Interview with Hilary Davan Wetton
by Bethany Tillerson (photo credit: Naomi Lambert)

This month, My Life in Music features Hilary Davan Wetton. This composer has directed and conducted the City of London Choir, the Milton Keynes City Orchestra, and the London Mozart Players in recordings such as Holst’s The Planets, Flowers of the Field, and The Nation’s Favorite Carols. He speaks with Naomi Lambert about his outlook on his life in music.

LAMBERT: I’d love to have the opportunity to help our listeners understand the breadth of your career and your experience. Could you tell us a bit about your conducting career and how it’s evolved over the decades?

WETTON: I went to the Royal College of Music when I was 16 to study the organ with the great George Thalben-Ball, possibly the greatest organist in the postwar period. My second study was piano, but my piano teacher was terribly boring, and she found me boring to teach because I didn’t practice enough. So I went to see the Deputy Principal of the Royal College of Music and asked if there was anything else I could do. He said, “Well, we’re starting a new conducting class. You want to be a cathedral organist, so you need to be able to conduct. Why don’t you join that?” My first rehearsal with the college orchestra was the Franck Symphony in D Minor. I got the score the day before the rehearsal; that didn’t bother me at all because in those days I had no idea what it meant, I just stood up and waved my arms. I still play the organ and I love the organ, but the conducting overtook it quite quickly. I conducted my first professional concert when I was 17, a performance of Messiah in 1961.

LAMBERT: So you were one of the pioneers of the conducting class at the Royal College.

WETTON: They ran a very high-caliber course until about the beginning of the Second World War, and then it lapsed until about 15 years after the war. There was some conducting going on, but there was no formal class. There were about ten of us who did conducting, and the standard was quite varied. Then I started with George Hurst at the Canford School of Music in the summer. He was a brilliant teacher, and I thought I knew all there was to know about conducting.

In my post-graduate year, I saw this poster for Sir Adrian Boult and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra doing Brahms Four which is one of my favorite pieces. I hadn’t been silly enough to try to conduct that, however arrogant I was. I went to see it with my wife and I suddenly realized I knew nothing about conducting at all because I had never seen someone exercising that level of control. Boult started with the Shropshire Lad, Rhapsody of Butterworth, the wonderful composer who was killed in the First World War. I’d never heard of it, and I was just stunned by the piece. It was so fantastic. And Boult knew it. He’d done the first performance, he knew it backwards, he knew exactly how to make it work. And I thought to myself, Oh, my goodness, I know nothing.

So I wrote a card saying, Please, can I come study with you, and I gave it to the porter at his hotel, who put it under his door. Boult transformed the way I look at conducting and music. The second is more important than the first; technique of conducting is useful, but it’s not critical in the way that it is on a piano. A conductor with poor technique can still make music, it just makes harder work for the people in front of them. You need to know how to look at the score and see what’s going on “below the surface of the notes”, was Boult’s phrase. He would make you see and hear things which you simply wouldn’t have gotten unless you had someone to guide you.

LAMBERT: Would you say there’s a particular score that stands out for you as being really challenging?

WETTON: My proudest achievement, perhaps, is the First Symphony of Elgar, which I did with the National Children’s Orchestra; you have to retire out of it by age 15. The Music Director of that organization asked me to do it because he knew I was an Elgarian.

They had a whole week to look at it. With a whole week, you have a chance to get quite deeply into the music, and the technical imperfection that came from these young musicians being 14 didn’t matter as much, because they understood what was going on. Of course, these were the 100 most gifted musicians in the country under 15; nonetheless, it’s an extraordinary thing for those kids to be playing Elgar. I was very anxious about it, I didn’t know how I was going to sell this sophisticated adult piece to these young people who love playing Rimsky-Korsakov or Stravinsky’s Firebird. Elgar needs something rather more profound in the way you understand it as you play. They somehow did that, and I thought that was spectacular.

LAMBERT: Some of the recordings we have of your work are with the Milton Keynes Orchestra. Explain to us how that came about and how you founded it.

WETTON: I came to Milton Keynes because I was director of music at Cranleigh, but after seven years of being there, I just felt that it was time I did something with the real people rather than people who had a lot of money and a lot of privilege. So I came to Milton Keynes because the job was a completely blank sheet. I was appointed Director of Music for this new city, and I had some money from the borough council and the development corporation to start an orchestra.

It was a new city, and that particular time meant there was enormous enthusiasm among people who wouldn’t necessarily have been classical buffs to get things going. The new city needed an arts life. A lot of people who were music lovers saw that and were prepared to support it and the local businesses wanted to be seen helping the city. It was terribly easy, to be honest, to raise the money. Nowadays, it would be terribly difficult, probably impossible. I was just lucky. I was just there at the right moment.

