Owain Arwel Hughes, conductor: the working life in order

This page is an independent account of that working record, in the order it happened.

The name itself is Welsh throughout. Owain is one of the oldest Welsh given names, carried by Owain Glyndwr and by the medieval princes before him, and Hughes is among the most common Welsh surnames. He has spoken Welsh since childhood. In 1977 he was music director of the National Eisteddfod of Wales, the festival that moves each year between north and south Wales and is conducted entirely in Welsh.

The career in order, from 1968

The career runs from 1968 and divides into four overlapping strands: the London orchestras, a Welsh broadcasting and choral period in the 1980s, a Danish period from 1989, and a long run of Welsh institution building that starts in 1986. Where a post carries no closing date in the record, none is given below.

The two London posts sit at the front of that list without dates attached, and they are the ones that shaped the rest. The Philharmonia was founded in 1945 by the record producer Walter Legge; the Royal Philharmonic in 1946 by Sir Thomas Beecham. An associate conductor is staff: the post prepares the orchestra, covers the chief conductor, and takes the concerts the chief does not take.

What a conductor actually does

A conductor sets the tempo, holds 80 to 100 players together, balances one section against another, and decides the interpretation the rehearsals then build. The physical vocabulary is small and old. The right hand, holding a baton of roughly 30 to 45 cm or nothing at all, beats the time: two to the bar in duple time, three in triple, four in common time, with the first beat of every bar, the downbeat, always travelling straight down.

The left hand does the part most listeners notice without being able to name. It typically shapes dynamics, lifting for more sound and pressing down for less, cues entries a beat or two ahead, sustains a held note, and restrains a section that is about to cover a soloist. Splitting the two hands, so the beating hand stays neutral while the other expresses, is one of the hardest mechanical skills in the trade.

Most of the work is invisible from the hall. Rehearsal time is short and expensive, and shorter still on tour, so the conductor arrives with the balance problems already identified and the score memorised or nearly so. Strings are about two thirds of the players, and a first violin section in a full orchestra runs to 14 or 16. The leader, called the concertmaster in America, tunes the orchestra, settles the string bowings and plays the violin solos.

Wales: the Proms, the youth orchestra and Camerata Wales

The Welsh strand of the career is institutional as much as musical. He founded the Welsh Proms in 1986 at St David's Hall in Cardiff and has been artistic director since. St David's Hall is the 2,000 seat national concert hall of Wales, opened in 1982 and officially opened on 15 February 1983. The festival has no connection whatever with the BBC Proms in London; the two are separate organisations with separate histories. The Cardiff season grew from orchestral evenings alone into a July run that added a Family Prom, a Tiddly Prom, an Organ Prom and a Jazz Prom. The BBC reported on 18 April 2018 that the festival had lost 30,000 pounds of Welsh Government funding, and it now operates as Welsh Proms Cymru.

From 2003 to 2010 he was music director of the National Youth Orchestra of Wales, formed in 1945 and the first national youth orchestra anywhere in the world. Camerata Wales, founded in 2005, is a chamber orchestra rather than a full symphonic band, and he is its music director. A professorship of performance at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David, has run from 1986.

The recordings, and why there are no songs

Conductors do not write songs, and the searchable body of work under this name is a discography rather than a songbook. The largest single item in it is the complete cycle of Vagn Holmboe symphonies with the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra for BIS: the thirteen numbered symphonies plus the unnumbered Sinfonia in Memoriam, Op. 65, recorded between June 1992 and January 1996 and issued as a boxed set in 1996, in the composer's lifetime. The Sinfonia in Memoriam was written at Hughes's request, and its first performance was his.

The second landmark is Alfred Schnittke. The public world premiere of Schnittke's oratorio Nagasaki took place on 23 November 2006 in Cape Town, with the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra, the Cape Town Opera Voice of the Nation chorus and the mezzo soprano Hanneli Rupert. Nagasaki had been written in 1958 and recorded by Moscow Radio in 1959, then left unpublished and unperformed until that evening. The first performance and recording of Schnittke's Symphony No. 0 was coupled with it on BIS, from sessions at Cape Town City Hall in November 2006, and Schnittke's Symphony No. 9 followed for the same label. A Rachmaninov cycle for BIS sits alongside them, with further recordings for EMI, cpo, Philips, ASV, Warner, Dacapo, Danacord, Divine Art and Quartz.

Honours and academic recognition

• Honorary DMus, University of Wales, 1991.
• OBE, 2004, for services to music and charity.
• Honorary fellowships of Bangor University and of the University of Wales, Lampeter, both 2007.
• CBE, in the 2009 New Year Honours.
• Doctorates and fellowships at nine universities and conservatoires in total.
• An autobiography, Owain Arwel Hughes: My Life in Music, University of Wales Press, 2012.

Read as a whole, the record describes a life spent between two kinds of work that rarely combine: the staff conducting of the big London orchestras, where the job is to be reliable and invisible, and the founding of festivals and ensembles in Wales, where the job is the opposite. The Holmboe boxed set and a Cardiff July season are what outlast any single concert.

Also in this programme

• The London orchestrasPhilharmonia and the Royal Philharmonic
• Boult, Haitink and Kempe: how a conductor was trainedThe teachers: Boult, Haitink and Kempe
• Owain Arwel Hughes: the career, and the music around itOwain Arwel Hughes and Welsh orchestral music