Edward Gardner on the LPO, Tippett, and Britten

Edward Gardner has been Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra since September 2021, kicking off his tenure with a Gramophone Award-winning performance of Michael Tippett's 1955 opera, The Midsummer Marriage. Since then, he has conducted several recordings for the orchestra's own label (celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year), including a new album of three works by Benjamin Britten: Sinfonia da Requiem, an orchestration of the song cycle Winter Words by Robin Holloway (featuring tenor Nicky Spence), and Gardner's own suite from the ballet The Prince of the Pagodas. I spoke to Edward regarding his recollections of conducting the orchestra for the very first time, why he chose such an ambitious work as Tippett's opera for his opening concert, and his thoughts on those three pieces by Britten.

Your guest-conducting debut with the LPO was back in 2003. Do you remember much about that concert, and what your memories of the orchestra were?

I was too young to be standing in front of them, I'll tell you that for a start! They were brilliant, of course, but much less forgiving than they are now. It was Dvořák Seven, a piece we have recently come back to, and I joked with the wind players that the team in those days were quite mean to me, so they had to be very nice to me this time! But it was still a wonderful experience, and then I came back for a few projects about five or six years later: I have great recollections of The Dream of Gerontius in 2011, first in the Festival Hall and then in Salisbury Cathedral. I felt a real connection with those wonderful players; they're well-known for being an incredibly open, intrepid group of musicians, and that's my experience of them every day.

For your first concert as Principal Conductor in 2021 you chose Tippett's opera, The Midsummer Marriage, which is quite a bold statement of intent! How did you come to settle on that work?

During the lockdowns I had a lot of time to think about what could be the defining areas of our relationship together. Obviously the history of the orchestra is incredibly important and I wanted to key into that: I grew up on those great Tennstedt Mahler recordings, and the orchestra is amazing at playing Brahms and that sort of mainstream late-Romantic German repertoire. But aside from that I was thinking about what are the pieces and composers who I think deserve more care, and Tippett for me is a huge part of that: the more music of his I do, the more I fall in love with it.

Everyone thought I was mad because coming out of Covid we didn't even know if we were going to be allowed to have a chorus or to have that number of people on stage, but kudos to the LPO who had the bravery to say, yes, we're going to go for it. It's an incredibly special piece, maybe even better in a concert setting than on stage. The players hadn't done anything like it before really, and we got into it by doing the Ritual Dances a month before, which was incredibly helpful to find the centre of the music. And then we let rip with that extraordinary performance of the whole opera at the end of September!

I believe yours is only the second available recording, and another of his operas, New Year, didn't receive its first commercial recording until earlier this year. It seems like Tippett is gradually coming more into fashion?

It's happening, isn't it? It's interesting when you see these waves of music that's popular and music that isn't. Benjamin Britten had an amazing reign, both in his lifetime and since his death, and in a way it was easy for Tippett to be overshadowed by that. Britten was very aware that Tippett had something that he didn't have. It's a different voice and language; he was incredibly respectful and, dare I say it, a little bit jealous of Tippett's music. Also for an orchestra rehearsing a piece of Britten, it's kind of easy because they understand exactly what we’re aiming for after two play-throughs. That's not the same with Tippett, you have to delve very deep before it reveals itself.

Can you remember when you first came across Britten’s music? Did you sing many of his pieces as a chorister at Gloucester Cathedral?

We did; I remember Hymn to St Cecilia was too difficult for us! So I only got to that when I was a little bit older. But we did the Missa Brevis, which is such brilliant children's music: the games of all those fugues and canons within the texture was such fun to perform. And Hymn to the Virgin, this extraordinary piece he wrote when he was only sixteen. So he was definitely on my radar, and when I started conducting his music, having been in the English church music tradition, I felt comfortable with it.

Moving to the first piece on your new Britten album, Sinfonia da Requiem: it was one of several commissions from Japan to mark the 2600th anniversary of the ruling dynasty of Emperor Hirohito in 1940, but it seems like a slightly odd work to have offered them, and I suppose they must have agreed as they rejected it!

Yes, it was written as a commission, but it's not at all about that. It's not a celebration of anything, it's a tone poem about grief for his parents and where the world was when he was writing it. It never used to be done much, but I came across that utterly captivating and visceral recording by Britten himself and thought it was a masterpiece. Since then I've done it with the LPO a lot. I'm fascinated by that first period in Britten's career up until Peter Grimes. When you think about the Violin Concerto, Les illuminations, and so on, these are pieces where he just throws it out there; he hasn't yet learned to be calculated or to be effective, it's just music that explodes from him, and that's certainly the case with Sinfonia da Requiem.

It wasn't then premiered until the following year by John Barbirolli and the New York Philharmonic. Was it well-received, or did it take some time to be appreciated?

It's a difficult piece to love, especially if you think about the time it was written. There is something extraordinarily soothing about that last movement, but it's not friendly music by any means, and it's shocking in many ways. That Scherzo is so diabolical, especially the way Britten conducts it. I always think I'm too fast when I do it and then I go back to Britten's recording and he's a little bit faster! Britten was an extraordinary conductor, and it unlocked something in me because when you look at his scores, you wonder what your job is as a conductor: everything is marked, and he's so specific about dynamics, phrasing, and note lengths.

