Musicians in the pandemic: Christopher and David Stark

Brothers Christopher and David Stark describe to Clare Stevens their contrasting experiences of the summer of 2020 as freelance and salaried musicians. Amid the frustrations and sadness of being unable to perform, they have developed their skills and found time for refl ection

Read our next feature to see how CAPPA, a performance arts course, continued on and adapted to lockdown

Left: Christopher Stark Photo: Ambra Vernuccio Photo taken prior to COVID-19 lockdown The freelance musician: conductor Christopher Stark of the Multi-Story Orchestra Putting on a classical music concert in a multi-storey car park off an inner-London high street sounds like a completely ridiculous idea. But that is just what conductor Christopher Stark and composer Kate Whitley did in the summer of 2011, gathering an orchestra of young professional players to perform The Rite of Spring in a draughty, low-ceilinged concrete space behind a cinema in Peckham. The venture worked, attracting a large audience that was diverse in age, class and ethnicity.

Further performances followed, featuring chamber and orchestral music ranging from Vivaldi, Rameau and Biber to Debussy, Wagner, contemporary scores such as John Adams’s Harmonielehre (a BBC Proms performance) and Terry Riley’s In C, and fusions of classical music, rap, hip hop and poetry. The MultiStory Orchestra rapidly developed an education programme that brought local schoolchildren together to perform works written specially for them alongside the orchestra; and it spread its wings beyond Peckham to cities such as Ipswich, Birmingham and Gloucester. In 2016, their work was recognised with a Royal Philharmonic Society Award for ‘ingenuity, simplicity, and as a model which can be replicated to create new audiences for classical music around the UK’.

Then in 2020 all this activity came to a halt; Multi-Story joined so many other organisations in being forced to cancel its planned season because of COVID-19.

The earliest and most signifi cant casualty of the cancellation was The Endz, a new musical drama that was to have been performed with students from Harris Academy, Peckham, at the end of March in two local theatres. The hour-long show, including singing, dancing and rap, was partly inspired by the fatal stabbing of a pupil at the school some years earlier, and had been devised by the students and their head of music Kerry Rogers in collaboration with Kate Whitley. The aim was to show how young people in inner-city communities are surrounded by gang culture and can so easily be drawn into crime.

Having to call off the performances at such a late stage, when so much work had gone into them, was deeply disappointing. Of course, the intention is that The Endz will be put on when conditions allow, but it may be diffi cult to regain the same sense of immediacy.

In the meantime, however, elements of the show have been used over the past few months in some of Multi-Story’s work with schools, which quite quickly moved online.

‘We made the decision quite quickly to honour our existing freelance contracts and bookings for 2020, and to continue to book freelancers for alternative activity and digital projects,’ says Christopher Stark. ‘Our focus was on continuing to reach the young people in the schools we engage with, and providing them with digital educational and artistic activity, and supporting disadvantaged and isolated communities. We decided that was a more helpful response to the crisis than trying to fi nd ways of putting on public performances. Fortunately, the funding bodies that support our work have been very fl exible and have enabled us to transfer our grants to reconfi gured projects.’

Top: Christopher Stark working at Glyndebourne (photo taken prior to COVID-19 lockdown)

Above: Multi-Story Orchestra performing at King’s Cross (photo taken prior to COVID-19 lockdown)

Read our feature ‘Musical roots’ on page 14 where we continue with our exploration of diversity and access to music and arts education

His biggest worry, he says, has been maintaining the orchestra’s momentum; although it started off as a large ensemble drawing on a large pool of players, the last three or four years when Multi-Story has presented a full season of concerts have seen it evolve into a more consistent group with a very special shared ethos. ‘The project has always had an element of trying to shake things up, but the shake-up caused by COVID-19 is a bit more drastic than we would have wished!’

