A GLITTERING CAREER

In celebration of his 70th birthday last month, British cellist Julian Lloyd Webber shares with Julian Haylock memories of a long and fulfilling professional life – and also looks forward to returning to the stage as a conductor

Julian Lloyd Webber records Elgar’s Cello Concerto with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Yehudi Menuhin in July 1985

IMAGE TULLY POTTER COLLECTION.

For those of us lucky enough to remember Julian Lloyd Webber’s first concert appearances and recordings back in the halcyon 1970s, it seems scarcely believable that he has just reached his 70th birthday. His passion and energy would flatter a man half his age – in fact, at one point as we looked back over his distinguished career, we lost an entire decade – ‘No, can it really be that long ago?’ he smiled, ruefully.

The years have indeed flown by, yet he remembers the moment he fell in love with the cello as vividly now as if it were only yesterday: ‘When I was four years old, my mother took me to an Ernest Read orchestral concert at the Royal Festival Hall, and that was my moment of epiphany. Not only was I impressed by the cello’s sound, but it also struck me as having a very natural playing position, with everything visually right there in front of you. I was a bit upset when shortly afterwards a 1/10-size instrument arrived at home, as I wanted one of the large ones I’d seen in the concert! But I enjoyed it all so much, it was quickly forgotten. To be honest, until I was at least eleven I didn’t have a strict practice regime –I just loved to play.’

Following early lessons at home in London with Alison Dalrymple (1956–60) and then at the Royal College of Music’s junior department with Rhuna Martin (1960–4), and still aged only 13, Lloyd Webber discovered a musical soulmate in Douglas Cameron: ‘He was the perfect teacher for me at the time – very kind and generous, and had the knack of letting his pupils find their own way as potential artists. For him it was all about the music and letting technique look after itself, which suited me down to the ground.’

The following year (1965), Lloyd Webber attended a marathon series of nine concerts given by Rostropovich with conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky and the London Symphony Orchestra. ‘I went to every single one,’ he beams, ‘and quickly realised that this was playing on an entirely different level. I had never seen anything like it before – nor, indeed, have I seen anything like it since. Rostropovich had this extraordinary energy and intensity, and set up an almost hypnotic two-way communication with his audiences. Sometimes he would reduce his sound to a mere whisper, and yet you could still hear him at the back of the hall. It was after seeing him in action that I felt inspired to develop my own career as a concert soloist, to the point of emulating his ability to play his entire repertoire from memory. Even when recording contemporary works, I made sure that I had everything thoroughly memorised, often listening to taped performances late at night to help get the notes completely settled in my mind.’

Inspired by Rostropovich’s playing, Lloyd Webber spent two years (from 1968) studying with the formidable Joan Dickson. ‘I felt the sea change right away, as Joan was very hot on technique and felt there was a “right” way to solve any problems. She insisted that the left hand should be almost robotic in its precision and muscle memory, so that if one ever suffered a memory lapse in performance, it would run on autopilot. She also made sure I was able to start at any point in a given piece and produce the goods instantly without having a few bars to warm up.’

A young Lloyd Webber: ‘I just loved to play’

IMAGE COURTESY JULIAN LLOYD WEBBER

Following two years studying with Harvey Phillips (‘a lovely person, who like Dougie Cameron simply adored music and was highly knowledgeable’), Lloyd Webber rounded out his cello education in style with Pierre Fournier in Geneva in 1973. At that time, Fournier was already something of a legend, yet Lloyd Webber remembers him as modest to a fault. ‘I was about to go in for my final lesson and I could hear him playing part of Prokofiev’s Symphony-Concerto, a work that I’ve a feeling he never actually performed. I rang the bell, went in and enquired enthusiastically as to whether he was intending to play it. He turned to me, a mere 22-year-old student, and asked my opinion as to whether he should play it in public because it was so closely associated with Rostropovich!’

Having moved on from his first full-size cello, a Joseph Hill, Lloyd Webber was by now playing an instrument by renowned French luthier Paul Bailly, of which he was particularly fond. However, as he began to get more solo engagements, the time came to find something more sophisticated, and through J.&A. Beare he managed to obtain a 1690 cello –a possible Giovanni Grancino. This was in January 1974, yet despite having high hopes for the instrument, on which he made several early recordings, he now candidly admits he was never that happy with it: ‘On paper, it should have been a match made in heaven, but to be completely honest, now that my playing days are over, all I can remember about my time with the Grancino was how much I wished I could have been playing another instrument! It had very little bass worth speaking of, and I wasn’t all that enamoured with its basic sound.

