NEWCASTLE'S MUSICAL HERITAGE AN INTRODUCTION By ...

The end of the hostilities heralded a return to touring artists and eventually a
more regular pattern to the concert life in the city, but the rise of the cinema,
improved recording standards and increased record sales captured more and
more people’s interests and as a result live classical and operatic musical events
suffered; there were often vacant seats at the City Hall, even for what one would
call special musical events. It was also particularly noticeable that Newcastle had
all but died in the artistic sense. The organisations that had sought to uphold
musical standards within the town were gone, or dormant, and what was left in
their place was mostly amateurs struggling valiantly to hold on to the town’s
musical traditions. Visiting professional artists raised expectations as did radio
and recordings and music lovers began demanding and expecting only the best
and were dismissive of anything else. My introduction to concert going was
through Newcastle’s amateur organisations. My first concert was by the King’s
College Choral and Orchestral Society – it was their eightieth – I was thrilled but
the playing was probably only competent. If my memory serves me correctly,
however, it was better than my second concert a week later when I attended the
Northumberland Orchestral Society’s annual concert at the City Hall. Looking
again at the programme after fifty-six years I see that the orchestra comprised
mostly ladies in the string section; refugees from the Newcastle Symphony
Orchestra no doubt. There were also three of my Post Office colleagues on brass
and French horn. Weeks later in the City Hall I attended my first professional
concert by the Amsterdam Concertgebouw under its conductor Eduard van
Beinum, when they played Wagner’s Overture, ‘Die Meistersanger’ and
Tchaikovsky’s ‘Pathetique’ Symphony. This one experience was to change my
life forever.
Concert life in the city became a combination of orchestral concerts sponsored
by what had by then become the Arts Council, and Celebrity Concerts promoted
by a number of impresarios who were active at the time; Harold Holt, Harold
Fielding, Gorlinsky and two mavericks Eugene Iskoldoff and Lynford-Joel
Productions, whom we shall return to later. The big name impresarios presented,
in the immediate post war period, artists who were English or from the
Commonwealth. The BBC Northern Orchestra came to town under Sir Thomas
Beecham, back from America. Beecham would return to Newcastle often and he
could always be relied upon to entertain with his devilish wit even before he
raised his baton and frequently after. The London Philharmonic, The Royal
Philharmonic and one of those short lived wartime bands, the London
International Orchestra all played at the City Hall in this period. By the later
1940s and moving into the 1950s there was a regular flow of orchestras and
artists. The year 1947 saw visits by Claudio Arrau, the Chilean pianist, Jussi
Bjorling, Swedish tenor from the Metropolitan Opera, New York and the Czech
Philharmonic Orchestra with Raphael Kubelik. The following year, Sunday 14 th
October, saw the first post war visit of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
conducted – not by Furtwangler (politically dubious) or by Karajan (even more
so) but by Sergiu Celebidache, who had been very carefully chosen as he was
Romanian and politically ‘squeaky clean’ so to speak. Emotions were still running
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