Several of Multi-Story’s players have contributed ‘Lockdown Stories’ to the News pages of the orchestra’s website. Back in April, viola player Jenny Coombes vividly described the feeling of shock as she and so many colleagues found themselves striking through date after date in their diaries. However she also described how she and her boyfriend had enjoyed playing duets that he arranged for the unusual combination of viola and tuba for their neighbours as part of the Thursday night Clap for Carers, helping to create a community spirit that she had never felt before. As lockdown lengthened she decided to use the time constructively: ‘So I’ve taken the plunge, downloaded Sibelius and I too am now learning how to arrange. I might even foray into composing … we will see!’

In the wake of George Floyd’s death and the spotlight it shone on the #BlackLivesMatter movement, bassoonist Linton Stephens contributed some eloquent thoughts on how it feels to be a black classical musician in the UK, and how the movement had allowed him to share some of his experiences with his colleagues for the fi rst time: ‘At a time when classical music is the least diverse of all performing arts, I couldn’t help but sit up and feel how important this movement is and, with hope, how it might help catapult classical music into a new era of diversity.’

Percussionist Jude Carlton’s July Lockdown Story described how he and several colleagues delivered interactive ‘digital schools tours’ over Zoom to students in Peckham and Gloucester: ‘Each of our presentations centred around a video of the Multi-Story Orchestra playing a different piece. Mine was based on Steve Reich’s Music for a Large Ensemble – really bright and uplifting music that I think the kids enjoyed and which proved to be fertile ground for inspiring our own rhythmic sentences, doing lots of rumbling on our knees and generally having a groovy time.’

And in August Multi-Story’s co-founder Kate Whitley wrote about how volunteering as a delivery driver for a food bank had not only enabled her to get to know the area she had just moved to, but brought home to her in a completely new way the reality of lives very different from her own, the gaps in the social care system and importance of strong communities in supporting people: ‘It’s incredible how close we can all live to one another while being worlds apart, and I really hope that some of the new relationships and experiences created out of the pandemic will have a lasting positive impact on how people see and relate to each other.’

All the members of Multi-Story have portfolio careers, combining performing, teaching, outreach work and in some case composing in different contexts. In addition to his commitment to Multi-Story, Christopher Stark is making a name for himself as an opera conductor, and his cancelled engagements for this year have included work in Cologne and at the Garsington Festival.

This summer he was to have conducted Blackheath Halls Community Opera’s production of Verdi’s Macbeth but this had to be shelved. Instead the company has produced a fi lm version of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, with distanced performances from a distinguished cast of soloists including ISM board member Nicky Spence in the title role of Tom Rakewell joining the amateur Blackheath Halls Orchestra and Chorus and Royal Greenwich and Blackheath Halls Youth Choir, imaginatively directed by James Hurley. It premiered on 3 October on Facebook and YouTube.

Stark is also principal conductor of the amateur Ernest Read Symphony Orchestra (ERSO), which normally gives fi ve concerts a year, combining a very high standard of performance (with the assistance of professional section leaders) with an approachable style of presentation, and giving important opportunities to young professional soloists.

Unable to rehearse in person during lockdown, members of the orchestra learned and recorded their individual parts in isolation for its fi rst #ERSOOnline project, an introduction to D’un matin de printemps by Lili Boulanger. The structure of the piece is explained and some context provided by Stark, with musical illustrations by the players followed by a complete performance. The result is one of the best distanced performances I’ve seen.