‘After six years of soldiering on with the Grancino,’ Lloyd Webber recalls, ‘I decided it was time to invest in a top-notch instrument, which turned out to be a 1791 Giuseppe Guadagnini. It was a great improvement on the Grancino, but it still lacked the necessary depth in the bass register.’ Following three years with the Guadagnini, which included a number of important recordings, he became ‘fairly desperate to move on’. In 1983, he purchased the c.1690 ‘Barjansky’ Stradivari (see page 32) at auction for an eye-watering amount – allowing for inflation, around £560,000 in today’s money. It involved him having to remortgage his house and take out a substantial bank loan. ‘By then, I was enjoying a successful career as a concert artist, but was earning nowhere near enough to cover the cost of the Strad,’ he remembers, turning pale at the thought. ‘It really was something of a gamble at the time, because I hadn’t even had a chance to try it out in concert, and it had sat, unplayed, in a bank vault for several years before I acquired it. In fact, as I gradually played it in over the first few months, it was so unpredictable at times that I wondered if I’d made a terrible mistake in buying it.’

Yet it was clear from the start that it was in a different league from any instrument Lloyd Webber had owned before:

‘BUYING MY STRAD WAS SOMETHING OF A GAMBLE, BECAUSE I HADN’T EVEN HAD A CHANCE TO TRY IT OUT IN CONCERT, AND IT HAD SAT, UNPLAYED, IN A BANK VAULT FOR SEVERAL YEARS BEFORE I ACQUIRED IT’

Recording at CBS Studios, now Whitfield Street Studios, in around 1991

RECORDING IMAGE DECCA CLASSICS.

Yehudi Menuhin examines Lloyd Webber’s ‘Barjansky’ Strad

MENUHIN IMAGE MALCOLM CROWTHERS

With conductor Vernon Handley (left) and Ursula Vaughan Williams (centre)

With conductor Neville Marriner, under whom Lloyd Webber recorded Britten and Walton in 1996

Before a British Airways flight to New Zealand in 1983

WAUGHAN WILLIAMS IMAGE ERICA CREER. MARRINER IMAGE RICHARD HOLT. PLANE IMAGE DECCA CLASSICS

‘What immediately struck me was the extraordinary quality of its A string and bass sound. It is also a superb instrument for recording, as you can come in really close with the microphones and it still sounds glorious. It involved a shift in playing perspective, because whereas with my previous cellos I had always dictated the sound, now it was more a partnership of equals. It is not an instrument that reveals its distinctive qualities immediately – you have to work with it for a while to discover how to get the best out of it. I played it with the greatest pleasure from 1983 until I was forced to stop playing in 2014. Now, I’m pleased to say, it has a distinguished new custodian – Kian Soltani.’

Lloyd Webber’s experiences with bows were thankfully more straightforward: ‘I started off with a Nürnberger bow, which was quite light and flexible, but when I started giving concerts and recording in earnest I moved on to a really fine John Dodd. My main bow, however, was an Émile Ouchard, made probably by the son – father and son were both fine makers, especially of double bass bows. That may explain why the bow was quite heavy, which suited my playing style to perfection.’

‘I PLAYED ELGAR MANY TIMES WITH MENUHIN, AND EACH PERFORMANCE WAS UNIQUELY DIFFERENT IN SOME WAY’

From the start, back in the early 1970s, Lloyd Webber’s diary was a blur of engagements almost unprecedented for a concert cellist at that time. He was also highly active in the recording studio, demonstrating a particular passion for British music in several world premiere recordings for the likes of L’Oiseau-Lyre, Lyrita and ASV. In 1978, MCA released Variations (on Paganini’s 24th Caprice), a crossover work for cello and rock band composed for him by his composer brother Andrew Lloyd Webber. Then, in the early 1980s, came an exclusive contract with RCA, which included premiere recordings of pieces by Vaughan Williams, Rodrigo and Holst. A long-term exclusive contract with Philips followed in 1984, happily coinciding with his acquisition of the Stradivari cello.

‘Looking back, I think it’s fair to say that most of the recordings I’m moderately pleased with are later ones made using the Strad, with the notable exception of the Delius and Rodrigo concertos for RCA. I especially enjoyed Saint-Saëns and Honegger with Yan Pascal Tortelier, Myaskovsky and Shostakovich with Maxim Shostakovich, and the Elgar Concerto with Yehudi Menuhin, as all three conductors had a special point of contact with the music. I played the Elgar many times with Menuhin, and each performance was uniquely different in some way. Yet if I had to single out the recording I am most proud of, it would have to be the Britten Cello Symphony and Walton’s Concerto with Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, recorded in 1996. It was a real privilege at the sessions to work alongside several musicians who had been involved in the Cello Symphony’s first performances, including Neville himself (as principal second violin in the LSO), leader Kenneth Sillito (who played on the premiere recording with the English Chamber Orchestra) and percussionist Tristan Fry.’

