From the Leader's Chair

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About The Author

In this absorbing memoir, Kenneth Sillito looks back over a long and distinguished career that saw him emerge from the coal-mining towns of the northeast to become one of the most admired violinists of his generation. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music in 1971 and awarded the prestigious Cobbett Medal in 2017 by the Worshipful Company of Musicians for Services to Chamber Music. As leader of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, the English Chamber Orchestra and Gabrieli String Quartet, Kenneth takes us behind the scenes of a golden period in British music-making. Illuminated by fascinating recollections of the many legendary artists he worked with, he brings to life an extraordinary career that embraced everything from performing in Carnegie Hall to appearing in Paul McCartney’s Give my Regards to Broad Street.

Dedication

I dedicate this memoir to my childhood musical mentor, Valentine Orde, MBE (1889–1983)

Copyright Information ©

Kenneth Sillito (2019)

The right of Kenneth Sillito to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528904858 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528957823 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2019)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

25 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5LQ

Acknowledgement

This memoir came into existence because of a WEA (Workers’ Education Association) talk I gave in my village entitled Pivotal Moments in a Musical Life. The response to this was, typically, You must write all of this down! But it was not until later, when I was interviewed for the Strad Magazine by Julian Haylock on various aspects of leading, that the idea of writing this memoir took shape. I have to sincerely thank my wife, Esmé, for continually cajoling this reluctant author to put pen to paper. My thanks must also go especially to Julian Haylock, who so generously gave invaluable advice and encouragement.

Introduction

Help me, Ken! This was hardly an everyday request from a conductor to the leader of the English Chamber Orchestra, especially as the maestro in question was Benjamin Britten, one of the finest musicians of the 20th century. We were waiting backstage with just two minutes to go before a broadcast concert of Schumann’s rarely-heard Scenes from Goethe’s Faust, a choral masterpiece very close to Ben’s heart. He was standing there white as a sheet and panic-stricken, but there was simply no turning back. The red light came on and after mouthing a few comforting words, I went onstage trying to look as unconcerned as possible as I took the leader’s chair. For a few seconds, I wondered whether Ben was going to appear, but at the last moment, he pulled himself together, emerged from the wings and conducted the performance of a lifetime.

That was the closest shave I had experienced at a concert since making my Proms debut, when I’d had to borrow a pair of braces from a doorman in order to prevent my trousers from falling down! Yet, it set me thinking just how far I’d come in 30 years, from my relatively humble beginnings to working with some of the finest musicians in the world. It had all felt so effortless and natural, almost as though my life had been predetermined. But could it really have been that easy?

Chapter 1

A Musician in the Family

The terrors of the Second World War were only six months away when I was born on 5 March 1939, the first and only child of a Northumbrian working class family with strong mining traditions. We lived in a modest, two-bed Victorian terraced house in the small village of Stakeford, about 17 miles north-east of Newcastle. Incredible though it seems today, there was no inside toilet, no bathroom and no running water—just a standpipe in the unmade lane that ran behind the back yard on the other side of a barbed-wire fence. The lane was adjacent to a farmer’s field and the River Wansbeck was just five minutes’ walk away, so we had the pleasant sensation of countryside surrounding us. In fact, Stakeford had quite a rural, unspoilt feel to it, unlike the nearby town of Ashington, with its rows of back-to-back terraces housing a population of 25,000, the majority of whom were miners

There was no garden as such, just a brick-paved yard with a wooden shack and, most importantly, a coal shed, which had a door in the wall so that the colliery could deliver the free coal that Walter, my miner father, was entitled to. Next to that was an outside toilet and a scullery. Friday nights felt special because I could splash around in a zinc bath in front of the fire.

As a child, one simply accepted these things—after all, I was no worse than the other children in the surrounding area. We had no car, although my father had a motor bike which he liked to dabble with occasionally. He was also an avid wireless enthusiast and I’ve a feeling he wanted to be a radio ham. It was something of an event if someone purchased a television set in our area. With the Queen’s coronation in 1953, things changed dramatically of course, and everyone wanted one of these magic, flickering screens in the corner of their living room. But that was still some 14 years in the future.

My dad had to ride five miles there and back from Stakeford to Woodhorn Colliery every day, and used to return home blackened from head to foot with coal dust. He’d then take a bath in front of a warm stove using heated water from an enormous kettle—showers were only installed at the colliery some years later.

