Historical Snapshots

Part 1: Accident or Inevitability?

Look at the picture of a forerunner of today’s Sydney Symphony, and contrast it with what you see on the stage in front of you. Then use your aural imagination: could that small group of players really have sounded anything like what we think of as an ‘orchestra’? Probably not. But an anniversary stimulates the historical imagination. 

Celebrating 75 years of ‘the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’ stresses continuity. It’s arbitrary, in a way. The name goes back much further, to the group that rehearsed over a fish shop in George St, between 1908 and 1914. One of its organisers was George Plummer, and it was not until 1937 that the name ‘Sydney Symphony Orchestra’ was bought from him, by Charles Moses, the General Manager of the Australian Broadcasting Commission. The ‘real’ history of  the Sydney Symphony might be said to begin when the ABC committed itself to providing Sydney with a permanent orchestra of a size adequate for the symphonic repertoire.

That was later in the 1930s. So our historical photo really belongs to the pre-history of Sydney’s symphony orchestra. Nevertheless, the establishment of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, in 1932, is a milestone. As Phillip Sametz, writes in his 1992 history of the orchestra, Play On!, ‘There is no story of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra that is not a story of the ABC’.

When that photo was taken, the new medium of radio had a voracious appetite for ‘live’ music. Symphonic music? Some, but not much. In 1932 the brand new ABC enlarged the studio ensembles it had taken over in Sydney and Melbourne from 15 to 24 players. Was this the beginning of a commitment to an ABC Sydney Symphony Orchestra? Only hindsight gives a sense of inevitability to the story.

Some saw in broadcasting a possibility of raising public taste and awareness of the ‘best’, including music. And they longed for Sydney to have a permanent orchestra that could represent that ‘best’. It was an accident, in many ways, that these aspirations combined to make public concerts, as well as broadcast music, a dominant activity of the ABC. So the story of the Sydney Symphony begins…

David Garrett ©2007

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Part 2: Bernard Heinze

The emergence in history of a Sydney Symphony Orchestra, a recognisable forerunner of the orchestra you see on the stage, owes much to many people. But if one is to be singled out, it is Bernard Heinze. Some will remember Sir Bernard as the avuncular guide to music who conducted ABC Youth and Children’s concerts, giving many their first experience of an orchestra in live performance. But a much younger Bernard Heinze was the man with the vision that gave Australia its six ABC orchestras. The story begins in Melbourne, where he used his energy and persuasive charm to position himself as the conductor who could realise Melbourne’s aspirations for a ‘proper’ symphony orchestra, and by the early 1930s he had largely succeeded. But Heinze’s vision was national in scope. He nudged his collaborators within the fledgling ABC to make it not just a broadcasting organisation, but a major concert presenter and founder of orchestras.

Nothing was going to stop Heinze: soon he was exerting national power and influence. Within the next 15 years not only Sydney, but all the Australian capitals, would have symphony orchestras. Other names worth recording as the founders of the orchestras include the ABC’s second General Manager William James Cleary, a Sydney man with a love of classical music, and Sir Charles Moses, the General Manager who made orchestras a leading element in the ABC’s contribution to Australian life. Moses said of Heinze:

‘It was the inspiration of Sir Bernard’s enthusiasm and foresight that persuaded me to recommend in early 1936 the setting up of permanent groups of musicians in each of the six Australian states to be the professional nuclei for the orchestras which, later that year, gave music lovers their first regular annual series of orchestral concerts.’

The professionalisation of Australian orchestras was based on Heinze’s belief that ‘no city worthy of the name – certainly no country – is today without a symphonic body of real artistic worth’. It was no coincidence that Heinze’s preference for a six-orchestra policy, rather than one ‘national’ orchestra, multiplied his own conducting opportunities. Some who played under Heinze, and some of the audience too, give credence to the adage ‘a prophet is not without honour, save in his own country’. But Heinze deserves to be honoured, not least by the Sydney Symphony.

David Garrett ©2007
A slightly abridged version of this article was published in programs for April–May.

The image shows Heinze rehearsing for a 1935 concert with the 19-year-old Yehudi Menuhin as soloist. Menuhin had been brought to Australia by the private entrepreneurs J & N Tait and the ABC negotiated for one concert, with its Melbourne ABC Symphony Orchestra.

Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, reviewing the broadcast relay, complained that ‘the melancholy thinness of the orchestral support reduced the concertos (Bach in E, Bruch and Beethoven!) to violin solos with unsatisfactory accompaniment’. This jealously provincial criticism was probably directed at Heinze. The Telegraph was backing Sydney, and another conductor.

