Music for Life
MUSIC FOR LIFE After more than 50 years as a conductor, John Lubbock (1959) knows the impact music can have, on his own life as much as on that of others. “All concerts are failures”. These are not the words that you would expect to hear come from a man whose musical career has spanned over 50 years, who has conducted the biggest names in classical music across the world and who is most likely the longest-serving Director of music with a single orchestra, the organisation he founded – the Orchestra of St John’s (OSJ). But to John Lubbock (1959), never producing a perfect performance of a piece of music is part of the joy he finds in his work. For him and his musicians, the next performance is, in his words, simply an opportunity to “fail better to master a Mozart”. Music is clearly not, however, just about the musicians and the enjoyment from his long and illustrious career derives not only from the performances, but also from the use of music as an immensely powerful tool to help and to heal everyone who hears it. John’s journey to master a Mozart began at Windsor, where as a chorister for over seven years the four hours of specialist music tuition and performance a day gave him a solid grounding in his field. His time at Windsor also introduced John to a new aspect of performance – performing for the music’s sake, devoid of ego. That notion of the joining together of a group of individual voices, be they human or instrumental, to create a sound that can physically and emotionally feed you has been one of the key elements in all his work since.
John Lubbock (second left) in the photo of the Athletics Team, c.1960. 36
the old radleian 2021
Such a talented musician was going to find much to be involved in during his time at Radley, and whilst here in the early 1960s he performed in the choir and the orchestra. Keen to further his musical education he managed to arrange to go up to the Royal College of Music (RCM) in Kensington every Saturday, furthering the breadth of his knowledge. After a stint in Peru with the VSO, he then switched over to the Royal Academy of Music to continue his musical studies full time. And it was whilst a student there that he inadvertently discovered his calling. As part of a performance piece, John commissioned a new work for tenor & 13 instruments, but unfortunately something was missing before it could be performed. It needed a conductor. With no one else putting up their hand to take the baton, John stepped forward. It was not something he’d planned and whilst the performance of the new commission was seemingly more of a ‘world derriere than world premiere’, it put him in the role that he would perform for the next 54 years (and counting). It was from this first, not entirely deliberate, step that the Orchestra of St John’s was founded whilst John was still a student at the RAM in 1967. Initially founding a choir, it was not long before musicians were added to the group and their musical repertoire and reputation grew. A stroke of good fortune then came their way when John was approached by someone that was just starting a music agency. He offered to run the OSJ’s concerts for nothing as a way to build up experience and exposure for both parties, and the success of this arrangement can be easily measured by the fact that the OSJ were soon well established and were invited to perform their first prom just nine years later, in 1976. Over the next 15 years, John went from strength-to-strength, conducting at the Proms another five times, touring the world and playing with the world’s great soloists, including Yehudi Menuhin, Mstislav Rostropovich, Gidon Kremer, Lucia Popp, Sir James Galway and Yo-Yo Ma. However, despite the esteem in which OSJ and John himself were held, the level of wider recognition for the OSJ never fully materialised and that was down to two decisions John made, both of which sum up the ethos at the heart of his work. The first decision was taken in the late 1970s and that was to simply stop studio recording. Increasingly it became clear that the recording process was ruining what the OSJ were trying to achieve when performing music - creating something new and individual with each playing of a piece as the interplay between musicians and composer varies every time. To John the essence of what it means to perform and the requirements of studio were increasingly at loggerheads, with the music stifled by the constraints and repetition of recording.
