followed by Leicester, and more recently Basingstoke, Bristol, and Southend. The idea was that we would develop a relationship with a local audience in such a way that we could build programming and a whole support structure behind the concerts. We're a publicly funded organisation and people in Bedford and Leicester and Bristol and so on ought to have the opportunity to hear Dohnányi or Ashkenazy just as people do in London. If the Arts Council funds a Philharmonia concert, that concert is not just played in London once, it will probably have at least three other performances, so that subsidy goes a hell of a long way. That's what public funding is all about: bringing the best of what we do to the widest possible audience. I mean, to have Dohnányi conducting the orchestra in Bruckner's 4th Symphony in the Musikverein in Vienna, then in the Corn Exchange in Bedford before going on to do it in Carnegie Hall is just amazing."