Leading an orchestra of cellos from London music colleges

NIGEL LUCKHURST

Lloyd Webber was still at the height of his powers when in October 2013, during a recital in Southwold, Suffolk, with his pianist Rebeca Omordia, the unthinkable happened. ‘After about ten minutes I felt the power suddenly go from my bowing arm,’ he explains, still visibly shaken by the recollection. ‘It was so bad that at times, as I struggled to get through the first half of the programme, it felt as though I could hardly hold the bow. During the interval, I expressed doubts to both Rebeca and the concert organiser as to whether I would be able to finish the concert, especially as we were ending it with Rachmaninoff’s mighty Cello Sonata, of all pieces. Somehow, we made it through, but where there are rapid changes between bowing and pizzicato in the second movement I simply kept the bow going, as I hadn’t sufficient control to hold the bow and pizzicato at the same time.’

Initially, his instinct afterwards was to soldier on regardless.

‘Happily, at that time I was booked to play a series of cello duo concerts with my wife, Jiaxin Cheng, which on the whole didn’t require the stamina and technical bravado of my regular solo repertoire. In November I was involved in a wonderful gathering of my cellist chums at the Duke’s Hall, Royal Academy of Music, playing Strad cellos, and we each had a short piece to play. By now, that was about my limit –I could just about play flat out for ten minutes and then I would seriously begin to lose power.’ Following a number of consultations and scans, it was discovered that Lloyd Webber had a herniated disc in his neck. However, the necessary operation had dangers attached to it – in fact, two surgeons refused to operate as he was not actually in pain.

‘It was a terrible decision to have to make,’ he reflects, ‘but especially given the fact that I had a young family, I wanted to enjoy life to the full and felt I had no option but to retire from professional playing. I soldiered on for a while, but when I was due to play Haydn’s C major Cello Concerto in April 2014, I felt enough was enough. I replaced the Haydn with a Vivaldi two-cello concerto with my wife, rang my manager to cancel all future engagements and that was that. I can tell you that the drive back to London from Bradford after the concert was, for both of us, emotionally shattering.’

In addition to coming to terms with his enforced retirement, Lloyd Webber had to face the fact that, after forty-odd years of earning his living as a cellist, he had no regular income.It was then that his passion for music education really came to fruition. ‘My core belief is that great music should be for everyone,’ he marvels. ‘The underlying impulse for everything I had done was to bring music to a wider audience. It was an act of celebration. When I started out, virtually every county had a decent youth orchestra –I played concertos with a number of them, most of which sadly no longer exist. Music was once considered a vital part of the curriculum, and instrumental lessons were free and widely available in state schools. I feel it should not be a question of whether children can afford lessons or instruments – music should be their birthright. To deny children the opportunity of experiencing some of mankind’s greatest creations is scandalous. It can make a huge difference to their lives, no more so than at the present time when we could all benefit from the solace that great music of any kind can bring.’

During the 1990s there was an increasing sense of music becoming marginalised in schools; by the early 2000s, Lloyd Webber felt something needed to be done. In 2003, he formed the Music Education Consortium with Evelyn Glennie and James Galway to petition the government, and in 2007 he had a special meeting with Prime Minister Gordon Brown at 10 Downing Street and managed to get an extra £332m ring-fenced for music education. The following year, he started the In Harmony programme in order to bring music education to disadvantaged areas, and there are still six programmes in operation that are making a huge difference to children’s lives. In 2013, he managed to get the government to climb down from its plans to take music out of the curriculum.

‘Becoming principal of the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in 2015 felt like an entirely natural step,’ he reflects, ‘as my father, William, had been principal of the London College of Music, and also taught at the Royal College for most of his life. I enjoyed my five years in Birmingham enormously. I was surrounded by gifted young musicians, which was enormously contagious, and we managed to start a scheme with Naxos whereby the most talented students would be able to record their debut album. Four have been released so far and have been well received, and another two are ready to go. That said, as the conservatoire is also part of Birmingham City University, I did find the sense of not having an entirely free rein to run things exactly as I would have liked rather challenging.’

The wonderful thing is that Lloyd Webber is now back performing – but as a conductor. His debut disc of English string music with the ECO for Naxos won rave reviews. It was recorded back in April 2014, just before he publicly announced his retirement from playing, and also includes the world premiere recording of him playing Howard Goodall’s 2008 piece for cello and strings An d the Bridge Is Love. He was due to conduct a concert this April with the Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra and cellist Niklas Eppinger, featuring Mozart’s Magic Flute Overture, Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto no.1 and the Franck Symphony in D minor. News of its cancellation, due to Covid-19 restrictions, reached us just after our interview, yet Lloyd Webber’s passion and enthusiasm remain undimmed. ‘These are pieces I simply adore,’ he beams, ‘so hopefully we can reschedule the concert sometime very soon.’

‘IT SHOULD NOT BE A QUESTION OF WHETHER CHILDREN CAN AFFORD LESSONS OR INSTRUMENTS – MUSIC SHOULD BE THEIR BIRTHRIGHT’