When I first did Peter Grimes at English National Opera in 2009, I listened to his recording, and I realised of course he respected everything he'd written in the score, but he gave himself latitude as a performer to find his own shape in it, that doesn't go against what he wrote but adds another level. I found that incredibly freeing, that you shouldn't be straitjacketed by what he wrote, even though it feels like it's very prescriptive on the page.

I think Mahler is the root of this, and I find specifically in British music from Elgar onwards, they took up this mantle of really prescribing how they wanted their music to sound. Elgar is incredibly neurotic about it and I remember going to my first director of music at Gloucester Cathedral [John Sanders], who had played Gerontius under Herbert Sumsion who had played it under Elgar, and he said to me, all he means is: play it beautifully, look after my music. Orchestras perhaps weren't always so respectful of the specificity of what was written as they are today, and so Elgar and then Vaughan Williams and Britten felt they had to notate in that way for it to speak as deeply as they wanted it to.

Moving to Winter Words, how did Robin Holloway’s orchestration come about? You gave the premiere performance, but was it a commission from you?

No, he just decided to do it! He thought it would speak well as a chamber piece. It's beautifully orchestrated with such delicacy and finesse. You won't believe this but I sang it when I was seventeen! So I've always loved it and I think what Robin has done is exactly what that piece needs. He completely respects the texture and feeling of the original, but just adds some colours. It’s very modestly done, including things like adding a marimba in places to sweeten but also veil the sound a bit. It was a real gift, and serendipitous in that it came at that very strange time when we couldn’t use large orchestras, so it really fitted our programme when we went to record it in that gorgeous concert hall in Saffron Walden. And Nicky Spence loved the orchestration as well.

You mention Nicky Spence: could you speak about what he brings to the performance?

Brilliance, character, and joy! We’ve done so much together, including David in Meistersinger and many other things. This is a piece that he had under his skin. We talked a lot about the sort of inflection he would put in it with just a piano, and funnily enough even with just a few more musicians you turn corners in a slightly different way, so we wanted to find that middle ground that didn't lose that Lieder quality but also gave it the space that the chamber ensemble needed. There were certain places where for the music to speak we had to give it more time, and others where we could play with more Schwung. He sings in a way where the text is absolutely front-loaded in his voice, and he has this ability where he's seemingly not thinking about his technique at all, just about the delivery of the story.

The final piece is the suite from The Prince of the Pagodas, which you compiled yourself from the full ballet. How did you go about condensing a two-hour work down to twenty-five minutes? 

With huge difficulty, and thank God we had those fallow months in Covid for me to do it because it took a vast amount of time. I set out with two or three main objectives. One was to work through the piece in some sort of order: although it's not a narrative arc because obviously you can't encapsulate the whole story of this enormous amount of music in those twenty-five minutes, I wanted it to feel like it was a musical thread which led honestly from the beginning of the piece to the end. I really wanted to include the gamelan music because I think that's at the heart of Britten's sound world in this: it's so special and maybe only on a level with Death in Venice for showing what he did with that Balinese inflection.

I also wanted to create a sort of “journey of temperature” through the piece, so it felt in some ways symphonic, that we had an opening, going into a second movement and then into a Scherzo (if you could call the gamelan music that), and then into a feeling of a finale. Obviously I wanted to do as much of the great music as I could, but there's so much I had to leave out. As soon as I started being emotional about what I wanted to hear, I had to give up for a couple of days because it’s all so good! But I was really strict with myself about what I could and couldn't do. 

Then to have the resonances of pieces that I think Britten had in mind when working on it, especially Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. I kept some of the music that gave those flavours as well as of course Britten's own extraordinary language, using it as an opportunity for showcasing the largest-scale piece Britten wrote for an orchestra which is almost never heard, this incredible music that is unique even in his own output. I must also say that Colin Matthews gave me incredibly good advice as I was compiling it, because he was responsible for the sign-off for the Britten estate in terms of me doing it, and he knows the piece backwards.

Moving to other recent releases: you mentioned Dvořák Seven earlier, and for your latest album you have coupled it with Schumann Two. Could you describe why you wanted to pair those two pieces?

There are so many connections, and I think Dvořák’s sound world in the Seventh, that distilled loneliness and personality, comes so much from Schumann. They're two of my absolute favourite symphonies. They're connected so much by soul, and for me Schumann is at the essence of so many composers’ music. Of course I think of him often when I perform Brahms, but also we just recorded the Elgar Violin Concerto with Frank Peter Zimmermann, and we were both saying how the sound world, even though it's bigger than Schumann’s ever was, is the same texture we're aiming for, just with larger orchestration.

Beyond that, are you able to tell us about anything else in the pipeline? 

There’s more Tippett to come with A Child of Our Time, and we’re also hoping to put out the Gerontius from the 2022 Proms with Allan Clayton in the title role. We very much want to continue showing the wider world what we’re performing. Unlike many other great orchestras, we only do one performance of each of these things. Honestly, I'm so proud of the musicians for what they can achieve because it comes out at the highest level, and it really shouldn't because there’s so little time! They have the ability not just to get it right, but also to assimilate an idea about what to do even within half an hour of the first rehearsal, and that's extraordinary.