Orchestra Manager of the Year: Julia Desbruslais

The arrival of ‘Lockdown Mark One’ in March 2020 found the London Mozart Players already deep into the business of organising a rapid shift online. ‘The week before the lockdown was announced I suddenly realised what such a course of action would mean both for the players’ livelihoods and for our audience,’ recalls Julia Desbruslais, the just-retired LMP executive director. ‘We were faced with the evaporation of our year’s schedule of 150 concerts. Clearly, we couldn’t risk losing touch with our dedicated supporters. Yet all we’d really made available online previously were a few concerts on YouTube.’

What happened next — and, more specifically, what continued to evolve through the following season — resulted in Desbruslais picking up the Association of British Orchestras/Classical Music Orchestra Manager of the Year Award for 2021. The first round of online content across spring and summer 2020 was designed to cater for a wide range of tastes and ages. A freshly conceived video of Peter and the Wolf (masterminded by Tim Henty, with narration from Alexander Armstrong) was an immediate hit, with a global reach. Other offerings included a wide array of contributions from orchestra players themselves, recorded on smartphones in lockdown seclusion. A string of At Home with LMP videos, still available online, bears witness to this. Into the mix went behind-the-scenes interviews, concerts-in-miniature, and items for younger age-ranges. Concert and recital performances were enhanced to meet the expectations of an internet generation audience.

A key element to the online innovations which have silver-lined the LMP’s Covid cloud in the last two years has been one basic principle, says Desbruslais, ‘The finished material has to be of the highest standard. It’s a matter of integrity. After all, musicians are perfectionists and whatever is presented online has to be the very best we can make it.’

Julia Desbruslais ©Kevin Day

This set the tone was for Desbruslais’ award-winning work through the 2020/21 LMP season and beyond. First up, the launch of the LMP’s Classical Club concerts, made available online from both familiar LMP locations and an imaginative range of other London venues, including St Pancras Clock Tower, the Great Conservatory at Syon Park and the Royal Hospital, Chelsea. All part of a value-drive, online-savvy approach which refused to allow a reversion to the safe and sensible in a time of crisis. All supported - naturally - by an incisive, vibrant approach to social media, constantly updated.

Desbruslais insisted the LMP’s online offer should embrace a commitment to young performers. The orchestra built on its existing long-term relationship with talent on the books of the Young Concert Artists Trust. ’It’s always hard for young musicians to get exposure as they enter the profession…but all the more so during the Covid crisis. It’s so important to support them. And they’re phenomenal!’

On into 2021. The popular lunchtime series Piano Explored with LMP conductor laureate Howard Shelley found itself online…behind a paywall. Desbruslais’ decision to use this business model from now on may have seemed brave, but she insists it ‘was important to establish that we couldn’t be giving away our players’ talents for nothing. In any case, what people pay for, they tend to value more. We found they were willing to pay…and in many cases make donations on top. Did the books balance? No, we had to rely to some extent on our financial reserves…but it was important to affirm a principle, while at the same time building our profile and developing connections.’ Indeed, the LMP’s new online presence has garnered it new followers in many parts of the world. Who knows what touring potential may emerge as a consequence?

The nomination (from within the LMP) for Desbruslais’ award cited the way in which her ‘genuine care for social justice and community cohesion was behind the formation of the LMP’s partnership with the Black Lives in Music diversity-orientated organisation…Julia’s trademark quiet resolve resulted in us working to implement meaningful changes to our programming and internal operations, while also supporting colleagues in the sector to do the same’.

Also cited was Desbruslais’ deep commitment to the LMP’s education offering, not least in the added dimension it brought to the orchestra’s new Spotlight On… concert series last summer, which featured the likes of young stars Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Jess Gillam and Leia Zhu, the orchestra’s new artist in residence. Building on the LMP’s long tradition of working in local schools to deliver personalised coaching and mentoring, the availability of the ‘spotlighted’ artists made possible workshop appearances in Croydon schools. Yet more numbers which contributed towards Desbruslais’ target of the LMP reaching, either live or online, at least 100,000 schoolchildren during the pandemic.

Says Desbruslais: ‘I think of a local school where normally there’s no music at all. Our players went in to introduce the pupils to the cello and violin while also telling them all about Sheku Kanneh-Mason. The children then came to the Fairfield Halls to meet Sheku at our rehearsal and had the chance to ask him any questions they liked…even about football! Sheku also worked with young cellists from the Croydon youth orchestra and performed a piece with them. All of this was filmed and made part of our online offer to schools.’

That award nomination goes on to recount that Desbruslais’ ‘leadership of the LMP over the past season is made even more remarkable by the fact that all of these achievements and more were completed at a time when Julia should have already taken her retirement, which she postponed in order to ensure LMP’s ongoing success.’

For her part, Desbruslais stresses time and again the talent of the team around her. All in all, she sees the pandemic as having been ‘an amazing catalyst. It’s done us a real favour. It’s shown us up…shown us where we were missing the mark, where we were stuck in our ways…where we’ve not been truly audience-facing and not appreciated the need to communicate.’

You can fid out more about the London Mozart Players here.