Classical Music Magazine
11th September 2004
The forthcoming academic year heralds an 18 month long celebration of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama’s 125th Anniversary. Such festivity couldn’t really come at a better time. After the rapid departure of principal Genista McIntosh in March 2003, whose tenure lasted barely six months, the school was left in the unsettling position of having no permanent principal – never too good for morale. But this is all set to change: Barry Ife, of King’s College London pedigree, is taking hold of the reins in September and the school’s anniversary is the perfect way to set off on a fresh new path.
Ife has been working for the school on a part time basis since January in conjunction with the acting principal Peter Derrick, Chamberlain of London. Since The Corporation of London owns the school (as one of many cultural assets including the Barbican) it was only sensible that they sent in Derrick, one of their top dogs, to sort things out. ‘They must have wondered what the hell was going on,’ one person admitted. In spite of difficult days, several staff commented that the period also bore great fruit. ‘It has been a tough period but honestly it has also been one of the most exciting years in the last decade,’ says director of music Damien Cranmer, referring to the hugely well-received production of the Marriage of Figaro, the appointment of Guildhall graduates as the first female brass player in the Berliner Philharmoniker and first ever female principal horn in the BBCSO, and an impressive role-call of prize winners including both the song prize and the accompanists prize at the 2004 Ferrier Awards (in fact four out of five finalists were Guildhall students); the Belmont Prize, given for exceptional contribution to contemporary music making by a young musician; and the winner of the Montreal International Piano Competition.
Student success aside, Derrick’s year in office served a particularly important purpose. ‘Having the Chamberlain of London here has meant the corporation have had a stronger awareness both of what we are about and also what the key issues are that need addressing,’ says Bernard Lanskey, assistant director of music. This relationship with the corporation is a major priority for Ife: ‘Everything we do has to start with the question: What can we give them, how can we pay back the fact that they are our major funder? The Guildhall School has to really think about how it can contribute to the city’s agenda,’ he says. He identifies two ways which it does: firstly, the quality of life in the city (with projects at the City of London Festival and LSO St Luke’s for example), and secondly in terms of social inclusion, with Sean Gregory’s award winning ‘Connect’ programme which has done remarkable work in local boroughs of Newham and Lewisham.
Ife is also keen to maximise the Barbican and Silk Street area: ‘We want to develop a real artistic water there. The school hasn’t made enough of its proximity to the Barbican – you’ve got a world-class conservatoire and a world-class arts centre under the same roof and they should do more together. We can contribute – and if we don’t then inevitably the corporation might start to ask why they’ve got us.’
Alongside John Tusa’s complete overhaul of the Barbican facilities the corporation have approved capital grants of £2m for this year alone, as part of an ongoing programme towards refurbishment of the Guildhall School’s infrastructure. This includes putting in a new concert hall, studio theatre and theatre into the nearby Milton Court site in order to be able to offer the full range of venues – and Ife even has hopes to pedestrianise the Silk Street area: ‘If we can do that we could really start to make it an attractive area that people would be drawn to.’
‘It has been a period of change in the programme and the curriculum,’ says Lanskey. ‘But tied up with the arrival of Barry Ife is the re-launch of what we all know to be good. The building blocks are all in place, the momentum is going and now everything will come together in the city.’
Ife appears to relish the challenges that lie ahead. He’s certainly had a good training having worked from the shop floor up at King’s College London (where he was chair of humanities for eight years, and until recently acting principal) and instigated several multimillion-pound capital projects, including turning the public record office into a library for the college. ‘When you deal with a university with 20,000 students and a turnover of £40m you have to keep a cool head. You have to work out priorities and stick to them.’
The interface between the arts and education is something which Ife has long since explored - he actually trained as a harpsichordist himself and at King’s he implemented a joint BMus in Performance with the Royal Academy in order to give students the chance to become, ‘not just a technically competent performer but a performer who understands what they are doing, and why – the fully rounded practitioner.’ Horsbrugh, felt similarly strongly about this and Ife plans to continue in this vein. Guildhall’s technical theatre department is one example which is unique training in both opera and drama. ‘There can be a real lack of understanding of what’s expected once you leave. But here the core of what they do is producing for both disciplines and that is how you learn – that’s real,’ says Cranmer.