Amongst my earliest memories is the incessant howling of the air-raid sirens that warned of aerial attacks on the Tyne-and-Wear shipyards. We occasionally saw a stray enemy aircraft fly over the village and I remember being put in a cupboard under the stairs in a probably futile attempt to shelter me from any local bombings. Towards the end of the War, when I was about five, I noticed several gangs of rather swarthy-looking men, whom most of the locals referred to as ‘Ities’. It wasn’t until much later that I realised that these had been Italian prisoners-of-war working as labourers on local farms.

I remember one particular visit to my maternal grandparents, who lived in Blaydon-on-Tyne on the other side of the river in County Durham. There was a nasty diphtheria epidemic going around at the time, so when I awoke one morning with an incredible thirst, burning throat and raging temperature, I was promptly whisked along to the hospital in Winlaton, an old steel-making town a few miles from Gateshead. I was quite ill for a time and the first sign I was over the worst occurred one night when the only thing I could find to ease my throat was a tube of Maclean’s toothpaste, which I downed with relish! By then, I had been confined to bed for so long that I had to be helped to walk again by one of the older lads in hospital. My parents were clearly shaken by this episode, but otherwise, my father remained a quite reserved, even taciturn man. Still waters run very deep however, and on reflection, I think there was far more going on beneath his calm exterior than he was willing to show. He was a miner all his life—it was virtually the only job open to you if you wished to remain in your birthplace (as most people did back then). He had a few violin lessons as a child, but sadly, gave it up after starting down the mines at the tender age of 14. I sensed a deep regret in him that he had not been given the chance to fully develop his musical potential, so in a way, I think he came to live that part of his life through me.

My mum, Margaret, was the oldest of ten children from a Blaydon-on-Tyne mining family and, like my dad, none of her relatives were especially musical. Looking back, I think she felt she had the thin end of the wedge, as it was Dad who was the driving force behind my playing the violin, and she was left with the unenviable job of making sure I put in the practice! She harboured a kind of inner sadness I think, although we never talked about it. She had been sent to Hampstead Garden Suburb in north London during her late teens to work as a live-in domestic help for the celebrated pianist-composer, Billy Mayerl, whose delightful miniatures Marigold and Orange Blossom were all the rage at the time. For some reason, she returned home in her early 20s and I think that having seen the lights and tasted something of the glamour of the big city, she never quite readjusted to the parochialism of Blaydon, Stakeford and the surrounding area.

I never discovered how my parents first met, but as my dad had a motorbike, I can only assume that he must have journeyed over to Blaydon at some point and they took a fancy to each other. Also living at home with us was my father’s great aunt, a spinster known to me as ‘Nana’, who actually owned the house. She taught me a number of hymns and carols, as well as the odd ballad and how to read music, albeit in a sketchy manner.

Nana also owned a harmonium (she had to play the pedals as my feet couldn’t reach them), an English concertina (which was far too large and heavy for a young child), and a decrepit, full-size, factory-made violin—I vaguely remember the name ‘Wolf Brothers’ on the inside label. My father asked me which of the three instruments I wanted to learn, and I pointed out that since the violin was the lightest to hold, it was the obvious choice. Little did I know it at the time, but the course of my entire life was mapped out by this almost casual decision.

Although I was reasonably tall for my age, my left arm was still too short to reach first position at the opposite end of the violin’s fingerboard. Nowadays, the problem is solved easily by obtaining an inexpensive, half-size Chinese instrument, but in 1940s Northumberland, such a thing was almost unheard of. While my dad looked into the possibility of locating a suitable instrument, I spent most of the next three months with the violin held near my shoulder, bowing the open strings. This saved the neighbours a little agony as I could only play four different notes, given the odd squeak along the way as I experimented placing my fingers on the strings. The upside was that this gave me a chance to concentrate on my bowing and creating a decent sound before having to worry what my left hand was up to!

My dad was working night-shifts at the time, so he was able to spend his spare daytime tracking down a smaller violin. This, of course, was in the days before mobile phones and the internet, so virtually everything had to be done by word of mouth. Anyway, the great day eventually came, and Dad arrived home with a rather nice Czechoslovakian, factory-made instrument. I was so thrilled, I dashed home for lunch the following day to practise and became so involved in what I was doing that I ended up being three-quarters-of-an-hour late back to school.