Christopher Stark was responsible for both devising the project and editing the recordings; he also edited the audio recordings for The Rake’s Progress. Like many musicians over the past few months, he found the experience forced him to develop new skills that will be useful in the future to a high standard. ‘I enjoyed the process, but it was very tiring and time-consuming, and challenging for our performers,’ he admits. ‘Most people have the technology to do it in their phones, but it requires a lot of patience and we lost some who felt it was beyond them. I hope in the future there can be a simplifi cation of the platforms for this sort of thing.’

christopherstark.com multi-story.org.uk erso.london blackheathhalls.com

The salaried musician: bassist ‘Now that we are getting back to work, that has David Stark of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales paid off,’ he says, adding however that he was pleased when BBC NOW’s learning department seized the opportunity to expand the amount of time the players At the beginning of March this year David Stark, could spend working with schools and care homes, younger brother of Christopher and principal double albeit virtually. Then towards the end of the summer bass of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales (BBC NOW), they were able to meet again in person to record in had the well-organised routine and full diary common reduced-size ensembles for BBC Radio 3 and to give to all members of the BBC Orchestras. Three-hour one of the shortened season of BBC Proms, broadcast sessions of rehearsals, recording sessions and public on both radio and TV from Hoddinott Hall. concerts in the orchestra’s base at Hoddinott Hall in ‘I wasn’t needed for the fi rst piece in the Prom,’ Cardiff were punctuated by performances across the Stark recalls, ‘and it was an amazing feeling to watch length and breadth of Wales, in venues my colleagues performing together again after such as the beautiful Brangwyn Hall in Swansea, so many months off – very emotional. We are all St David’s Hall in Cardiff and Arts Centres in musicians because we love performing, and we want Aberystwyth and Bangor. to work.’

With lockdown came the cancellation of the This is principal conductor Ryan Bancroft’s fi rst orchestra’s public concert season, and even its recordings season at the helm of BBC NOW, but Stark says he has as Hoddinott Hall was out of bounds. But the BBC adapted wonderfully to the strange circumstances, orchestra players are salaried, and as employees of a entering into all the online activity, getting to know public service broadcaster are not eligible for furlough, the players and calmly meeting the challenges of all so they could not be fully ‘laid off’. The BBC NOW admin, the changes of programming. ‘He has a great rapport social media and education and outreach teams quickly with audiences, he obviously wants to get stuck in and swung into action to work out ways in which the nothing seems to faze him.’ The orchestra also has a players could continue to work and to communicate new director, Lisa Tregale. It is a challenging time for with their audiences online. a new team to be at the helm, but Stark says that she

So instead of the rigid schedule of orchestra sessions too is doing ‘an incredible job’ on behalf of the players. Stark and his colleagues have found themselves ‘I genuinely feel that in BBC NOW we are some contributing solo performances, distanced chamber of the luckiest musicians in the country because our music performances, interviews, baby photographs role as a national orchestra as well as a broadcasting and recipes to the BBC NOW social media feed. orchestra means there has been so much work for Stark has revealed the contents of his enormous us to do. I know lots of people who are much less double bass case in their ‘What’s in your gig bag?’ fortunate – some who have had to stack shelves or series, chatted to fellow members of his section about drive delivery vans because their freelance work has their likes and dislikes on and off stage, and recreated dried up completely – so I never take it for granted.’ in a distanced performance with violinist Gwenllian Hâf MacDonald an encore that they played on tour in bbc.co.uk/bbcnow South America a few years ago.

He also arranged ‘Bogoroditse Devo’ from Rachmaninov’s choral vespers to be played by the double bassists of all the BBC Orchestras from their homes in Scotland, England and Wales for the #BBCInstrumentalSessions, inspired by his memories of singing in school and church choirs as he was growing up in South London. ‘It was quite tricky, because the bass isn’t really a solo instrument, but it has the right soundworld for that deep Russian sonority and in fact I didn’t even have to transpose it.’

Back in the spring however, this activity was not enough to fi ll a normal working week. Stark shared with many fellow musicians an initial feeling of relief in having a chance to step off the treadmill of fastchanging repertoire and spend a bit more time on personal practice, refl ection, and learning some pieces more thoroughly. As Stark was just 23 when he was appointed section leader seven years ago, having a short enforced sabbatical from full-scale concerts was a positive experience.

Above: Screenshots from BBC Now

Below: David Stark performing with BBC NOW at one of this year’s BBC Proms Photo: Jake Bufton