LAMBERT: During your time there, some of the recordings you did were of music which people had entirely forgotten about. Could you talk a little bit about how you came across those pieces?

WETTON: I’m sorry to say that my life has just been an accident, but it is absolutely true. Obviously, when I first got the orchestra started, there was no way anyone was going to fund a recording, and the orchestra had no money to fund one. And then I was asked by the development corporation, a government-funded body charged with the PR for the city, to make a recording.

There was no point in recording a Chopin piano concerto, because there were 150 recordings of those, and I happened to have been asked to conduct a William Sterndale Bennet symphony with the BBC in Belfast. It’s a terrific piece. His fourth piano concerto is as difficult as anything written by Chopin or Mendelssohn.

Bennett invented a sound I’ve never come across before, which is strings played pizzicato as the piano plays single notes over the top of it. The first couple of times it’s enchanting, and the third time he adds a flute going the opposite direction. So it’s pizzicato strings, single notes on the piano, and a flute; this is very sophisticated orchestration. No one else has ever done it, and it’s bewitching music. That recording was a bit of a success.

If you want to get your work heard and you have an orchestra which most people haven’t heard of compared with the LPO or the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the thing not to do is to record music that has been recorded by a lot of other people. What you actually want to do is record music which is interesting, so people will buy it, whoever’s performing it.

We did finally record two Mendelssohn symphonies, the First and the Fifth. They’re the least well-known, but they’re still quite well recorded. And we got this wonderful review in Gramophone Magazine which said that the Keynes performance is lean and driven and exciting, and the Berlin Philharmonic is wonderfully lush and relaxed. And I think it’s the only time our music has been compared in any way to the Berlin Philharmonic.

LAMBERT: I wanted to talk a bit about your work with choral groups. Most choral groups in the U.K. are amateurs. What’s it like working with different groups with different dynamics and people who have busy lives? They are obviously passionate about the music, but they’re not necessarily as polished as the orchestras.

WETTON: You have to adopt a slightly different style. I’ve written a book about conducting, and I do talk specifically about the difference between amateur choirs and professional orchestras. I like both enormously. When I used to go to Guildford from Milton Keynes, in order to get up there you get on a train, and the journey is long and not always attractive. Rail services in this country are only medium quality, and you would arrive thinking, “Do I really want to go on doing this?” Within 15 minutes these people show up, but—and this is the definition of the word amateur–they come because they love doing it. If they didn’t love doing it, they stopped coming.

That’s what I say in my book to young conductors. It’s your job to make amateurs feel like they’re having a great time. If you don’t do that, they won’t bother to come. Professional musicians will put up with irritating conductors because they’re being paid to be there and they want to buy the groceries. An amateur singer will not go on with a conductor who irks them, so it’s part of your job to enthuse them about the idea of singing, about the music, about your enthusiasm for them, and then they give back to you in spades.

LAMBERT: I wanted to talk about your work on a CD featuring Holst’s compositions, which I was involved with while you were leading it. What was that like, having worked at St Paul’s Girls’ School and discovering quite a lot of Holst’s music there?

WETTON: I don’t want to overstate this, but I did think some of it was due to his picture being directly behind me. I sat in the chair in which he started to write The Planets. I had in front of me the desk upon which he’d written The Planets, and a lot of other things too, possibly even the Choral Symphony. And his presence was still there in the school.

We had all of his manuscripts and letters. I was performing that music every week. I think it does help you to understand how the pieces fit together. I don’t think my insight is unique, but I do think that it means you have sympathy with the way it works. Holst was a man who understood voices. He conducted his own choirs a lot and he knew what works.

LAMBERT: What are some of your favorite pieces?

WETTON: Of course, I’m going to go straight to Butterworth’s Shropshire Rhapsody. I think this is an extraordinary piece. There’s one great piece, his song cycle on the Housman poems, and some of the music from those songs is incorporated into this 12-minute orchestral fantasy, which I think is one of the greatest pieces of the 20th century from any country. It is a spellbinding piece. It was written just before the war, just like Holst’s The Planets. “Mars” was not written during the war, it’s one of these prophesying pieces in which the horrors of mechanical warfare are in his head before he’s ever seen them. It’s very much the same with Butterworth. This is a piece of huge nostalgia and sadness and yet great beauty. You feel the English countryside around you, but you feel people limping around it rather than cavorting around the Maypole. It was a prophetic piece, and the textures and melodies are just spellbinding. I don’t know how well it’s known in the United States, but I think it should be known more.

Join us to listen to Hilary Davan Wetton’s full interview on Monday, July 3rd. Listen on TheClassicalStation.org, 89.7 FM, or our app!