London Symphony Orchestra

• 1. Introduction

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  The London Symphony Orchestra was born out of an act of defiance. In May 1904, a group of musicians riding a train to a festival in the north of England made a decision that would reshape British musical life for over a century. They had just heard the manager of Queen's Hall announce, bluntly, that there would be no more deputies. No more sending a stand-in when a better-paying gig came along. For men who relied on that flexibility to survive, it was a financial blow. So they decided to build something of their own.

  What emerged from that train journey was an orchestra unlike anything London had seen: self-governing, profit-sharing, and answerable to no single patron or institution. The four principal movers were three horn players and a trumpeter. The ensemble they founded went on to become the oldest surviving symphony orchestra in London, a fixture at the Barbican Centre, and the orchestra behind some of the most recognisable film scores ever recorded.

  How did a group of mutinous freelancers build one of the world's most recorded orchestras? The answer runs through two world wars, a near-bankruptcy, a last-minute escape from the Titanic, and a 25-year contract signed by an 86-year-old conductor.

• 2. The Deputy System

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  London at the turn of the twentieth century had no permanent salaried orchestras. Players were engaged per concert or per season at venues like Covent Garden and the Philharmonic Society. What made this system chaotic was a practice so entrenched it had its own logic: the deputy.

  John Mewburn Levien, treasurer of the Philharmonic Society, explained it precisely. A player signs to perform at your concert. He sends a substitute to the first rehearsal. That substitute, without permission, sends someone else to the second rehearsal. That person, unable to make the concert, passes the seat to a fourth player the management would have paid not to show up. The conductor Henry Wood faced exactly this situation when he turned up to rehearse his own orchestra and found dozens of unfamiliar faces staring back at him.

  Robert Newman, the Queen's Hall manager, stepped onto the platform after one such rehearsal and delivered his ultimatum: no more deputies. The musicians who would go on to found the LSO were not simply offended. They were calculating. For skilled players who supplemented their income with multiple concurrent bookings, losing the right to deputise was a tangible financial penalty. Their response was to cut out the middleman altogether.

• 3. A Musical Republic

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  Thomas Busby organised the founding meeting at St Andrew's Hall, near the Queen's Hall itself. Around a hundred players attended, drawn from present and former members of the Queen's Hall Orchestra. Busby described the new ensemble as "something akin to a Musical Republic": an orchestra with a constitution, a management committee, and a profit-sharing model that meant members worked without a fee at LSO-promoted concerts, collecting their earnings at the end of each season.

  Adolf Borsdorf's international reputation as a horn player proved critical in one early negotiation. Through his connections, the new orchestra secured Hans Richter to conduct its first concert, on the 9th of June 1904. Newman, who had set the rebellion in motion, bore no grudge. He attended the concert and made the Queen's Hall available. The programme ran from Wagner's Die Meistersinger prelude through Bach, Mozart, Elgar, and Liszt to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

  A review in The Times noted that 49 of the new orchestra's members were rebels against Newman's no-deputy rule, 32 had left Queen's Hall earlier, and 21 had no prior connection to Wood or Newman at all. The founding committee included Borsdorf, Busby, Henri van der Meerschen, John Solomon, Alfred Hobday, and E. F. James. Busby was appointed chief executive, a post that would be renamed several times across the decades.

• 4. Near-Disasters and Near-Misses

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  Arthur Nikisch insisted, despite his long ties to the Berlin Philharmonic and Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, that the LSO should accompany him on a North American tour in 1912. The orchestra, 100 strong, was booked to sail on the Titanic. A last-minute change to the tour schedule meant they sailed on the Baltic instead.

  The tour was arduous but triumphant. The New York Press described the orchestra playing "with a vigor, force and temperamental impetuousness that almost lifted the listener out of his seat." The New York Times praised most sections but found the strings "brilliant rather than mellow", a verdict that echoed what The Manchester Guardian had written a few years earlier on the first British tour under Elgar.

  The same New York Times, writing from a country accustomed to permanent, salaried orchestras like the Boston Symphony, also gently mocked the LSO for its "bold stand for the sacred right of sending substitutes." The deputy system the orchestra had been founded to escape was still following it across the Atlantic.

  On the home front, the First World War brought a different kind of near-disaster. Borsdorf, one of the four founding horn players, had lived in Britain for thirty years and was married to an Englishwoman. But rank-and-file players petitioned to have him removed because of his German origins. He was forced out. Thomas Beecham's donations kept the orchestra afloat through the war years, but by 1917 the directors had voted unanimously to stop promoting their own concerts until the armistice.

• 5. Recovery and Rivalry

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  Albert Coates took charge of the post-war orchestra under inauspicious circumstances. His first concert featured the premiere of Elgar's Cello Concerto, and Coates ran over his rehearsal time at the expense of Elgar's own preparation time. Lady Elgar called him "that brutal selfish ill-mannered bounder." Ernest Newman, writing in The Observer, said that "never, in all probability, has so great an orchestra made so lamentable an exhibition of itself." Coates stayed two seasons regardless, and is credited with breathing life back into the ensemble.