Research activity, already strong in the school, will be expanded upon by Ife and one of the ‘125’ events will be an international conference on what he calls ‘the reflective conservatoire – how a conservatoire thinks about what they do and how to get better.’ Another area is an exploration of the relationship between the arts and medicine (at King’s Ife created a chair of Medicine in the Arts) which he believes can illuminate every area of the discipline. He gives the example of an oboe teacher who is currently enquiring into several of aspects on breathing and playing, ‘but she can’t do it in a vacuum. What I need to do is get her together with a physiologist and see what they can do together.’
‘There is no reason why a conservatoire shouldn’t be at the cutting edge of knowledge and practise in the way that a university is and has to be,’ he states. ‘Obviously our core is identifying and then training the best musicians but at same time the whole science needs to move forward to stop the conservatoire being a sort of sausage machine.’
With over 40 nationalities represented at the Guildhall (no less than a third of each year can be expected to come from outside the UK) Ife admits that in the past ‘we’ve been a net importer but not an exporter so much.’ As a result, he is keen to get more touring lined up. ‘You don’t have to go to 20 different places, even just taking a production to one other location is worth doing. It’s all part of this process of lifting our eyes and broadening horizons.’
Several forthcoming ‘125’ projects will do just this, including a particularly high profile event with Sir Colin Davis, who has had a long-standing relationship with the school. In April Guildhall instrumentalists will join the Sibelius Academy and Vienna’s University of Music and Dramatic Arts to create a unique symphony orchestra that will perform works by renowned composers from each of their home countries (namely Elgar, Sibelius and Mozart) in each of their home countries; the Barbican, Sibelius Hall and Musikverein. Excitement is already building up: ‘He is one of the great conductors who has an incredible way of communicating and from that we learn so much,’ says viola-player Sheldon Person. ‘There are no passengers in his orchestra. It’s an incredible opportunity.’
Vocal students will have a remarkable chance of their own next year when 32 of them perform as the chorus in Britten’s Peter Grimes at the Salzburg Festival directed by Sir Simon Rattle, Trevor Nunn and chorus master Simon Halsey. As vocal coach Linnhe Robertson describes, ‘Everyone is almost elbowing each other out of the way for this! When we first spoke to them about it I could see their minds whizzing, working what voice types were needed!’ It takes Ife’s idea of the complete student to even greater heights, presenting a chance to learn about the discipline not just from the isolation of a college but by getting out there and seeing first hand what goes on in a first-class international production. ‘You can get lost in academics but this makes you realise why you are here,’ says soprano Rachel Howells. ‘It is a privilege to be part of the college who have been asked to do it.’ Bass Baritone Simon Gray agrees, ‘We might get knocked back, but many performers take years to even get the chance to try out for this sort of event. It’s an opportunity that wouldn’t be there unless we were at Guildhall.’
Other events include a major commission for July 2006, work with William Christie and a project with Graham Johnson on Fauré’s Complete Works (similar to his Britten project from last year) which will result in a book and a CD and involve a huge number of students.
Discussing such exciting projects, Ife takes up a macro view of things, with a passionate conviction that public policy for conservatoires as a whole needs to change. ‘London underplays the importance of its conservatoires and drama schools – if you look at a lot of the arts policy documents that have emerged from the government in recent years they are virtually silent on the conservatoires. We are falling down the gap between higher education on the one hand and the creative industries on the other,’ he says. ‘Everyone is dead keen on creativity as a way of promoting the economy but the conservatoires never get thought about in that context. It’s a bigger job than one institution can do, but one institution can lead that process to get the training of professional musicians, actors and dancers back in to centre stage.’ It might seem an impossible task but Ife is characteristically un-perturbed, ‘It’s just reminding people that we have some of the best conservatoires in the world in this country. Everybody takes these great performers for granted but they have to be trained somewhere. The tide is beginning to turn but there is a long way to go yet until the real treasures that we have in this country are fully appreciated and properly supported. I’d like to feel that once we’d got the anniversary and builders under way I could make my voice heard more loudly in the public arena – as representative of how the Guildhall can show the way.’