ARTS: English horn player Michael Thompson, is working with Kilkenny Arts Festival as soloist, ensemble player, conductor, and progammer. It's anambitious involvement - but he has never been one to hold back, writes Michael Dervan
For Michael Thompson, his teenage years were what he calls a great voyage of musical discovery. His first instrument was the violin, which he started at the age of 12, in secondary school. It was no big deal. It was one of the things that was on offer, he thought it might be interesting, so he took it up. Just a year later, a second instrument came into his life.
"The horn really came about because the music teacher needed two boys to play horn in the school orchestra. They were a bit short. He pretty much volunteered a couple of us. He just said, 'You and you. Come and play the French horn.' And I'm eternally grateful that he did. I struggled on with the violin for a few more years, and eventually the violin gave me up. It was too difficult. Too many aspects of co-ordination for me to deal with."
His parents' taste was for light music, with members of his father's family involved in dance bands. So classical music was a whole new world to him, which he worked his way up, from school orchestra, to local county orchestra, to national youth orchestra.
"Quite soon, by about the age of 15, really, I just thought 'I want to do this'. Looking back, I think it probably did become a bit obsessive. I just thought this is really how I want to spend my time, and consequently didn't really apply myself to my school work very much." His teachers cautioned him about the competitiveness of a performing career, and that he mightn't make a living at it. He's glad that they did. But the warnings were to no avail.
He gorged on LPs from the school record library. Mozart was an early infatuation, and he remembers falling in love with the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, getting it out week after week. Early idols included the Russian violinist David Oistrakh and the English horn player Dennis Brain, and then, when he started having lessons with Ifor James, he devoured all he could of his teacher's recordings, too.
The only ambition he had, he says, was "just to be able to support myself, to be able to make a living playing music. That, actually, was it. I didn't mind how that came about, or how I was doing it, or whatever".
He was, however, as he puts it, impatient. "I left school before I even did my A Levels, much against everyone's advice, and went to the Royal Academy of Music in London. I went there on my 17th birthday, and got shoved into the front line fairly immediately - after auditions I got put on the first horn part of the first orchestra, which completely flabbergasted me." Things moved pretty quickly. Ifor James suggested he apply for some jobs that had come up, and the idea of doing auditions and getting the experience seemed a good one.
He went for the principal's job in the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and he got it. He was aged 18, and hadn't even completed his course at the academy. Some people advised him to stay and complete his education. "Ifor, bless him, said, 'Go! Get in an orchestra, make lots and lots of mistakes, and you'll learn from that.' And I think he was quite right, really. I certainly made lots of mistakes."
He probably cleared up those mistakes quite soon, because three years later, in 1975, he landed the principal job in a premier London orchestra, the Philharmonia.
"I think, to be honest, playing the horn is at its most satisfying in an orchestral situation. That's not to say that the other things aren't fun, as well. But there's nothing, really, to comare with sitting in the middle of a Brahms symphony or a Beethoven symphony. It's just incredible."
There are drawbacks, though. An orchestra like the Philharmonia does a lot of travelling, and there's a lot of repetition. He recalls a remark by a Philharmonia colleague, trump-eter David Mason, to the effect that 10 years in an orchestra doesn't mean 10 years' experience, but rather one year's experience 10 times over. So, after 10 years, Michael Thompson opted to leave the comfort of a top symphony orchestra and venture into other worlds.
"I just became curious as to what life would be like as a freelance horn player, doing some other things." These other things have included playing concertos around the world, forming the Michael Thompson Wind Quintet, the Michael Thompson Horn Quartet, entering fully into the world of contemporary music by becoming principal horn of the London Sinfonietta, and also exploring the natural horn in the context of period instrument performances.
"The funny thing about horn playing or horn writing," he says, "is that the things that sound the simplest are the things you worry about the most. One of the most psychologi-cally difficult moments would be the first bar of Weber's Oberon Overture, which is just a little phrase that goes A, B, C sharp. As a friend of mine says, that's the A B C sharp of horn playing. It really couldn't be simpler. It's the sort of thing that a Grade III child could do. But, it's also something that the most accomplished professional player you could imagine could actually just have a little slip on, and it would be noticed, and you'd be so embarrassed. It's a bit like the professional golfers getting very nervous about the four-foot putt when the pressure is on, the TV cameras are there and there's big prize money involved. They get nervous about a putt that I could probably do if nobody was looking."
Nervousness in horn-playing can exhibit itself as a slight tremor in the tone, resulting, he says, from an excess of adrenaline causing involuntary muscular movement. Some players deal with this by using medication, taking beta-blockers. Thompson doesn't use them himself, but it's not an issue he has strong feelings about. A friend pointed out to him that surgeons use them too, to steady the hand in the operating theatre, and posed the question, "Would you check if your surgeon were using them, and ask him not to?"
He sees all the different aspects of his work interacting with each other. The natural horn informs how he approaches early, and sometimes later, repertoire on the modern horn. Working with living composers, "trying to make sense of music that's still metaphori- cally wet on the page, informs how you approach Beethoven - hopefully, you can approach that as if it's new as well." He singles out the experience of working with Oliver Knussen, a regular with the London Sinfonietta, who's a composer as well as a conductor. "The way he approaches work as a conductor is with that perspective. What's this about? It's as if he has this machine, unscrews bits and takes it apart, and says, 'I see. That's how that fits together.' I find that fascinating. He's extraordinary. And the beat is tiny, in fact, sometimes I find it quite difficult to see. You really have to concentrate. It's no more than you need."
Here he recalls the story about Fritz Reiner, conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the 1950s, whose beat was notoriously small. A double bass player, it is said, brought in a pair of binoculars, and went through the motions of looking through them during rehearsal to make out what Reiner's stick was indicating. At the next rehearsal, while Reiner was conducting, he held out his left hand, with a piece of paper on which there was some tiny writing. The player got out his binoculars, looked at it, and read, "You're fired!"
FOR Kilkenny Arts Festival, Thompson has put together a series of four chamber music concerts which blend works familiar and unfamiliar - Debussy's Violin Sonata and Brahms's Horn Trio jostle with Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen's Six Pieces for horn, violin and piano, for instance. And he's bringing together colleagues from the London Sinfonietta for areas of repertoire that they don't normally work on together. He also appears as a conductor, working with a nine-player ensemble where the wind pairings will bring together teachers and students from the Royal Academy of Music. And, of course, he's also appearing as a soloist in Mozart's Horn Concerto No 3 in the opening concert with the Prague Chamber Orchestra.
Mozart, it turns out, is the composer whose horn writing he finds most satisfying. And the horn concerto Brahms never wrote, is the piece he most misses from the repertoire. "I think everything Mozart wrote for the horn feels absolutely right. It has to be something to do with voicing, with where he puts the horn in the chord. Other composers can write the same notes, and it doesn't feel as comfortable. But something about where you are in the texture in Mozart just always feels right. I think exactly the same thing is true of Brahms. Even when you're just playing an accompanying tutti, it just never feels awkward or angular, but as if you're in total agreement with the laws of the universe in some way."
Michael Thompson's concerts at Kilkenny Arts Festival are on Sat August 10th, Mon 12th (lunchtime), Tues 13th, Thurs 15th, and Sat 17th. Details and booking from 056-52175, or online at www.kilkennyarts.ie