  The 1920s brought guests of the calibre of Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Wilhelm Furtwängler, and Serge Koussevitzky. Soloists included Sergei Rachmaninoff, Artur Schnabel, and a young Yehudi Menuhin. But the apparent golden age masked a genuine decline. The Berlin Philharmonic visited London in 1927, 1928, and 1929, and the contrast in standards was plain. The critic W. J. Turner argued the problem was not that the LSO had deteriorated, but that it had failed to keep pace with European and American improvements over two decades.

  By the early 1930s the LSO was the third-best orchestra in London. It had lost Covent Garden, the Royal Philharmonic Society concerts, and the Courtauld-Sargent series. The London Philharmonic Orchestra, launched in 1932 by Thomas Beecham and Malcolm Sargent, took 17 of the LSO's leading members with it. The arrival of Sir Hamilton Harty from the Hallé, along with eight of his best Hallé players, and the world premiere of Walton's Belshazzar's Feast in 1931 and First Symphony in 1934, began a genuine recovery. In March 1935, the LSO recorded Arthur Bliss's score for Alexander Korda's film Things to Come in fourteen full orchestral sessions, a project the orchestra's own website describes as a turning point in the history of British film music.

• 6. Profit-Sharing Abandoned

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  The Second World War cost the LSO more than the First. Between 1914 and 1918, thirty-three members were away on active service. Between 1939 and 1945, more than sixty were, and seven were killed. The orchestra recruited replacements wherever it could, including the brass and woodwind players of army regimental bands based in London.

  When the war ended, a state body, the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, offered the LSO a public subsidy on one condition: the profit-sharing model that had defined the orchestra since 1904 had to go, replaced by salaries. The players rejected the offer outright.

  By 1948, with two new orchestras, the Philharmonia and the Royal Philharmonic, having overtaken the LSO, the position became untenable. The players voted to accept the Arts Council's conditions, abandoned the profit-sharing principle, and engaged Josef Krips to raise standards. Krips's cycles of Beethoven symphonies and concertos, featuring Wilhelm Kempff in one season and Claudio Arrau in another, restored both finances and musical standing. The comparison of workloads from 1949 to 1950 illustrates just how far the LSO had fallen: the LPO played 248 concerts that season, the LSO 103, the BBC Symphony Orchestra 55, and the Philharmonia and RPO 32 each.

• 7. Film Music and the Star Wars Effect

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  Silent film screenings in the 1920s were already part of the LSO's work. The orchestra accompanied screenings of The Three Musketeers in 1922, The Nibelungs in 1924, The Constant Nymph in 1927, and The Life of Beethoven in 1929, with scores arranged and conducted by Eugene Goossens.

  The deeper engagement with film began in 1935 with Things to Come. Musical director Muir Mathieson, whom the film specialist Robert Rider calls "the most important single figure in the early history of British film music," described the LSO as "the perfect film orchestra." Among the composers he brought to cinema work were Vaughan Williams, Walton, Britten, and Malcolm Arnold. A 1946 documentary, Instruments of the Orchestra, captured the LSO performing Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra under Malcolm Sargent.

  The relationship with cinema that Mathieson built reached a new register in 1977 when the LSO recorded John Williams's score for the first Star Wars film. The orchestra shared in three Grammy awards for the score in 1978. It went on to record Superman: The Movie in 1978, Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, and six of the eight films in the Harry Potter series. The orchestra claims to have played on more than 200 soundtrack recordings in total, a body of work the film specialist Rider says "consolidated the period of film music activity for the orchestra, which continues unabated to this day."

• 8. Self-Governance and the Long Record

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  Since 1982 the LSO has been based at the Barbican Centre in the City of London. Its early years there came close to financial disaster. A programme of ambitious modern works put existing audiences off, and the satirical magazine Private Eye ran a series of defamatory articles that caused serious reputational damage before the magazine was forced to pay libel damages.

  Cellist Clive Gillinson took over as managing director in August 1984, at one of the lowest points in the LSO's recent history. He negotiated what Richard Morrison calls "a dazzling series of mega-projects, each built around the personal enthusiasm of a star conductor or soloist." Among them were a Mahler festival planned by Claudio Abbado in 1985 and a Bernstein festival the following year.

  The LSO's own record label, LSO Live, launched in 2000 with performances of Les Troyens under Colin Davis, which went on to win two Grammy awards. Gergiev's version of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet was BBC Music Magazine's Disc of the Year in 2011. The label has published more than 70 recordings, with performances captured live at the Barbican and edited in post-production.

  The orchestra's self-governing structure, the principle on which it was founded at St Andrew's Hall in 1904, remains intact. Players still select the conductors with whom they work. The current chief conductor, Sir Antonio Pappano, first guest-conducted the LSO in 1996 and was formally appointed in March 2021, taking up the role in September 2024.