The headmistress at my local primary, which was just over the road from where we lived, must have been amazed when I announced excitedly in the local Geordie vernacular that Me dad has brought the fiddle yehm [home], Miss. This was her first inkling that there was to be a violinist in the school. She was actually very supportive and my first performance as a fiddle-player in front of any kind of audience was during morning assembly there, playing Handel’s Largo. I remember noticing halfway through that I hadn’t tightened-up my bow sufficiently. We learn by our mistakes, however, and I certainly made sure that never happened again.

We didn’t own a gramophone, but we had a radio that my father had built and which we used to listen to every Sunday evening, most especially a music programme entitled Grand Hotel, which offered a varied selection of popular, light classical pieces. The salon orchestra was led by a fine violinist, Albert Sandler, who always played two short solos in the middle of the programme. Guest violinists included the great Max Jaffa and Tom Jenkins, a gifted pupil of the renowned Hungarian pedagogue Carl Flesch, with a dazzling technique.

One of the solos I remember hearing was the popular Czardas by Vittorio Monti, played by a wonderful violinist who was then earning a living by playing with his own salon orchestra in the Lyons Corner House—his name was Alfredo Campoli. Dad told me that Campoli had given a recital in Ashington before the War and had to play six encores before the audience would let him go. He was a fantastic player with a beautiful sound, but the rather stuffy classical music critics of the time never let him forget his light-music background.

My first violin teacher was my dad, who took the opportunity to brush up his concertina playing so that he could play the second part in Pleyel’s violin duets with me. I’ll never forget my first lesson. Dad placed a pencil on the kitchen table and asked me to pick it up. Instead of grabbing it in my palm, which is the natural tendency, I instinctively gathered it up with my fingers—That’s basically how you hold the bow, he told me. And I never forgot it. We also owned a special tutor manual, which had a violin fingerboard that folded out so that I could practise the various positions, up and down.

Dad was especially concerned to ensure that the fourth finger of my left hand possessed strength equal to the other three (always a problem for violinists), and actually wrote out an exercise in the form of a scale that required the fourth finger to play every other note. This was part of my daily practice and I had to keep a note of how long I had worked on it. Eventually, instead of giving me pocket money, he paid me threepence an hour as a reward for a minimum amount of daily practice. However, it soon became so expensive—especially at weekends, when I would play virtually non-stop all day—that he had to cut it to a penny!

After about 18 months, Dad felt it was time for me to have a new teacher. Any parent who has tried to tutor their own children, especially the same instrument, will know that more attention is paid to a voice outside the family unit, even though the information is essentially the same. I have experienced this many times when I have been invited to listen to someone else’s pupil and made a suggestion, only for the teacher to exclaim: Thank you. I’ve been saying that for the last six months—now he might believe me! Anyway, Dad took me along to Mr Tommy Lawes, who was actually the local greengrocer. Lawes had studied the violin more seriously than my dad had been given the chance to and knew more about the basic violin literature, which was extremely helpful.

The curious thing is that once I got going on my half-size Czech violin, I can’t remember ever not being able to play it. I’m sure I must have gone through the inevitable agonised sawings and scrapings, but I enjoyed it all so much that all I can recall now are feelings of great excitement and contentedness. Shortly before my father’s death in 1990, he told me I had cried a lot as a baby and that the only thing guaranteed to soothe me was the sound of a violin on the radio. So, it would seem that my love of the instrument was there from the very beginning.

Chapter 2

Enter Valentine Orde

When I first began studying the violin at the tender age of seven, the likes of Beethoven and Mozart were quite unknown to me. This quickly changed, however, as I began listening to ‘live’ concerts broadcast at seven in the evening on the Third Programme, as it was known in those days—I was allowed to stay up late on Fridays specially to listen to the ‘star’ recital. I heard many remarkable violinists in this way, including Max Rostal and Ida Haendel, all playing live at 10:15 P.M.

There were also Promenade Concerts broadcast live from London’s Royal Albert Hall during the summer months, and I looked forward particularly to those featuring a violin soloist. One affected me very deeply at the time—the great Ginette Neveu playing Brahms’s Violin Concerto. Although I was still only ten years old, I could not believe what I was hearing—there was an extraordinary depth to her sound, and I experienced the strange sensation that she was somehow living through the music as she played it. That was in 1949 and she was still only 30 years old at the time. Just two months later, she was tragically killed in a plane crash, when a scheduled flight she was travelling on in the Azores was forced to land in bad weather and hit a mountain.

During that halcyon initial period of contact with the