Boult, Haitink and Kempe: how a conductor was trained

The route ran from Howardian High School in Cardiff to University College Cardiff and on to the Royal College of Music in London, and the three conductors who taught him were Sir Adrian Boult, Bernard Haitink and Rudolf Kempe. None of the three taught the same thing.

Cardiff first, London second

Cardiff supplied the general education and London supplied the trade. He attended Howardian High School in Cardiff, then University College Cardiff, founded in 1883 as the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire. A British university music degree is an academic qualification: harmony and counterpoint, analysis, history, orchestration, keyboard skills. It teaches a student to read a score, not how to stand in front of 90 professional players and be obeyed.

The Royal College of Music, founded by royal charter in 1882 and opened in 1883 in South Kensington, is where the second half happened, and a conservatoire deals in exactly the physical and social skills a university leaves out. Cardiff trained and London finished is the ordinary shape of a British orchestral career of that generation. Wales had no conservatoire of its own until the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama opened in Cardiff in 1949, and the professional route ran through London for decades afterwards.

The three teachers, and what each one had to give

The three teachers were an Englishman, a Dutchman and a German, and between them they covered three separate traditions: Boult the senior figure of English orchestral conducting, Haitink the orchestral builder of the postwar Dutch school, Kempe a Central European opera and concert conductor whose economy of gesture other conductors studied deliberately.

Sir Adrian Boult and the English repertoire

Boult conducted the first performance of Holst's The Planets, a private run through at the Queen's Hall in London on 29 September 1918, which is why his name attaches permanently to Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity. The Planets has seven movements, Mars to Neptune, with no Earth and no Pluto, a wordless offstage female chorus in Neptune, and a playing time of about 50 minutes. Jupiter is the fourth, and the broad tune in the middle of it later acquired words as a hymn.

His other permanent association is Vaughan Williams. Boult gave first performances of several of the nine symphonies, recorded the complete cycle more than once, and recorded The Lark Ascending, the 1914 piece for violin and orchestra that Vaughan Williams revised in 1920. Boult conducted the City of Birmingham Orchestra from 1924 to 1930, and Birmingham later named the concert hall of its conservatoire the Adrian Boult Hall, opened in 1986 and demolished in 2016.

Boult and Elgar

Boult knew Elgar, who lived from 1857 to 1934, and championed his music from the 1920s onwards, when the fashion for it was receding. The two works that advocacy rests on are the Enigma Variations of 1899, fourteen variations on an original theme of which No. 9 is Nimrod and each of which is a portrait of a friend, and The Dream of Gerontius of 1900, rescued in Germany after a failed Birmingham premiere.

Bernard Haitink and the long line

Haitink became chief conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam in 1961, an appointment that looked premature at the time and lasted until 1988. Alongside it he was principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra from 1967 to 1979, music director at Glyndebourne, music director of the Royal Opera House from 1987 to 2002, and principal conductor of the Chicago Symphony from 2006 to 2010. His discography includes complete symphony cycles of Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler, Shostakovich and Vaughan Williams. What a student takes from him is not a mannerism, because he had almost none. It is the habit of letting a slow movement take its time, and of not asking an orchestra for anything the score does not require.

Rudolf Kempe and the economy of gesture

Kempe began as an orchestral oboist in Leipzig, which is the clearest possible training in what a player needs from the rostrum. He was music director in Dresden and then in Munich, conducted at Covent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera, and from 1961 was principal conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Beecham's London orchestra, where he remained until he gave up the post in 1975. His complete Richard Strauss orchestral cycle with the Dresden Staatskapelle remains the reference recording of that repertoire. His beat was famously small, and the lesson in it is that a large gesture is usually a confession that the rehearsal failed.

What conservatoire conducting training actually consists of

Conducting training at a conservatoire is mostly not conducting, because podium time with live professional players is the scarcest resource in the building. The syllabus divides roughly as follows.

• Score study. Reading a full score of up to 30 staves, hearing it internally, and knowing every transposing instrument at sight.
• Baton technique. Drilling the beat patterns at a mirror, then splitting the hands so the right beats and the left shapes.
• Two piano work. Rehearsing repertoire with two pianists standing in for the orchestra, which is where most students log most hours.
• Repetiteur skills. Playing an opera or oratorio from a vocal score while conducting singers, the standard entry job in a house.
• Ear training. Identifying which of the 16 first violins is flat, quickly and without insult.
• Rehearsal craft. Planning three sessions of three hours so the difficult bars get the time and the easy ones do not.
• Observation. Sitting in on professional rehearsals, which is what a staff post with a London orchestra supplies at a scale no conservatoire can match.

That last item is where formal training stopped and the profession began. The three studios gave a technique. The staff conductorships in London gave what no studio can, several hundred hours behind a full orchestra that is being paid to play whether the young conductor is ready or not.

Also in this programme

• Owain Arwel Hughes, conductor: the working life in orderA biography of the working life
• The London orchestrasPhilharmonia and the Royal Philharmonic
• The choral yearsHuddersfield Choral Society and the big British choral works
• Becoming a conductorHow a conductor is trained, and how the job is actually entered