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You would think a conductor would be mildly eccentric,
passionate and committed and that's what I'm expecting Robert Trory to be like.
But instead I get salmon, red wine and his mum, who is up for the day from,
"Hoveactually," which she tells me is next to Brighton.
She is nearing 80 and has her leg up on a stool. She
does the classic mum-thing of informing on her son whenever he is out of the
room: "Oh yes, he's never been able to sit still, always up to something ever
since he was tiny". |
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That "up to something" is now bringing the Royal
Philharmonic orchestra to Catford for a season. Robert is conducting it
himself. This is quite a coup. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra is a
world-class orchestra made up of some of the country's finest musicians.
Internationally they have played for Pope John Paul ll at the Vatican, the
President of China in Tiananmen Square and at the tenth anniversary
celebrations of Kazakhstan's independence. So why are they coming to
Catford?
This is in effect, "an inner city residency" says
Robert. Twenty years ago London orchestras gave concerts in provincial towns
regularly. But now local authorities have no money to subsidise such high
culture and no orchestra can afford to put on such a concert itself. Lewisham,
argues Robert, is like a provincial town - it is the same size as Leicester,
with a population of 350,000 - and so really he is updating an old idea of
bringing the culture to the community.
Over the salmon (he invited me to lunch in his home in
Nunhead) he makes circles with his fork. "It's the donut effect," he says.
Audiences in central London are made up of people from the suburbs and the
centre he says, residents from the outer boroughs (eg Lewisham) don't bother
travelling in because transport is so difficult, especially at night when
trying to get home.
So Robert, working through Sydenham Music, the
organisation he founded in 1998, has revised the idea of provincial tours and
asked, "Why do we have to bus people in to the Royal Festival Hall?" Instead,
bring the RPO out here, to Lewisham.
And handily, there is Lewisham Council, one of the most
culturally aware councils in London (if not the only one), which is not averse
to spending money on arts under their Creative Lewisham banner: promote the
arts and promote community. Lewisham has supported Sydenham Music for three
years and has granted it £50,000.
"I think we're setting up something pretty unique. I
don't think any other borough is doing anything like this," says
Robert.
There are four orchestras in London. The London
Symphony Orchestra (LSO) was established in 1901. The London Philharmonic in
the early 1930s. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra was set up in 1946 and the
Philharmonia Orchestra also in 1946.
The Royal Philharmonic is the only one not to have a
permanent home, although it has just been given a rehearsal space in Cadogan
Hall, Chelsea.
Robert has not always been a conductor. Before
studying eight years ago in Russia at the St Petersburg Conservatory with the
famous Ilya Musin (born in 1903 Musin turned to teaching when Soviet
anti-Semitism thwarted his conducting career and was professor at the
Conservatory from 1929 until he died in 1999) he was a concert violinist for
many years. A fact, he says, "that disappoints some people". He means other
musicians, the people he conducts. It is easy to imagine some members of the
highly strung world of violinists being quite put out if they knew their
conductor had, a decade ago, been one of them.
However, he is a conductor now: "I couldn't sit in an
orchestra now," he says. And he is passionate about it. Not only passionate but
good too. After his first concert with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra the
music critic Denby Richards wrote, "Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture became the
masterpiece it ought to be".
By dessert, Robert is into his stride. He has
impressed upon me how good the acoustics of the Broadway Theatre are, and he
has explained the difference between the RPO visiting Catford and the RPO
having a residency here: The residency means the orchestra will be involved in
community and schools work, as well as performing a series of four concerts
between October and April.
And after all the explanations he is finally into what
matters: the music.
"My great enthusiasm is for music at the end of the
day," he says.
"When you get a great audience, a great orchestra,
there's nothing better."
In the past six years much of his enthusiasm has been
directed into Sydenham Music, an organisation which he and his wife Nina
Whitehurst, a violinist in the RPO, established in 1998. The first concert they
put on was a fundraiser for Sudan and was in the Church of St Bartholomew.
Robert says it is his wife, Nina, who is the real reason the concerts were such
a success initially. "She just phones musicians up and they say yes". Musicians
around London, from all the different orchestras, now look forward to the
benefit concerts promoted by Sydenham Music. It is an opportunity, Robert says,
to put aside the everyday inter-orchestra politics and just enjoy playing the
music.
And it is the music that Robert is here for too. "We
do something with the music," he enthuses. In London, "We have very boring
has-been [conductors] who have nothing new to say about music and if we are
honest, are bored with the music," he says.
"I go to concerts and I sit there bored. They're
boring." This is the worst sin in Robert's world, to make music boring.
"How can you be boring with a Beethoven?" He asks
disdainfully.
"He had his own word for it - unbuttoned. You can
imagine him with his hair flying and his shirt unbuttoned. How can you be
boring with Beethoven?"
To illustrate his point he stands and hunts for two
cds. Here, he says, listen to this. It is the introduction to Beethoven's ninth
symphony and it's true, it is boring. The second cd goes on and slowly, slowly,
something happens. The air trembles as notes rise up, slowly, dangerously,
threateningly. Robert smiles, "See?" he asks. The second cd is a recording of
the Berlin Philharmoniker from 1942, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. It
was recorded from a live radio broadcast in Berlin at the height of Germany's
power during World War Two. The conductor, written off as a Nazi sympathiser
but who saved the lives of Jewish musicians by employing them in Berlin, is
driven and angry; he is performing in front of Berlin high society, throwing it
back in their faces: How can there be an Ode to Joy when there is so much
horror?
"Music is me," says Robert. "I feel desperately that
I've got so much to say about music that I'll be dead before I've finished."
This is what it's about - people and their passion, their reaction, the
audience and the orchestra creating something extraordinary for an evening,
something to remember for the rest of your life.
"I was aware of music when I was three," he says, "I
remember hearing it and thinking 'Oh, I understand this, it's a language, I
know it.'" And he weaves his fingers in the air above his head as the notes
from the past float above him.
(Written by Ed Ewing and reproduced by kind permission
of 'The Guide' & 'Living South' magazines) |
