7th October 1932. Battle of the Orchestras.

First Programme of the LPO. 1932..

The London Philharmonic (LPO) is one of five permanent orchestras in London and it was Today in 1932 at the Queen’s Hall, after 12 rehearsals, that saw the Orchestra’s first performance.

Sir Thomas Beecham.

The aim of the founders was to create an orchestra to rival the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) and The BBC Symphony and build an ensemble to match the top American and German Orchestras, which up to WWII it succeeded.

The LSO had been founded back in 1904 when fifty players were to break from Henry Wood’s, Queen’s Hall Orchestra over its rule to only employ musicians on exclusive contracts, on what they called, ‘something akin to a musical republic’,  with the rebels being dedicated to maintaining the players’ freedom to come and go as they please, which included sending substitutes.

The LSO, 8 years later were lucky to survive in 1912 when they changed a booking and so avoided the calamity of the Titanic sinking.

With Richter and Elgar the LSO flourished only to run into trouble in the 1920s with the competition from the new radio output as well as orchestras such as the Queen’s Hall,  and what was known at the time as the BBC Wireless Orchestra.

All except the Queen’s Hall employed players on an ad hoc basis but none approached the level of playing as the foreign orchestras, revealed in 1927 when the Berlin Philharmonic under Furtwangler performed two concerts at the Queen’s Hall.(1)

Queen’s Hall 1912.

These were performances so to inspire that the music critic of The Times reported, ‘that the British public were electrified when they heard the discipline and precision of the orchestra…’

Thus it was the next year that John Reith of the BBC and Thomas Beecham decided to set up an ensemble to meet this competition, but negotiations fell down when the autocratic Beecham wanted more control than Reith would cede; so the BBC set up its own Symphony Orchestra under Adrian Boult.

In 1931 Beecham was approached by the young Malcolm Sargeant to set-up a permanent salaried orchestra which was to be subsidised by Sargeant’s patron the Courtauld, textile family.

The original intention was to reshuffle the LSO, but the self-governing orchestra refused to weed out its under-performers, Beecham and Sargeant lost patience and founded their own orchestra, the London Philharmonic, backed by Sam Courtauld, Sir Robert Mayer and Baron d’Erlanger which soon gained acclaim and recording contracts including that to play at Mayer’s Children’s Concerts at Covent Garden.

After the outbreak of war, however, private backers pulled out and the LPO reconstituted itself as a self-governing body. In the meantime Beecham had left, but returned to the LPO in 1944, but offered only terms as a salaried employee, unlikely to be accepted by Beecham.

Two years later he founded the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. (RPO), which still flourishes.

(1) The Queen’s Hall was bombed in May 1941, destroying all the instruments.

References/Pics.

wikipedia.org.