County music - Maidstone Symphony Orchestra

Published Monday 20 June 2005 at 17:25 by Susan Elkin

The Maidstone Symphony Orchestra boasts talented musicians from a range of different careers, from lawyers to taxi drivers. Susan Elkin finds out how the 94-year-old company pulls adoring audiences in their hundreds

The string sound is clear and incisive, the brass impeccably tuned and the percussion players have that clockwork sense of timing which always leaves me gasping with admiration. The woodwind section is pretty good too. No, I’m not in a pricey London venue enjoying the LSO or a top visiting orchestra, I’m at Mote Hall, Maidstone on a damp Saturday night listening to the Maidstone Symphony Orchestra.

There’s a whiff of chlorine in the air because this is a sports hall which doubles up as a concert arena and it shares the building with a swimming pool. So forget the architectural attractiveness of, say, the Cardiff Millennium Centre or the Sage at Gateshead.

Brian Wright is conducting and tonight’s programme includes Chloe Handslip playing Elgar’s violin concerto and Ravel’s orchestrated version of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Earlier in the 2004/5 season the MSO played Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Dvorak’s cello concerto and Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony.

There are no limits on repertoire and soloists such as cellists Guy Johnston and Adrian Brendel, violinist Jennifer Pike, pianist Freddy Kempff, clarinetist Emma Johnston and trumpeter Paul Beniston are routine. In May, John Lill, the orchestra’s president, who has played several concerts with the orchestra, will be there to do Beethoven’s third piano concerto in the president’s benefit concert.

What an achievement. The rich vibrant sound is well worth coming a long way for, which is why the full house - upwards of 800 - travels enthusiastically from all over the county for each of the season’s five concerts.

And yet this is an amateur orchestra. Although about half the players are music teachers or those who earn, or have earned, their living from music, the rest come from all walks of life.

“John Moore, who plays first violin, is a business manager at NatWest, our new principal bassoon player is a physicist who teaches the subject and both trumpeters are taxi drivers,” says Steve Migden, principal horn and chairman of the orchestra. Migden himself is a Kent Music School teacher and his wife Angela is MSO’s principal cello. He adds that the orchestra also boasts a trombonist who is a wine merchant, a lawyer who plays cello and a horn player who has a daytime job as a BBC executive.

The orchestra gave its first concert in the Corn Exchange at Maidstone under the baton of Frederick Cole in 1911. Despite two world wars it has been performing almost continuously ever since, under various conductors, in Maidstone venues and is now looking forward to its centenary - funding permitting.

It costs around £9,000 to mount each concert. The calibre of the soloists means they command fees of up to £3,000. If there is a piano concerto on the progamme then a Steinway grand has to be hired. For a large work such as The Rite of Spring the orchestra, whose core membership is about 60, has to hire professional extras to fill the gaps in its ranks, otherwise choice of repertoire would be curtailed.

Ticket prices never quite cover costs as all concert promoters know. Maidstone Borough Council has always helped by subsidising the hire of Mote Hall. There are now signs that this will be cut down next year because, as Brian Wright observes bitterly, the orchestra and the hundreds of people who support it are regarded as elitist. Until recently the orchestra benefited from an arts council grant but that is now minimal.

Against that, fees for soloists are rising. “It is important that we keep using soloists people have heard of,” says Migden. “We tried using student soloists a few seasons back but on the whole they weren’t musically successful.” He adds that no one wants to rule out piano concertos in order to save the cost of piano hire.

“We fear we could soon be facing an annual £4,500 deficit,” says Migden, who is American by birth but has lived in Britain for many years. “We’re looking for private patronage for the orchestra. That’s quite common in the USA even with community orchestras,” he says.

Meanwhile there is a lot a frantic fundraising, such as a homely raffle at every concert, a campaign to get audience members to become subscription ticket holders or ‘friends of the orchestra’, to sponsor this or that, to request gift aid on their donations or to use a ‘you shop you give’ voucher scheme in local retail outlets. The British spirit of amateurism is alive and well and achieving a lot in Maidstone but it would be better to see something as worthwhile as MSO put on a sound financial footing by a single individual or a business with the wealth to do it.

“MSO is driven by passion,” says Migden. “Its players are deeply committed to it. So is the conductor. We call ourselves a community orchestra because we are a collection of people with musical ability who want to get together on a regular basis to enjoy rehearsing and performing for the greater community. But MSO is a rare animal because the quality is so high.”

It requires a lot of dedication to get to a weekly rehearsal and to give extra time during concert weekends but most do it because they find it so satisfying. “Orchestra playing at this level feeds one musically and often spiritually as well,” says Peter Aviss, principal viola who teaches string playing. His wife Sally - also a music teacher, violinist and MSO’s rehearsal leader - adds that rehearsing concert pieces over several weeks “allows us to go deeper than we could in a single rehearsal unfolding different layers in it”.

No wonder the sound and musicality are so outstanding. It would be a great loss if MSO was prevented by mere money from surging ahead to triumphant centenary celebrations in five years’ time.