History

The National Symphony Orchestra was founded in the 1940s when it was laying down an average of 10 records a year for Decca with famous conductors and soloists.

The orchestra was assembled in wartime London by the conductor Sidney Beer, who had come back from conducting in Salzburg and Vienna to find a city with almost no orchestral music left in it. The first concerts were Saturday afternoons at the Savoy Theatre in the opening months of 1941, then at the Queen’s Hall — which was gutted by an incendiary bomb on the night of 10 May that year, three months after the orchestra had begun playing there. The players moved to Sunday concerts at the Phoenix Theatre, took the name National Symphony Orchestra in 1942, and reached the Royal Albert Hall on 19 January 1943 with Cyril Smith at the piano.

The programme above prints no year — only “Sunday, November 7th”, which since the orchestra began falls in 1943, 1948 or 1954. The masthead points at the earlier end: Sidney Beer as Artistic Director, Victor Olof as Associate Conductor, David McCallum leading, and Harold Holt presenting, which is the same team named on the 1945 Albert Hall programme further down. That is inference, not a date the document gives. Programme and notes, sixpence.

Throughout World War 2 almost all of the NSO’s musicians were active personnel and therefore unlike many other orchestras, who relied on musicians were either too old or otherwise unfit for military service, the orchestra was composed of young men. The records made between 1944 and 1946 are considered by experts to be outstanding, especially when compared with pre-war orchestras.

Beer could pay for players and the war had made them available in an unlikely way: the wind section came largely from the RAF Central Band at Uxbridge, young musicians in uniform and stationed close enough to London to play. Among them was the horn player Dennis Brain, then barely twenty. Reginald Kell led the clarinets, Léon Goossens played oboe, and Norman Del Mar — later far better known as a conductor — was in the horn section too. David McCallum, whose name is printed as Leader on both programmes here, went on to lead the Royal Philharmonic under Beecham, and twenty years after that played on the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”. When this period ended, its players went on to become principals of the Royal Philharmonic and the Philharmonia.

The NSO also recorded the music for many films, including: “Brief Encounter”, “Caesar and Cleopatra”, “The Magic Bow” and have appeared in films, such as Stephen Fry’s “Bright Young Things” and “De-Lovely”, the film of the life of Cole Porter for MGM with Kevin Kline and Robbie Williams.

Two of those are among the most-heard British film scores ever recorded. It is this orchestra playing Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto under Muir Mathieson, with Eileen Joyce at the piano, through every scene of David Lean’s “Brief Encounter” — the music has become so bound up with the film that most people cannot hear one without the other. The same conductor took the orchestra through Georges Auric’s score for “Caesar and Cleopatra” and William Alwyn’s for “The Rake’s Progress”, both in 1945. In 1946 came “The Magic Bow”, the Paganini picture, with Yehudi Menuhin playing the solos and the orchestra’s own leader coaching Stewart Granger to look like a violinist.

More recently the NSO has recorded, in their entirety, more than 40 complete major classic musicals. This significant compilation has contributed to the fact that the NSO is the most recorded orchestra at EMI Abbey Road Studios. The works, marketed mainly in the USA, often sold more than 1.5 million copies per musical

The NSO is one of the busiest and most highly regarded freelance orchestras in the UK. The NSO choses it’s players not only for their musical talent and technical ability, but also for their desire to give their best.