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Part 3: Listening In

At most Sydney Symphony concerts you’ll probably see microphones. Most likely, too, you’ll be able to hear the concert, again, in a broadcast. The ABC was broadcasting this kind of music before there was a Sydney Symphony, and indeed brought the orchestra into existence for this very purpose. The Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House used to be referred to in ABC radio as ‘Studio 227’. But it was a broadcast studio only when there was an audience for public concerts. The ABC’s Sydney Symphony Orchestra was, soon after its beginnings in 1932, much more a concert than a broadcasting orchestra. This came as a surprise, to some a nasty one.

Before the formation of the ABC, private entrepreneurs had imported high-flying soloists, and even conductors, in the hope of making money. Now these promoters faced a formidable competitor, subsidised by the public purse. The ABC held a trump card: its new orchestras. At first orchestral resources were traded for broadcast rights to privately promoted concerts. But, frustrated at the limited broadcasts they were obtaining, the ABC soon began to present their own ‘Celebrity Concerts’, by subscription. Their competitors – especially the Tait Brothers/J.C. Williamson combine – threatened legal action. In 1938 the ABC cleverly bluffed its way out of a court case, deflecting the complainants with the argument that the ABC’s concerts were also broadcasts, which enabled them to reach ‘listeners in’ who would otherwise never be able to hear such concerts.

And so it became an – unwritten – law that at least part of every ABC concert was also a broadcast.
It would seem that the first concert broadcast by the new ABC involving their ‘Sydney’ orchestra was on 1 July 1932, when the ‘National Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra’ was conducted by E.J. Roberts, with Isador Goodman as soloist. The broadcasting of the orchestra by the ABC continues. Sydney would no doubt eventually have acquired a full-time professional symphony orchestra, but – without a public broadcaster that became a major concert promoter – who can say when and how? The audience, then and now, has been formed and shaped by the broadcaster’s heavy bias towards the kind of music you have come to hear.

David Garrett ©2007
This article appeared concert programs in the month of June.

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Part 4: Keep Music Alive

Orchestras rarely get noticed in the media, except in the arts pages, or when invaded by The Chaser. Exceptions are rarely to do with music. When Eugene Goossens became a person of interest to customs and police, there was wider interest in what they found in his luggage than in ‘his’ orchestra. The most notorious ever, perhaps, of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s playing members claimed to have caused Vladimir Petrov to defect in 1954, in Australia’s biggest spy sensation. Dr Michael Bialoguski, code name ‘Diabolo’, worked under cover for Australia’s intelligence agencies. A Pole who came to Australia as a war-time refugee, he was a medical doctor. He joined Petrov, the Russian embassy official, in visits to King’s Cross for drinking and other pursuits. But Bialoguski was also a violinist of a calibre to be invited by Goossens to play in the SSO (years later he paid London orchestras to let him conduct them in recordings).

When in the late 1970s the ABC seemed threatened by reports  recommending cuts in government spending (notably the Green Report of 1976), musicians took to the streets with placards: ‘Keep Music Alive!’ The Sydney Symphony’s Musicians’ Association denounced the reports as ‘an attack on the creative, imaginative, and spiritual life of Australia’. More than just the permanence of their employment seemed to depend on the ABC’s viability. Removing the orchestras from the control of the ABC seemed unlikely: working against it were job security, the protective screen of the ABC between music and government, and sheer inertia.

All the more surprising – shocking in fact – when for once in Australian history a political leader took a personal initiative in relation to an orchestra. In 1994 Paul Keating’s government announced in ‘Creative Nation’ that the Government would transfer the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, only, from the ABC to local control. The Prime Minister’s hand was seen in this decision, by which the Sydney Symphony would also receive additional funding to increase its player strength, tour as a ‘cultural export’ and throughout Australia. ‘It is time for the Sydney orchestra to be given the opportunity and freedom to excel’ (the other ABC orchestras ‘may put a case to the Government for divestment if they see fit’.) This started the ball rolling – not always, history records, down the path intended. It’s 2007 and all the orchestras have loosened links with the ABC. The anxious fears of the musicians in 1976 are dispelled. The sky hasn’t fallen.

