The Stage

The all England club

Published Thursday 17 March 2005 at 12:05 by Susan Elkin

Classical music campaigner Em Marshall despairs at what she sees as the sidelining of English composers, so much so that she is launching a festival to celebrate them. Susan Elkin discovers how the Royal Philharmonic and Julian Lloyd Webber are already on board

English composers - the likes of Arnold Bax, Hubert Parry, Charles Villiers Stanford, William Walton, Gustav Holst and even Purcell - are being marginalised in favour of music by foreigners like Mozart and Dvorak. The classical music industry in general is to blame and the BBC is the worst offender. That is the view of Em Marshall, who is setting out on a one-woman campaign to redress the balance.

“Do you realise that more time was given at the Proms between 1992 and 2001 to the music of Kurt Weill, a German, than to Bax, Stanford, Parry, Delius, Holst, Walton, Moran and Purcell added together?” asks Marshall, a steely glint in her eye. We were speaking at the Classicalive show at Olympia earlier this month, where live performances, children’s concerts, workshops and celebrity interviews jostled for attention with campaigning stall holders like Marshall.

She was a founder member of the Vaughan Williams Society aged 14 and is now the Elgar Society’s head of publicity. She mentions other English composers whose music rarely gets a hearing such as Edgar Bainton, Cecil Coles, Frederick Cliff and York Bowen. “All very high quality stuff and it should be performed,” she informs me.

Still in her early twenties and fresh from St Paul’s Girls’ School - where she fell in love with English music while being taught by conductor Hilary Davan Wetton - and a classics degree at Oxford, Marshall is busy planning the ambitious English Music Festival to start in October 2006. Thereafter, she hopes, it will be an annual event.

Supported by private means, Marshall has no other job and is currently devoting all her energies to English composers. “I’ve decided to put my heart into music,” she says.

The venue for her festival will be Dorchester-on-Thames, eight miles south of Oxford. The main concerts will be held in the abbey there. She has provisionally booked the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The Orchestra of St John’s Smith Square is also on board along with the Finzi Singers, cellist Julian Lloyd Webber and soprano Catherine Bott, so there will be plenty of work for musicians in this festival if it comes off.

Marshall has also appointed Bramwell Tovey as music director, David Lloyd Jones as principal guest conductor and Giles Easterbrook as artistic director so there is no shortage of large classical music names in the line-up.

She has assembled a formidable body of high profile patrons too. They include Lady Bliss, widow of Sir Arthur Bliss, master of the Queen’s Music and Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, former head of the Civil Service and son of the English composer Thomas Armstrong. Paul Ginnery of Radio 3, former Classic FM presenter Henry Kelly and writer Simon Jenkins are actively involved too. So is Ursula Vaughan Williams, widow of composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.

It all sounds very impressive until you reach the bottom line - money. At present there isn’t any. “We have small grants from some of the composer societies but I’m looking for a major sponsor to put in about £500,000,” says Marshall, explaining that ideally it should be a company with an English image. “We couldn’t have, for example, Coca-Cola,” she says with a shudder.

She is also applying to various trusts and trying to coax money from Arts Council England but isn’t hopeful. “The whole venture has an elitist image and it certainly isn’t very politically correct, so we’re unlikely to get public money,” she admits.

But, although she uses the word elitist several times, she is determined that her festival avoids the prohibitively expensive Glyndebourne route. “I’m aiming for ticket prices from about £5 to £30 so they will be affordable for the sort of people that attend the Three Choirs Festival,” she says.

Ah yes, the Three Choirs Festival. Started in Elgar’s time, it rotates triennially between Worcester, Gloucester and Hereford and has always been a key showcase for English music. “But the new director is changing its character and including works by composers like Brahms and Verdi,” says Marshall. “So I hope we shall pick up some concertgoers who feel let down by the way Three Choirs is changing.”

I can’t help wondering whether a movement which seeks, apparently, to sideline the works of a great composer like Brahms for nationalistic reasons is not slightly skewed but Marshall won’t have it.

“There is some wonderful English music which is never heard,” she argues with crisp passion. “Chandos and Hyperion are doing some good work in recording some of it at last but why has, for example, Holst’s The Coming of Christ never been noticed?”

She continues: “English music, particularly that written in the early years of the 20th century, suffers from an image problem. People think it’s all worthy stuff about cow pats but it’s sexy, fresh, exciting and ought to be played and heard.”

Hilary Davan Wetton has wished her well and told her that if anybody can win this fight, Marshall can. One knows what he means. It is rare to meet such informed single mindedness in one so young. Put October 2006 in your diary.

• For more information visit www.englishmusicfestival.org.uk