Press - Summer 2009

Telgraph article - Conductors? Who needs ‘em!
Gig Magazine article - A Word from the Sponsor

 

Conductors? Who needs ‘em!

Ivan Hewett meets the orchestra that does everything differently – and brilliantly
The Telegraph, Saturday 18 July 2009

The orchestra is truly a miraculous cultural creation. But there’s no denying it is not well-suited to life in a lean, globalised world. Orchestra are big, expensive beats, which need special custom built place s to play in. their music is grand and colourful, but it can also be culturally remote. And in a world that favours the “up close and personal”, all those ranks of drilled musicians can seem distressingly anonymous.

On all these fronts, Britten sinfonia is breaking the mould. As a model of how orchestras can reshape themselves to survive the 21st century, it could hardly be bettered. And yet when it was founded in 1992 no one had any thoughts about “reinventing the orchestra”. “It was felt then that the east of England lacked proper orchestral provision” says chief executive David Butcher, who’s been involved with the orchestra from the beginning. “But we knew we had to be small-scale, what we call a ‘chamber orchestra’, because there weren’t any big-scale venues.”

The new, Cambridge-based orchestra launched in a conventional way, but it wasn’t long before Butcher began to feel his way towards a different way of working. “We started to think of concerts more as totally crafted events,” Butcher says, “and that’s how we work now. We invite performer to curate and perform in their own event, or we might treat a composer or a piece as the core of an event, and build everything around it.”

One of the Sinfonia’s favourite partners is the creatively restless pianist Joanna MacGregor, who’s been curating her own events with Britten Sinfonia for a decade. In on e of her early shows she put the Californian orientalism of Lou Harrison next to the post-Stalinist anxieties of Alfred Schnittke, topping this with one of the first orchestra adventures of that pioneer of East-West fusion, Nitin Sawhney. More recently she combined Bach’s Art of Fugue with the big-band joyousness of the composing hobo Moondog. Mediating between these two very different sorts of contrapuntal rigour were stretches of improvisation from MacGregor and the orchestral players themselves.

How did she persuade the players to do something so novel? “Well, an air of calm is pretty essential!” she laughs. “You have to be sure you know the music really well, and if you’re bringing in an improvising musician, as I often do, my role is to act as an interface. I have to instil confidence in the players, as I’m asking them to step outside their comfort zone.”

A remarkable thing about Britten Sinfonia is its willingness to engage with music beyond the Western classical tradition. That, and the lack of conductor at the front keeping everything together, requires a special kind of player. Jacqueline Shave, who’s led the orchestra for around five years, says that the creative responsibility is part of the attractions. “I’d been playing chamber music for several years, and this way of working seemed similar. This is just a dream job for me. I love the way we listen to each other as we play, in a way that players in bigger orchestra perhaps don’t. Everyone feels engaged and empowered to make suggestions. If there’s a conductor up there you’re not so responsible.”

Engaging with other musical traditions is a challenge that runs both ways. Composer Sawhney, whose musical roots lie in India, remembers his own steep learning curve when he first encountered Britten Sinfonia. “I really loved their tone, the strings make a really wonderful sound. Working with classical musicians can be like working with the sort of ‘good voice’ that can read other peoples words and bring them to life. But Briten Sinfonia goes beyond that, they’re willing to try different things. They were really good at the Indian rhythm in my music,” he says. Did he discover things himself? “Oh, a huge amount. It allowed me to hear the orchestra as an instrument and I realised what an art form orchestration is.”

In its early days, Britten Sinfonia’s experiments were dismissed by some as a bit of a trendy multicultural window-dressing that would soon fade away. But almost 20 years on, the orchestra is thriving. This month it becomes the first orchestra to appear at the ultra-trendy outdoor Latitude Festival, and next season there’s a collaboration with Philip Glass protégé Nico Muhly, violinists Pekka Kuusisto and tenor Mark Padmore. Of course, not everything Britten Sinfonia does comes off. Sometimes the disparate elements refuse to gel. But when they do, the results are peculiarly exciting. They point towards a different sort of future for classical music, less rule-bound, more spontaneous.

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A Word from the Sponsor

Gig Magazine, May 2009

Stephen Bourne, chief executive of Cambridge University Press, explains the benefits of its partnership with the UK’s Britten Sinfonia, which won the 2008 British Council/Arts & Business International Award

How did the partnership originate?
Cambridge University Press (CUP) first sponsored Britten Sinfonia in 2002. Initially an in-kind agreement covering complimentary print, book proivision and Britten Sinfonia subscribers’ receptions, it grew to include an annual UK concert sponsorship, and then broadened in 2007-08 into a full international partnership in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Italy, with CUP staff involvement additionally in Mexico and Chile.

What did CUP originally hope to get out of the deal?
The primary objective was to create an opportunity to entertain business connections in a novel way, by enabling Britten Sinfonia to tour a number of locations in Latin America. As a result of its direct involvement CUP hoped to: obtain media coverage, thus creating an awareness of its involvement in this sort of activity, which in turn would portray the message that we care about culture and the arts; have an opportunity to entertain a wide range of people; give our staff from many countries the opportunity to be closley involed, strengthening the team spirit; network with new audicences in the countries where CUP is opening new offices; be involved in creative thinking about the marketing of the events which would be inspiring and could then be used for more routine activites; change and improve some its relationships with key stakeholders, who would be able to influence the success of the publishing business, and create a positive learning experience for CUP staff, dealing with a very different group of people.

How has the partnership affected/improved CUP’s brand identity?
Until the South America tour, Britten Sinfonia and CUP had only worked together in Cambridge, so the move to an international collaboration was a significant one, with the partnerhsip extending awareness of CUP’s brand in increasingly important markets. Speaking about the partnership, João Madureira (director, Brazil branch of CUP) says: ‘Sponsoring oversaeas tours of arts organisations is a relatively novel idea which makes a tremendous impact. Our customers, authors, distributors and other business associates, as well as our own staff, have never seen anything like what we did. It was a great way of letting all those constituencies know that we value them. It also generated brilliant press coverage for us - there was unquestionably a payback for us.’

Have there been tangible benefits to CUP’s own staff or customers?
The tour of South America coincided with CUP’s restructuring of our offices and operations in Latin America. The five concerts offered an ideal opportunity for CUP to engage with its locally based staff and authors, and also to entertain key customers, suppliers, and opinion-formers in São Paulo, Buenos Aires and Montevideo. This continued with further international activity in Rome.

How would you like the relationship to develop/expand in the future?
CUP’s target markets overlap with parts of the world where Britten Sinfonia has touring plans, so we plan to carry on working together in Spain, India and China, with a return to South America planned for 2010.

www.cambridge.org
Cambridge University Press

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