Michael Henderson talks to John Wilson, whose obsession with songs from the golden age of musicals led him to form his own band
‘People think I am an expert on musicals,’ says John Wilson, in his pleasing Geordie voice, ‘but that is something I am certainly not. I am obsessed with songs, written by professional songwriters for professional singers in the golden age of popular music.’ It is a nice distinction, to restore the original meaning of that adjective, and Wilson, who is currently touring the country with the orchestra that takes his name, is proving as good as his word.
This is a fruitful time for the Gateshead-born conductor, one year short of his 40th birthday. Last week he was in the pit for Opera North’s revival of Ruddigore, a superb production by Jo Davies that did the company (and, more important, Gilbert and Sullivan) proud. Now he is taking his band on the road to present some of those songs that obsess him. They also appear on That’s Entertainment, the set of standards from MGM musicals he has just recorded for EMI Classics.
Switching effortlessly from classical to light music, Wilson feels at home in both disciplines. There is no sense of the slumming one occasionally finds in the not-quite world of ‘crossover’, which accounts partly for the enormous success he has enjoyed. This is authentic music-making. The other reasons are the quality of the players Wilson has recruited, and his own orchestrations, based on the original piano parts, held for copyright purposes, and what he calls ‘aural dictation’.
Like actors who understand that farce must be played with absolute conviction if it is to work, Wilson knows that popular music warrants fidelity to what the composers wrote. ‘It may be called light music but, to play it well, you need to know it. Beethoven or Elgar will always win in the end, even if the performers are not always up to scratch. They can take a bit of a hammering. But an Eric Coates waltz has to be played deftly.’
The big six, Wilson calls them: those composers who created the landscape of popular music. Jerome Kern to start with, obviously, the pioneer who wrote Showboat, ‘the bridge between operetta and the American song’. Then came Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and Harold Arlen, the most underrated of the great Americans, who, as Wilson says, ‘had the combination of the Jewish idiom — he was the son of a cantor — and the black idiom’.
As for George Gershwin, who spent his working life hopping between the European traditions of the music he studied and the commercial imperative of the Broadway musicals he wrote, and whose Porgy and Bess emerged from both worlds, Wilson has no doubts. ‘I have always said that Gershwin’s songs are the Schubert songs of the 20th century. You are never going to hear the like of them again.’
Wilson’s story as a bandleader began 20 years ago when, as a young man studying composition and conducting at the Royal College of Music, he moonlighted as a pianist at the Grosvenor House Hotel in Mayfair. ‘It was there that I met Matt Skelton, the drummer in our orchestra, and he introduced me to some of his jazz-playing friends. Suddenly, I was bringing them together with musicians I knew from my world. I made no distinction between a Vaughan Williams symphony, say, and what we were doing.’
Soon the John Wilson Orchestra, as it became, had a residency at another swanky hotel, the Royal Garden in Kensington, that was eventually to last nine years. There was also, in 1994, a concert at the Bloomsbury Theatre, which led to engagements at Pizza on the Park and the Queen Elizabeth Hall. ‘People kept asking us, “Have you made any records?” In 1996 we did make one. There was no logic to it. We went into the studio not knowing what we were going to do, and the record is what we came up with. As far as we were concerned they were good tunes that were meant to provide sumptuous background music for expensive dinners at the Royal Garden Hotel!’
The band’s style can be caught on Orchestral Jazz, a record it made ten years ago with Richard Rodney Bennett, which is worth a tenner of anybody’s money. Here are American standards beautifully realised in orchestrations that dissolve the boundaries that separate ‘art’ music from the popular kind. The stand-out cut, ‘Then I’ll Be Tired of You’ by Arthur Schwartz, is a small masterpiece of tasteful arrangement. Hear this record once, and you’ll be hooked. It is one of the jewels of popular music.
By now Wilson and his orchestra were building up a fair old head of steam. They supplied the soundtrack to Beyond the Sea, Kevin Spacey’s biopic about Bobby Darin, and in 2009 there came an invitation to perform songs from the great MGM musicals at the Proms. The singers straddled both worlds. Sir Thomas Allen was there, and so was the wonderful Kim Criswell, New York-born but for many years resident in London, where she has become the go-to girl for popular numbers. Televised live by the BBC, the Prom was a glorious success, and carried Wilson’s name to a wider audience.
‘We received countless letters afterwards,’ says Wilson. ‘In fact they kept coming for a year!’ That triumph led to another appearance at the Proms the following summer, when the orchestra played selections from Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals to a hall packed to the gunwales. So when Wilson brought back his band again this year, to perform more songs from the shows, the concert had acquired the weight of a Prom tradition. Long may it last.
Not everything on the new disc works. While Seth MacFarlane does justice to ‘You’re Sensational,’ Cole Porter’s great song from High Society, made famous by Frank Sinatra, it was not wise to include ‘Well, Did You Evah?’, on which Sinatra traded phrases and jests with Bing Crosby. Some songs can only bring unwelcome comparisons with the original performances. Mind you, Criswell has a high old time with ‘The Trolley Song’, which belongs to Judy Garland, so perhaps the golden rule is not to invoke golden rules. There is plenty to enjoy, and anybody who catches the band and singers on tour will (as Porter wrote in ‘You’re Sensational’) have a ball.
Wilson, meanwhile, has other things on his mind, notably the nine symphonies of Vaughan Williams, ‘which stand at the heart of English music in the last century’. He has got four of them under his belt and next year he will return to his native heath, to conduct the greatest of the lot, the fifth, with the Northern Sinfonia, at the Sage in Gateshead. ‘How lucky are we to have all this music in our lives!’ Yes, indeed. And for enthusiasts like Wilson, who is bringing familiar music to listeners young and old, the challenge puts him on his mettle. So little time, and so much to do…
For tour dates: www.johnwilsonorchestra.com
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