As if to stuff my rash cliché further down my oesophagus, I spent a Mahler weekend this spring working with Daniel Harding's extraordinary Swedish Radio Orchestra. Its two concertmasters, Malin Broman and Ulrike Jansson, are young women whose delight in their work and each other is unignorable. In the inevitable wait for the maestro to get his white tie straight, they chat away 19 to the dozen, projecting their excitement to the highest reaches of the Berwald Hall.
The principal clarinet, Andreas Sunden, was poached from the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, supposedly the world's number one according to a Gramophone magazine poll. Sunden voted with his feet: he prefers the pay and lifestyle in Stockholm. The principal bass, Rick Stotijn, is one of those players who, in concert, becomes one with his bull-fiddle, forming a centaur-like man-bass at the heart of the orchestra, a dramatic focal point. Harding, who works with Europe's finest, talks of Stockholm as symphonic heaven.
And then we have the BBC, cornerstone of world broadcasting. Since the convulsions of 1980 when half a dozen regional orchestras were axed and the Proms were blacked out by a strike, a nervous musical peace has prevailed. The BBC employs two orchestras in London (one called Symphony, the other Concert) and one each in Manchester (BBC Philharmonic), Cardiff and Glasgow. It also pays a fair whack towards the costs of the Ulster Orchestra. These five outfits form the hard-working core of the summer's BBC Proms. Without them, the argument goes, there could be no way of putting on 76 concerts in eight weeks.
That argument is going to be tested in the coming recessional years and the BBC is gingerly negotiating alternative options with Arts Council England that may result in some reductions of orchestral funding. The optimum solution, both sides know, is to devolve one of the BBC orchestras to the bustling port city of Bristol to serve south-west England which has about as much access to symphony concerts as south-west Africa. That would be the logical outcome. Logic, however, tends to get lost when two big public organisations push chips around the table. My fear is that a compromise solution will result in a weakening of Britain's orchestral infrastructure, already under threat from the strident cries for Scottish independence. There are dark clouds on the near horizon.
Meantime, the BBC orchestras maintain and enhance their excellence. The Spaniard Juanjo Mena has made a terrific start in Manchester, Donald Runnicles is having the time of his life in Glasgow, London can't wait to get started with its new Finnish chief Sakari Oramo and the players are just getting better than ever. The principal horn of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Martin Owen, is being wooed by the Berlin Philharmonic, the ultimate accolade.
