Founded in 1956, London's Kensington Symphony Orchestra is one of the best known non-professional orchestras in Britain. It regularly attracts the best non-professional players from around London for its concerts at St John's, Smith Square and other venues in London. Like many British amateur orchestras it finances its concerts not only through ticket sales, charitable donations and corporate support, but through its playing members who pay subscription fees.
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KSO has only had two principal conductors — its founder, Leslie Head, and the current conductor, Russell Keable who has been with the orchestra since 1983.
"All the main orchestras in those days were doing very boring programmes, really, rarely anything unusual—and in a way I think we helped to change that" said Leslie Head. He was a 33-year-old freelance horn player and part-time conductor when he first assembled Kensington Symphony Orchestra at Queen Alexandra House, next door to the Royal Albert Hall and across the road from the Royal College of Music in Kensington. Head’s original concept was that this would be a repertoire orchestra, one that provided conservatoire students with the opportunity to read through pieces they might not otherwise set eyes on before professional auditions. "When I was a student we had three hours of orchestra a week, the same amount that the college were doing in 1850—and look what had happened to music in those 100 years!" That first Saturday-morning session in May 1956 was spent tackling works including Brahms’s First Symphony and Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel, with some Schumann thrown in.
It wasn’t long before the students decided they wanted to give a concert. A début programme was scheduled for 5 December 1956; but KSO’s first appearance actually came a couple of weeks earlier, when Head was asked to put on a last-minute performance at Hove Town Hall in support of the Hungarian Relief Fund. The clarinet section for that first concert comprised Alan Hacker and Paul Harvey—both familiar names to today’s clarinettists—and a young Royal Artillery bandsman called Harrison Birtwistle. In honour of the Hungarian cause, the programme included Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3, written only ten years earlier. Even in that first concert, KSO’s predilection for the new, the unfamiliar and the downright difficult—what one of Head’s players would come to refer to as ‘backs-to-the-wall-again’ music—was shaping itself.
Powered by Head’s hard work, and with its few expenses met by a postwar Labour government keen to support anything that might fall under the remit of further education, KSO flourished. Fundamentally, Head still saw it as a repertoire orchestra, something that was to continue for two decades and more. A typical schedule from 1978 has the orchestra rehearsing Brahms and Bartók one week, Bliss and Strauss the next, Elgar the week after. Yet the concerts continued, and grew more and more ambitious. Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky received an early UK performance from KSO at the 1963 St Pancras Festival; several now-standard works including Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, Mahler’s Das Klagende Lied and Puccini’s Messa di Gloria were introduced to UK audiences by KSO. As the orchestra for Opera Viva, another of Head’s brainchildren, KSO (in all but name—the sponsoring Fulham council insisted they dropped the "Kensington") performed in well-received exhumations of early Wagner, Verdi and Donizetti operas with distinguished singers including Pauline Tinsley and the young John Tomlinson.
Yet the boldest venture was perhaps KSO’s 1961 UK premiere of the vast, original 1901 version of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder. The huge forces this required (eight of each woodwind instrument, for a start) put it way beyond the capacity and budget of most groups employing professionals. This, Head thought, was exactly where KSO should be coming in. Not everyone agreed. "I wrote to the Arts Council to ask for an extra £100," he remembers. “And they answered saying that I shouldn’t even be attempting a work like this, and that they had told the National Association of Music Societies not to give us anything either.” The performance went ahead regardless, and was a huge success.
In the 1983-4 season, Head retired as KSO’s music director and handed over to Russell Keable. By this time the balance had shifted firmly towards amateur players. Changes in conservatoire curriculi during the 1970s had meant that their students no longer needed KSO to bridge the gap. And so, the age range of the orchestra had begun to broaden, as had the geographical spread of its players, who came from all over London and, occasionally, beyond. The 30th anniversary concert in 1986 was celebrated with an all-British programme of Walton, Bax, Stanford and Wilfrid Josephs in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. This marked KSO’s South Bank début. “It was,” says Keable, “also a milestone in terms of performance quality.” At around this time the orchestra began to give concerts in St John's, Smith Square. “It was a really happy orchestra, and that was absolutely key in its development. If an orchestra is happy socialising it will play better,” said Keable.
Today, St John’s is effectively KSO’s performing home. Most of its six concerts each year are given there, with occasional visits to the Cadogan Hall or the Queen Elizabeth Hall. The line-up varies very slightly from concert to concert, but the orchestra inspires considerable commitment. The four woodwind principals have around 75 years of service between them. Many are National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain alumni, people who chose not to turn professional as players, and many are employed in the music industry in other capacities.
In 1996, Korngold’s opera, Die tote Stadt, received its UK premiere, a concert performance by the Kensington Symphony Orchestra conducted by Russell Keable at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, with Ian Caley (Paul) and Christine Teare (Marie/Marietta), thirteen years before the first UK staged performance at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Head’s longstanding tradition of programming unusual or neglected works by British composers has been maintained—perhaps most obviously in the premiere recording of Sir Henry Walford-Davies’ once-famous cantata Everyman, made with the London Oriana Choir in 2004. That recording was Gramophone Magazine's Editor’s Choice in February 2005. Also in 2004, the orchestra together with the BBC Concert Orchestra premiered Errollyn Wallen’s Spirit Symphony – Speed-Dating for Two Orchestras, conducted by Russell Keable and broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. That performance won the BBC 3 Listeners’ Award in 2005. That year, the orchestra celebrated its 50th anniversary by performing at the Barbican Centre with pianist Nikolai Demidenko. And in 2007, at Cadogan Hall, the Kensington Symphony Orchestra, once again under Russell Keable's baton, accompanied Myleene Klass, Alfie Boe, Natasha Marsh and Natalie Clein for EMI Classics, in a concert celebrating the 10th anniversary of the EMI Music Sound Foundation.
The orchestra is more involved than ever in promoting new compositions. In 2004 KSO commissioned and premiered Hovercraft by Joby Talbot, which he then incorporated into the ballet Chroma by the Royal Ballet in 2007. Works by John Woolrich, Peter Maxwell Davies, Robin Holloway and both Colin and David Matthews have also featured in recent years, often in their London or UK premières. For composers, the chance to have their work rehearsed at proper length and performed with enthusiasm can be a welcome change from the professional norm. For the players, breaking new ground brings greater risks but commensurate rewards. "An amateur orchestra can be simply there for the indulgence of its members, or it can try to do things that professional orchestras either can’t or don’t want to," says Keable. "It can try to make a difference."
2. http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_features.php?id=3782