Rupert Christiansen

The best band in the land

issue 03 January 2004

Being of the same age and provenance as Richard Morrison, I was intrigued to note that he honours the London Symphony Orchestra of the late 1960s as the band that turned him on to classical music — it even made it seem ‘a bit groovy’, he remarks wryly.

My own memory is different. Aged 14, I remember the LSO as being rather naff — after all, ‘they had a man from Hollywood as their conductor,’ as Morrison puts it, and ‘they sometimes wore polo-necked sweaters’. The Philharmonia, on the other hand, boasted the gravitas of Klemperer as well as the youthful eclat of Barenboim and Muti, while the BBC Symphony Orchestra had the radical chic of Boulez to offer. Against such competition, André Previn and the chucking of white tie just couldn’t do it for me: there was something a bit shallow about the LSO. Goodness, I was so bottomlessly sophisticated.

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