One
of my earliest memories is of myself as a small boy sitting on a high stool and
enjoying the sounds as I pressed down the keys of my aunt’s Dale Forte upright piano.
I guess I was just two or three years old. And that may have been why my mother
began to teach me to play. When I was four years old, the two of us walked onto
a concert platform to play Winter’s Ride,
a duet for four hands. A year later I played one of Mozart’s solos for a
similar audience.
Then
my mother took me each week for more formal lessons with Miss Beryl Knight who
rented a tall narrow studio at the back of Mr Moon’s music instrument shop in
Seymour Place. One of the most important lessons she taught me was to look up -
and not at my fingers - when I played from memory.
My
association with the Royal Academy of Music began when I was a pupil at St
Mary’s (Church of England) Elementary School. For a few weeks a student from
the RAM came to teach us singing. Before she left, she handed out leaflets to
those of us who might be interested in joining Margaret Donnington’s Junior
School at the RAM. My parents filled in a form. I was interviewed. I was
accepted. Miss Knight was devastated. She had expected to take me through all
the grades of the Associated Board and then prepare me for my Wigmore Hall
debut.
We
Junior Exhibitioners were a happy lot. I went once a week after school (the RAM
was so near to my home) for a piano lesson with a sub-professor and again on
Saturday mornings for various classes. Once in each term we played our solos at
a Saturday afternoon concert for an invited audience in the Duke’s Hall.
I
was three months short of my twelfth birthday when war with Germany began on
Sunday the 3rd of September 1939. My younger brother and I passed the next
three years as evacuees in Caerphilly. I had splendid piano lessons from
Clifford Lewis in Cardiff and began to learn to play the church organ with
David Williams who was blind.
We
came back to London in time for the autumn term of 1942 and in the following
January, when I was just 15, I was engaged as organist and choirmaster at St
Peter’s Church, Fulham – very much a part of the Anglo-Catholic wing of the
Church of England. For me, it was a completely new experience. In later years I
looked back on it as a splendid preparation for conducting opera. From my organ
loft, perched high up on the south wall of the chancel, I looked down on the
liturgical action with its solemn choreography and kept my ears open, ready to
pick up the spoken and visual cues. The ‘remuneration’ was £35 per annum.
Back
at Margaret Donnington’s Junior School at the RAM, some of us were now Special
Talent Exhibitioners. I was fortunate enough, and very grateful for piano
lessons with Madeleine Windsor and organ lessons with Douglas Hopkins.
This
rather fruitful episode came to an unexpected end a little way into 1944 when I
began my first full-time professional engagement. I was the pianist in The
Solid Eight, an ENSA concert party on tour, entertaining some of the Canadian
troops preparing to join the war in northern Europe. I look back with glee on
this precious experience of show-biz. The nightly ‘on stage’ to live audiences
several hundreds strong. It made an immense difference to my playing.
And
so, inevitably, once more to the RAM. This time as a full-time student. On our
first morning Sir Stanley Marchant spoke to us about our future careers as
professional musicians, the joys and responsibilities ahead of us.
Douglas
Hopkins was a fine teacher who took a personal interest in the well-being of
his students. I learned my trade in his choir training class. We’d be faced
with a previously unseen copy of an item from the choral repertoire. He’d call
one of us out to conduct – at sight – another to play the keyboard
accompaniment. Saved my life on many a crucial occasion in later years.
In
my individual lessons he was gently encouraging. When I was influenced by new
ideas flowing in from the real world outside, he stood by, correcting only when
I went too far from the acceptable. With his gentle guidance I won the Henry
Richards Prize for organ playing in 1946.
In
1947 I was called up for National Service in the army. In 1949 I went up to
Oxford and came down three years later with an Honours Degree in Music. Egon
Wellesz had been a great inspiration, assuring me that my own research and the
conclusions I reached were more valuable than dependence on secondary source
textbooks.
The
1950s saw me playing a small part in a UNESCO programme of international school
holiday exchange visits, then moving on to grammar school music teaching. All
the while playing the organ for church services on Sundays and Holy Days and
taking choir practice at least once a week.
Towards
the end of that decade my appointment as Master of the Music at Westminster
Cathedral was accompanied by an invitation to join the professorial staff of
the RAM.
The
1960s were wonderful times to be in London and to teach at the RAM. Carnaby
Street positively fizzled. But it wasn’t just the bright new fashions that
attracted attention. All sorts of new ideas were in the air. The Thursday
Concerts on the BBC Third Programme introduced me to Schoenberg Webern Berg and
a plethora of forward looking composers and performers, while the Beatles and
the Rolling Stones captivated wider audiences. We endeavoured to play Bach as
his contemporaries might have played him, then modified our performance to
bring him closer to our modern audience. Should we play the Widor Toccata
at the composer’s metronome mark, or should we take it a little faster? These
were questions we asked ourselves and resolved every time we played.
Of
course we were a minority, and even at the RAM a majority preferred to teach in
the old traditional ways.
As
my fortieth birthday came nearer I realised I stood on the brink. I too could
go on doing the same things in the same way for the next twenty-five years. And
then, one Sunday, the Observer and the Sunday Times carried display
advertisements for the new position of Assistant Director at the New South
Wales Conservatorium of Music in Sydney, Australia. A new chapter was about to
begin ..
francis
cameron, oxford, 06 september 2013