It’s ironic, really, that the musicians in the orchestras should be most anxious about the permanence of the orchestras. The push to have permanent, full-time symphony orchestras in Australia, before the ABC made them a reality, came, largely, not so much from musicians as from music-lovers. They were well-off, well-connected people, who wanted a permanent orchestra in their city to ensure the hearing of music they loved, with the hope that permanence would bring a high standard. Their vision and connections are symbolised by the title of Melbourne’s ‘Lady Northcote Permanent Orchestra Fund’ formed in 1908. The merger of orchestras, in which the guardians of this fund played a part, formed what we now know as the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and provided a model for the whole country. The emergence of ‘Radio’ orchestras in each city under the ABC, was not the expected outcome, but probably the only way permanent resources could be ensured.

The visionary with whom the Lady Northcote Fund entered into partnership was conductor and educator Bernard Heinze. In 1938 he wrote: ‘…the development of Civic and personal pride in one’s own City Orchestra can in the long run only have the finest results…on these principles we have built up an audience in Melbourne which does not exist in any other City in Australia.’ And here’s ‘Creative Nation’ in 1994: ‘the world’s finest orchestras all operate under local control, and are accountable first and foremost to their cities of residence’. Had the wheel come full circle? Was the ABC’s orchestra founding and stewardship a mere stage on the way to a higher state of being? Those who care may like to be reminded, at any rate, how orchestras became a permanent part of Australia’s national culture. In the news? That would be good, too.

David Garrett, a historian and former programmer for Australia’s symphony orchestras, is studying the history of the ABC as a musical organisation.

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Part 5: Composers Up Front

Players, conductors, soloists – they’re all vital parts of the history of any orchestra. But there’s something without which there’d be no life: composers. Mainly dead composers, since an orchestra must cultivate the whole repertoire, but when there’s an encounter with a living composer, how the whole purpose for being lights up! There’ve been many such memorable moments, beginning for me with hearing Stravinsky conduct his music with the Sydney Symphony in 1961. Hearing and, more important, seeing, being in the presence.

Was it shrewd economy for the ABC to invite composers to conduct as well? Or the sense that the broadcast audience wouldn’t get much out of the composer merely being in the hall? It wasn’t always good conducting – Stravinsky was old, and so was Copland in 1978. He knew his own music, but clearly was at sea accompanying Joseph Kalichstein in a Mozart piano concerto. I wasn’t at the Adelaide Festival in 1964 where William Walton conducted the Sydney Symphony in the Australian premiere of his Cello Concerto. The orchestra may wish that they had played in the presence of Olivier Messiaen, who toured Australia in 1988 under ABC auspices. The Australian Chamber Orchestra had that privilege in Sydney, and their colleagues in the big orchestra escaped a crisis-turned-miracle: the trombone parts were left in Brisbane and the players managed with Messiaen’s copy of the full score.

The Sydney Symphony did get to collaborate with Witold Lutoslawski in 1987 (the program including Dene Olding in Chain II), as it has more recently with Gunther Schuller, James MacMillan, and Tan Dun – all primarily composers. But some conductors have had scores as well as batons in their knapsacks, notably the orchestra’s first Chief Conductor, Eugene Goossens. He premiered his oratorio The Apocalypse in Sydney in 1954. Among Australian composer-conductors Richard Mills has championed many living composers with the orchestra, and Sydney Symphony programmers have often presented resident composers, sometimes conducting their own works – John Antill comes to mind as well as Mills.

In 1941 Bernard Heinze presented an all-Australian program in which Edgar Bainton conducted his own Symphony in D minor, Miriam Hyde played her Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra, and Heinze conducted Roy Agnew’s Breaking of the Drought. And as for concerts ‘in the presence’, the Lutoslawski concert had a counterpart in the concert for Peter Sculthorpe’s 60th birthday, under Stuart Challender, in 1989. The continuing relationship with composers, dramatised when they stand in front of the orchestra, is an essential tribute to the vitality of our musical tradition. And a reminder that there’s life in all music that’s worth playing.

David Garrett, a historian and former programmer for Australia’s symphony orchestras, is studying the history of the ABC as a musical organisation.

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Part 6: On Tour

You can’t take Sydney out of the title, but you can take the orchestra out of Sydney. Tours are said to be good for orchestras, putting them on their mettle, but there’s more to touring than the orchestra’s good. From 1965 on, when the SSO’s touring itinerary included Manila, Tokyo, Hong Kong as well as London and other British cities, there have been overseas tours at intervals: Europe in 1974, USA in 1988, and more since.

