The Long View | Do you remember 2002?

You might want the first Long View of the New Year to look forwards, outlining what we can expect from the coming twelve months. Sorry, but I ain’t gonna make that mistake again.

Ever a sucker for anniversaries, I’ll take a long view backwards instead. This year marks something of a personal milestone. Way back in 2002, someone was desperate enough to appoint me Marketing Assistant at Manchester Camerata (MC). It was my first full-time job in the classical music industry or anywhere else. In retrospect, the appointer was decidedly optimistic concerning my abilities – for which I remain ever grateful. I spent the following 18 months in a grubby office in Hulme laminating, mail-merging and tea-making for the princely sum of £11,000 per annum (gross).

All six staff were crammed into the same windowless room, which made for the best possible education in orchestral management. I had almost no money. Nor did Manchester Camerata. But I had excellent colleagues and an almost embarrassing abundance of enthusiasm.

I also had access to two tickets for any Bridgewater Hall concert given by Manchester’s other orchestras, so I learned the repertoire sharpish. I heard my first live Sibelius courtesy of the Hallé and watched Sir Mark Elder conduct Elgar’s Enigma Variations on the very day my Mancunian grandmother died. One morning, the stage-door keeper at the still-new-feeling Bridgewater Hall (Gawain Glenton, now a renowned early musician) informed me that the Hallé was inside ‘recording Nielsen’. Recording who? It was the first time I’d heard mention of the composer I would come to love.

A performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No 10 from the BBC Philharmonic under Vasily Sinaisky had me emotionally skewered for days, Gianandrea Noseda conducted the same orchestra in a Verdi Requiem that remains the most intense I have ever experienced, or so my ingrained memory dictates. Ever loyal, I became convinced that Douglas Boyd’s lean, mean Beethoven with my own Manchester Camerata was the one true way.

In the office, I had the essential experience of any junior marketing operative: having to tell your line manager you’ve sent a brochure to print with a typo in it. My benevolent boss responded with a ferocious quietness that I knew signified intense inner anger. In the end, she gave me the benefit of the doubt. Eventually she started letting me write programme notes. At last, I found my feet.

Had I been built of stronger stuff, I’d have quit orchestral management sooner – so poor were the remuneration and development opportunities, so unrealistic and socially crippling the demands on my weekends (for no extra money or time off). Little, I suspect, has changed there – one reason for the persistently huge turnover of junior staff in the arts. The industry has never woken up to the damage inflicted by its refusal to invest in young administrative talent.

There were some revelations. One day, our General Manager Gavin Reid returned from an industry conference all fired up. The philosophy he outlined to his gathered employees that morning in the kitchen stuck with me. What he proposed, broadly, was that we stop thinking of MC as a performing orchestra and start thinking of it as a community resource. Its Education Department (as it was known then) should be viewed as central, not supplementary. From then on I understood the value and investment of the public subsidy we received and started to make sense of our existence – and relevance.

In the last two decades, those ideas have become widespread, to almost overwhelmingly positive effect. By today’s standards, MC’s repertoire was narrow and obvious, catering to presumed tastes (that has changed). A couple of times a week, I’d almost literally open the bonnet of our cumbersome website – housed on a separate computer – to add or remove some text. There was no social media; you marketed via paper mailshot and the odd randomly placed and totally ineffective ad. But still the audience just came and came.

At away days, reasons for the orchestra’s existence were brainstormed. One of the headliners was ‘to provide employment for freelance musicians in the vicinity’ - an idea repeated at the orchestra I moved to next, the London Philharmonic. Something about that sat uneasily with me. Surely creativity and public service should be at the heart of an arts institution’s raison d’être, not the keeping of a small pool of individuals in a living? At least, since then, the whole ‘relevance’ debate has seen off moribund, inward-looking arguments like those.

Still, we talked more about art back then and less about the person behind it. It didn’t matter who was making the music, just that it was made sincerely and made well. I understand that some shift has been necessary in that regard. Whether or not our insistence on appraising the artist before the artwork will prove corrosive in the long term is a question I can’t pretend to know the answer to.

Manchester badly lacked opera (no change there) though my old university chum David Butt Philip used to fix me tickets to student productions at the Royal Northern College of Music. In the college bar one night, he told me he’d happily take a lifelong job as a bass in an opera chorus; this season he made his debut as a tenor soloist the Met. What a legend!

Coming from Devon, I was pinioned by the quantity of performances on offer in Manchester. This feeling was compounded when I moved to London where the metropolitan classical music industry seemed like a colossal and inexorable machine. As much as it excited me, it also created a sort of din in my head – the feeling that I would never scratch the surface of this mass of creativity. I wouldn’t wish the chaos and heartache of Covid-19 on anyone. But in slowing and even stilling the juggernaut for the first time in many decades, it has at least helped us see the wood for the trees.

It would be no bad thing if, from now, we stop to consider the reason for putting on a performance before doing so – even if that reason is as prosaic as ‘this music is amazing’. The next two decades will probably deliver far more meaningful change than the last two have, thanks to the pandemic. Out of my depth in Manchester, I survived by focusing on music. As an industry emerging from crisis, we should do the same.