The London orchestras

Neither post has a closing date in the public record, and neither is a guest engagement: both are jobs inside the building.

Two orchestras founded a year apart, for opposite reasons

The two orchestras were founded within twelve months of each other and for almost opposite reasons. Walter Legge assembled the Philharmonia in 1945 as a recording orchestra: he was a producer at EMI, he wanted the finest players in Britain available to a microphone, and he built the ensemble to serve the catalogue first and the concert hall second. Herbert von Karajan and Otto Klemperer both worked with it at length, and a large part of the classical record library of the 1950s is that orchestra. When Legge tried to wind it up in 1964 the players refused, reconstituted themselves as the self governing New Philharmonia and took the original name back in 1977.

Sir Thomas Beecham founded the Royal Philharmonic in 1946 for the opposite purpose. He wanted a concert orchestra under his own direction, having already founded the London Philharmonic in 1932 and lost control of it during the war. The Royal Philharmonic took its name from an association with the Royal Philharmonic Society, has been self governing since 1963, two years after Beecham's death, and has always earned more of its income outside the standard symphonic season than its rivals do, through touring, film and popular classics programmes. Rudolf Kempe, one of the three conductors named as a teacher of Hughes, became its principal conductor in 1961.

What an associate conductor and a principal associate conductor actually do

An associate conductor is a staff conductor: the orchestra employs the post rather than engaging the person for one set of concerts. The work divides into four parts: covering, preparing, taking the concerts the chief does not take, and being available at no notice. A principal associate conductor sits above an associate and below the music director, with more of the season allotted and more responsibility for the playing standard, but no artistic authority over the season as a whole. The titles are precise and are routinely misread from outside.

Payment follows the same logic. Conductors are almost never salaried by the concert giving body; they are paid a fee for each engagement, and a music directorship is a contract for an agreed number of weeks. Fees for a UK regional orchestra concert are commonly in the low thousands of pounds. The international top of the profession is a separate market entirely.

Five orchestras, one city

London supports five full time symphony orchestras, four of them self governing bodies owned by their own players and one of them salaried by a broadcaster. No other city in the world sustains that density, and the consequence is a permanent competition for the same halls, the same recording work and the same audience on the same nights.

Two of the five share the Royal Festival Hall, two share the Barbican, and all five compete with the orchestras of the Royal Opera House and English National Opera for the same freelance players. That is the market a staff conductor in London learns in, and it is why the associate posts are worth having: they are the only way of standing in front of that quality of ensemble week after week rather than twice a season.

Royal Philharmonic against the London Philharmonic and the London Symphony

The three are separate organisations with separate members, separate boards and separate halls, and the similarity of the names is an accident of history rather than any kind of family relationship.

• Royal Philharmonic against London Philharmonic. Both were founded by Beecham, fourteen years apart. The London Philharmonic came first, in 1932, and is resident at the Royal Festival Hall with a summer contract at Glyndebourne. The Royal Philharmonic came in 1946, is resident at Cadogan Hall in Chelsea, and does proportionally more touring across Britain and more film and popular repertoire.
• Royal Philharmonic against London Symphony. The London Symphony is 42 years older, founded in 1904, and has been the Barbican's resident orchestra since the centre opened in 1982. It has the largest film soundtrack history of any British orchestra and its own record label.
• The word Philharmonic itself. Philharmonic and symphony orchestra describe the same kind of ensemble, about 80 to 100 players in four sections. The choice of word reflects what was available when the orchestra was registered, not size, repertoire or quality.

The Liverpool confusion

The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra is a different orchestra entirely and is not a Liverpool branch of the Royal Philharmonic. It belongs to the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Society, which was founded in 1840, which makes it older than any of the five London orchestras, and it plays in its own building, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall. The London orchestras all tour to Liverpool and to every other British concert hall, which is where the confusion starts, but the two organisations share nothing except an adjective and a royal title.

What the London years left

The Philharmonia and Royal Philharmonic posts sit in the record without dates, which is normal for staff conducting: the work is unglamorous by design and leaves few landmarks. What it leaves instead is the technique for standing in front of a first class orchestra that has had three rehearsals and is not disposed to be patient. Everything afterwards, the Danish symphony cycles, the choral years in Yorkshire and a Cardiff festival built from nothing in 1986, was done by a conductor who had learned the trade inside two of the hardest orchestras in Europe.

Also in this programme

• Owain Arwel Hughes, conductor: the working life in orderA biography of the working life
• Boult, Haitink and Kempe: how a conductor was trainedThe teachers: Boult, Haitink and Kempe
• The choral yearsHuddersfield Choral Society and the big British choral works
• Symphony orchestra or philharmonic orchestraIs there any difference?