But the bread and butter of touring assumes the orchestra is not just for Sydney, but for the bush. In 1938 the ABC approved the proposal that its ‘New South Wales Orchestra’ should visit Wollongong, Katoomba, Orange and Bathurst. The pretext was the State’s 150th Anniversary Celebrations, a gesture to some of the country towns, in this ‘opportunity of attending a big Orchestral Concert’. It was an experiment, and the reasoning, according to Dr Keith Barry, the Federal Controller of Programmes, was ‘to let country people have in some small measure the same facility granted to the city people of seeing a symphony orchestra in action’.

The small stages allowed only an orchestra of 45 players. And Barry, who lived in Leura, complained that the Katoomba program amounted to ‘café music’, so a Mozart symphony was added to give substance. All the same, attendance was poor, perhaps partly because much of the potential audience was already attending the orchestra’s concerts in the Sydney Town Hall. In Bathurst, the press was excited : ‘This will be something unique…the first occasion on which a symphony orchestra has given a recital so far west of Sydney’. In Orange there had been some reluctance to have the orchestra at all, something to do with the date offered being late-shopping night.

The orchestra played under its resident conductor Percy Code, and the soloists included country locals – such as pianist John Hannell and baritone Colin Chapman in Newcastle – as well as concertmaster Lionel Lawson.
Country touring of this kind became a more regular fixture for the Sydney Symphony in the 1950s, and since. (In September the orchestra will play in Tamworth – a special anniversary concert and live broadcast.) Local enthusiasm shines through the press notices. The Newcastle Herald, 4 March 1938: ‘appreciative audience’ for the ‘happy inspiration of sending the Sydney Symphony on a country tour’. If even one light went on in a youthful head, hearing and seeing an orchestra for the first time – perhaps as the Overture to Tannhäuser reached ‘a climax of massive brilliance’ – then the experiment was surely worthwhile.

David Garrett, a historian and former programmer for Australia’s symphony orchestras, is studying the history of the ABC as a musical organisation.

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Part 7: Batons and knapsacks?

The return of Sir Charles Mackerras to conduct in the orchestra’s 75th anniversary year, under the banner ‘Australia’s most distinguished conductor’, prompts the question why there have been so few Australians among the Sydney Symphony’s chief conductors. Mackerras was the first, and since then only Stuart Challender. That still puts the Sydney orchestra two Australians ahead of Melbourne!

Charles Mackerras’ career path, from oboist in the Sydney Symphony, through studies in Prague and extensive experience in Britain and Europe, especially in the opera house, resembles Challender’s in some ways, and suggests part of the answer: it is difficult to get the right experience here in Australia, and enough of it. Apart from Challender, and perhaps Moshe Atzmon (aged 36 when he took over the Sydney Symphony in 1967), the Sydney orchestra has never had a chief near the outset of a career, and for several it was, sadly, the end: Nicolai Malko and Willem van Otterloo died here, and Goossens never recovered from the mode of his going from Sydney.

Some say the ‘cultural cringe’ made imports more acceptable, to audiences at least, than natives. But one would have thought the ABC’s network of 6 full-time symphony orchestras could have been an ideal training ground for local conductors. Some ABC music officials pointed to the potential, near the beginning in the 1930s. Then the war-time cancellation of planned visits by overseas conductors was given a positive spin, as an opportunity for the residents. The main beneficiary was Sir Bernard Heinze, who conducted here, there and everywhere during the war years. Audiences for music grew, the local conductors and soloists were acknowledged to have done well, yet the upshot was a resumed search for an import, fulfilled in Goossens with impressive results.

Heinze himself never seems to have done any conductor training, or suggested any, in his role as the ABC’s main music adviser. Whether any of the Australian conductors of that time could have been nurtured into the post is doubtful – Joseph Post is said to have lacked necessary qualities, for all his musical talent and fine technique. What was needed, clearly, in addition, was drive and initiative. A young oboe player in the orchestra of the 1940s had those, even though he may have wished at times that less patience was required. His nephew, and a cohort of young conductors, some of them trained in the programs instituted by the ABC then Symphony Australia, since the 1980s, may be a sign of the future. Whether the chief is Australian matters less because of the musical results than as a sign of the health and vitality of Australia’s musical culture.

David Garrett ©2007

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Part 8: At Home

The Sydney Symphony spends more of its time than any other Australian orchestra in the public eye, giving concerts, but this is still only a fraction of its time together, the bulk of which is spent rehearsing. Where? Edo de Waart insisted, early in his time as the orchestra’s chief conductor, that more than just the final rehearsal should be in the Concert Hall. The SSO’s management persuaded the NSW Government and the Sydney Opera House Trust that the Sydney Opera House should truly become – as Eugene Goossens had imagined – the orchestra’s home, and so it has been since 1995.

