Here's a little writeup about a gentleman I admire that I want to share with you. He did many recordings of arrangements by Angela Morley, the great arranger/orchestrator who left us this past january.
John Wilson's plea for 'light music'
Conductor John Wilson is on a crusade to bring 'light music' back to the concert hall.
By Ivan Hewett
Published: 5:34PM BST 24 Jun 2009
'Light music” - the very words evoke a bygone age of Lyons Corner Houses, thés dansants and Workers’ Playtime. But for one young conductor, light music will always be cutting-edge.
“I would stick my neck out and say it’s just as good on its own terms as Brahms and Beethoven,” says John Wilson. “Look at something like Eric Coates’s London Suite; the way he creates mood and colour is so brilliant. The emotional range might be smaller, but the level of craftsmanship is just as high.”
Wilson has been fighting his crusade to bring light music and the great film composers back to the concert hall for 15 years. In the early Nineties, fresh out of the Royal College of Music, he founded the John Wilson Orchestra, which this summer gets two high-profile outings: once at the Cheltenham Festival, in a programme of classic film scores, and then at the Proms, for a celebration of MGM musicals.
He has revived long-forgotten film scores, recorded the soundtrack for Kevin Spacey’s Beyond the Sea (a biopic of Bobby Darin), he has arranged film scores for sell-out American tours, and is a chum of André Previn and John Williams. These days he is permanently on the road, conducting top-rank British orchestras.
It’s quite an achievement for someone still in his thirties, and I’m expecting to meet someone with an LA-style permatan, a Rolex watch and a personal assistant in tow.
Instead I’m faced with a slender, slightly myopic, pale young man, still with a broad Gateshead accent. He could pass for a university librarian or a computer programmer. But when I ask how he got started, it soon becomes clear that under the modesty is an amazing native gift, coupled with extraordinary self-confidence.
“I was always interested in what people call light music, and I started to learn the piano. I think I got it from my mother, who was very musical, and loved to watch old films. I started playing for rehearsals in amateur dramatics, and one day the pianist fell sick and someone asked me to take over for the performance for £30. I was really worried because I hadn’t got £30, but then someone explained that it was for me.”
One thing led to another, and soon the precocious pianist was conducting productions. “That’s also when I started arranging, because I decided that if I only had 15 players and the score demanded 30 I would just rearrange it to make it sound right. So by the time I was 16 I had been conducting and arranging for a couple of years.”
At 16 he founded the Newcastle Symphony Orchestra; at 18 he went to the Royal College, where, as he puts it, “I could form a different orchestra every week.” By the age of 22 he was out in the world arranging music for Radio 2’s Friday Night Is Music Night, and scouring libraries and archives for music for his newly formed John Wilson Orchestra.
“I was determined to get that wonderful Fifties sound you hear on those great MGM musicals, so I booked the best players. It’s the same now. You wouldn’t believe how many section principals and orchestral leaders I’ve got in the string section!” he says proudly. “And we did top-quality repertoire – Gershwin, Cole Porter, all in fabulous arrangements.”
By 2002, the orchestra had its first Queen Elizabeth Hall concert, and in 2004 Wilson conducted his first MGM Live concert. Talking about this brings a crusading gleam to his eye.
“I realised that an awful lot of this music had disappeared. It turned out that MGM threw out all the scores for their great musicals like Singin’ in the Rain and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. They were used as landfill for a car park. So I had to track down the short scores and parts. It’s been a 10-year project.”
Getting the style right involved studying a man who, for Wilson, is a neglected master of 20th-century music.
“Conrad Salinger was a house orchestrator for MGM, and he was really in the Ravel class. André Previn reckons he’s the greatest who ever lived. I’ve learned lots of tricks from him.”
Would he describe himself as a perfectionist? “Oh, it’s got to be right. I once spent a whole Sunday morning on just four bars from The Wizard of Oz.”
We’ve been talking about American film composers, but it’s only when I ask Wilson about future plans that the truth finally comes out.
“People think I’m a film music nerd, but my real passion is English music. What I’d really like to do is conduct all the Vaughan Williams symphonies.”
What makes English music special for him? “Oh, I can’t explain it. It’s that wistfulness and longing and melancholy. Elgar’s symphonies I think are in the Beethoven class. I have fights with people in the pub about that.”
The idea of Wilson getting in a fight is wonderfully improbable; but then so is his charmed life-story, which is the stuff of a good musical itself.
