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John Farrer is a well known conductor in the United States and has been music director of the Bakersfield Symphony Orchestra in California for thirty years. He is also music director of the Roswell Symphony Orchestra and the Santa Maria Philharmonic. Mr. Farrer is a frequent guest conductor with orchestras in England. As senior guest conductor of the English Sinfonia, he has toured with the orchestra throughout England and northern France. His eight recordings with the London Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic, Bournemouth Symphony, and English Sinfonia have received high praise from critics around the world.
John Farrer has been appointed a national trustee of the National Symphony Orchestra of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C.
As Colin Anderson discovered when interviewing John Farrer is fully seized by the ambitions of the New Queen’s Hall Orchestra. “I just love the sound of the orchestra, the texture of the strings, their special unwrapped way of playing, the very distinctive quality of the winds, and the enormous flexibility of the players. I have a thing about being able to hear into the texture of an orchestra; with this orchestra you get every single chord tone, which means the tension and release of the harmony and the overall harmonic rhythm are much more effective. I’m wondering if it’s because the composer had that in mind – rather than this heavy digging into the strings and trombones that, in full cry, would cover Big Ben!”
The instruments used by the New Queen’s Hall Orchestra – mostly French and crafted in the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century – are those used by British and French symphony orchestras up to the 1940s (and even later in France). They have a distinction and opalescence that affords integrated balances to satisfy most of the repertoire. The horn solo that opens the Overture to Weber’s Oberon acts as a gently-calling invitation to be seduced by some mellifluous, warm timbres: simmering (gut) strings and lightly tripping woodwinds, and a brass section that supports and interjects without ruining the collective substance that is cut from a fibrous collection of instruments. As Farrer relates, regarding Oberon, “I have in mind a moonlit forest. There’s a specialness about this sound you don’t get anymore.”
The New Queen’s Hall Orchestra does indeed conjure some beautiful sounds, but not self-consciously so. Between the skills of the musicians and the natural characteristics of the instruments themselves, a beguiling and dynamic interaction takes place; it’s not a battle between them (although there is plenty of incisive argument when required, such as in the finale of Brahms’s symphony). The NQHO produces a tonal relationship that is neither homogenised (probably a dirty word in NQHO circles) nor overly fulsome. Instead there is light and shade and the sense of chamber music being made, each musician responsible for the sounds he or she makes – hence the less than pristine ensemble sometimes and the occasional ‘solo spot’ in the strings. Perfect unanimity and finite tonal blends are not ‘gods’ for these musicians; nor are they something shied away from, either. These players want to capture the ‘living’ quality of music, its emotion and colours, and undertake a musical journey.
Nevertheless I ask John Farrer if something ‘less than perfect’ should be issued. “Maybe it’s time for a change. I think it’s a human performance and we humans do make mistakes. Originally a recording was intended to replicate a live performance. During the twentieth-century that was totally inverted because of editing and the ability to produce a perfect or near-perfect rendition, so it’s now typical for orchestras to want to reproduce the perfection of recording: there’s been this total perversion, if you will. Yet, I have never heard a perfect record.” The question could also be asked, given the duplication of repertoire, ‘why bother to record Brahms again?’ “Because one of the wonderful things about this orchestra is that the players just need an invitation to play. You don’t dictate, they know what to do. The leader [Richard Friedman] is just phenomenal. Each player has a distinctive personality and each section a different characteristic, yet it all fits, and it’s because they listen to one another and they love what they are doing.”
As well as having the two violin sections sitting antiphonally (as was the norm in orchestras until comparatively recently, although more conductors have now returned to the arrangement), John Farrer has the double basses in a line across the back of the platform. As he explains: “Everybody in the orchestra can then hear the foundation; and what a sensitive musician will do is tune his partial to the overtones being generated by the basses. If you have the basses along the back the players can actually hear and it helps produce a more resonant sound.”
Not that what is on this recording is intended to be ‘authentic’ (after all, contemporary concert pitch is used, so too vibrato, and Farrer’s spacious tempos give the music time to express itself in Romantic terms). There are though certain touches associated with the period of the NQHO’s previous, Henry Wood existence: not least portamento (expressive sliding by the strings), and which is nicely illustrated in the Oberon Overture (try from 4’19”). Farrer explains that he “encouraged portamento but I didn’t dictate it. Although my scores are fully marked with bowings and fingerings, what was coming back from the Orchestra was so natural and so musical that I didn’t want to interfere.” And, overall, the NQHO’s softer-grained timbres do sound appropriately magical in this superb piece.
I go as far to suggest to Farrer, without wishing to question his authority as a conductor, that the NQHO musicians are effectively doing their own thing, “yes, very definitely, which I think is the way it used to be. I’m hoping that the time has come for a return to humanism in music. John [Boyden] has said this too. ‘Routine is the death of music’, that’s a Toscanini quote. I like the way the Queen’s Hall players mix it up a bit; that’s one of the things that makes a great performance; it’s not enough that it be perfect ensemble, perfect intonation, perfect this, perfect that.”
If the writer may offer an opinion, it is this. These live performances are not perfect – they are not meant to be – and in any case they are genuinely ‘live’ (with only five single-note patching edits, and none in the last two movements of the symphony). What’s notable is the character and balance, and the intense, continuous phrasing from everybody, John Farrer subtly controlling ebb, flow and climaxes. The music ‘sings’ with generous emotion. It is to this listener a revelation.
But, ultimately, it’s the New Queen Hall Orchestra and John Farrer’s record. What does it mean for him? “It’s an opportunity to set down a performance that has integrity and I hope a sense of improvisation, which is so important, and that is the opposite to the idea of stamping-out the same performance on different nights, which recording teaches you to do. For me it’s a privilege to be associated with the New Queen’s Hall Orchestra. It’s the beginning of something new, which will be something old; it will point people in the direction that I consider to be the right one. You can argue all day about what’s right and wrong. I have no wish to denigrate what anybody else is doing; I’m just simply saying that in music you are supposed to be expressing something which is lasting and which encapsulates the best that we humans have to offer.”
Colin Anderson