Immediately before, the SSO had rehearsed in the purpose-built Eugene Goossens Hall in the ABC’s new Ultimo Centre, but spent only a few years there – the over-generous acoustic and the players’ difficulty in hearing each other were problems obvious from the first.

As a broadcasting organisation growing like topsy, the ABC had trouble over the years finding where best to put its orchestra. The first venue, in 1932, was in the now demolished Arts Club, in Pitt Street. It was small, but close to ABC management, and to the Sydney Town Hall, where the orchestra performed. War anxiety about central Sydney prompted a move in late 1941 to another Arts Club building, in Burwood. It was too far from the Town Hall, uncomfortable, and not designed for broadcasts. So in 1946 the SSO took up residence in a studio in Darlinghurst Rd, Kings Cross (occupied years later by the Australian Chamber Orchestra). Too small and in insalubrious surroundings, it was also no good for television, so in 1964 the SSO moved to a converted cinema in Chatswood, the Arcadia. Still further from the Town Hall, but close to a railway station, shopping and (desideratum of increasingly affluent musicians) on-site parking, this was to be the orchestra’s rehearsal home until 1989. Many of the musicians bought homes in nearby suburbs.

In 1973 the Opera House opened and the orchestra moved in, rehearsing in the Recording Hall (now The Studio), which had similar problems to those later experienced in Ultimo. By 1974 the SSO was back in Chatswood, but by 1989 the Arcadia had been sold and demolished. While waiting for the ABC Ultimo Centre to be finished, the orchestra spent a couple of years at the Sydney Town Hall, ironically long after it had ceased being their main performance venue.

Spare a thought, as you grumble about the traffic and the parking on your way to and from the concert, for the musicians of the Sydney Symphony, who often do it twice, on a performance day! But they can hear the point, that this Concert Hall is where they should be for rehearsal and performance – and you’re hearing the benefits of their having found, at last, the right home.

David Garrett ©2007

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Part 9: History records, music flows on

As Sydney Symphony’s 75th Anniversary year comes to a close, it’s time to look both forward and backward. How will history remember the orchestra? Every concertgoer will have memories of wonderful events. An orchestra is a complex beast, in peak form as often as possible, but, let’s admit it, not always. There can be a downside, but that’s part of what makes the concert experience a ‘live’ one. Will the recording angel determine what is remembered? Those who attended the composer festivals this year will no doubt have been encouraged to note that all the concerts were recorded for CD, and the printed programs remind us that the Sydney Symphony has started its own label, documenting some of the orchestra’s best performances.

It was high time, since the most important record of an orchestra is the sound of its music-making. The orchestra’s recently issued 5-CD retrospective brings the frustrating realisation that in addition to the many wonderful things it includes – such as Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony conducted by Klemperer, or the orchestra at the newly opened Sydney Opera House with Birgit Nilsson and Sir Charles Mackerras – many other things remembered fondly and with excitement have been lost. Especially disappointing is the knowledge that so many musical highlights were indeed recorded, but not kept.

It’s true that memory can play tricks: trawling such aural trove as has survived, it can disconcerting to discover that not everything remembered as treasure measures up. But that shouldn’t worry anyone – the nexus between an orchestra and its public lies in things more fundamental than whether a standard worthy of repeated listening is always achieved.

Above all, an orchestra’s life is the exploration of one of the supreme achievements of our culture, an exploration it makes in a kind of dialogue with its audiences. Both parties have needs, not least of which are the orchestra’s need for a supportive public and the public’s need to discover both old and new music performed live. If we listened to the Beethoven Festival concerts given in World War II under Bernard Heinze, to large and grateful audiences, we might find the sound of little more than curiosity value, and the Proms concerts under John Hopkins, in the 1960s and 70s, surely would be heard as surveys of a great deal of music new to orchestra and audience, under the pressures of short rehearsal time – a condition of their happening at all. This writer’s memory stretches that far back, but the microphone can still bring surprises.

What can’t change is ‘that’s the first time I was there when that music was played’ – ‘that’s when I first played that music’. We trust each other – orchestra and audience – and the history tells us that there is a future.

David Garrett ©2007

David Garrett, a historian and former programmer for Australia’s symphony orchestras, is studying the history of the ABC as a musical organisation. This nine-part series of Historical Snapshots was published in the concert program books for 2007.

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