Years ago, when I met a famous concert pianist, I was surprised when he greeted me in a northern accent. A soft one, mind you, but completely intact. I’d assumed that, by the time a conductor or soloist reached a certain level of fame, the northern vowels would have been erased by Received Pronunciation or some painful mid-Atlantic hybrid.
I was such a little snob in those days, affecting a languid drawl that had my old schoolfriends in Reading rolling their eyes. But my social climbing had at least given me a good ear for other people’s doctored accents. London was crawling with northern choirmasters and music critics whose self-taught ‘posh’ accents were about as convincing as home-tinted hair (which, incidentally, some of them also sported).
In contrast, this pianist was perfectly happy with the voice he’d been born with. Likewise his friends, top-flight musicians who had studied at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. At which point it was time to confront a more fundamental snooty assumption of mine – that classical music and the North of England didn’t mix, because northern folk, being working-class, preferred brass bands. And, if they were concert-goers, they were aspiring to southern gentility.
How could I have been so ignorant? It didn’t help that my experience of the North was limited to childhood holidays in Blackpool with my grandmother. She was a southerner, but her friends were Lancashire matrons still reeling from the shock of Martha Longhurst dropping dead in the snug of the Rovers Return. (That was very big news in 1964.) The only classical music I heard up there was a snatch of Mozart’s Piano Sonata K545, played freakishly fast in the style of Glenn Gould — by the ice-cream van.
Growing up, I heard about the Hallé and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, but didn’t give them much thought beyond wondering how they’d managed to sign up such legendary 19th-century Germans as Hans Richter and Max Bruch as their conductors.
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