Bramwell Tovey

Bramwell Tovey

When I was 31, I was conducting a show in Aberdeen with the Scottish Ballet, and Peter Hemmings, the creator of the Los Angeles Opera, who was then general manager of the London Symphony Orchestra, came backstage afterward and asked me out for lunch.

He offered me an engagement with the LSO, which was fantastic, because I was a young man on the make and seeking to get along in the world. He asked me what it was I wanted to do, and I said, “Well, I would like to be the music director of a symphony orchestra who also conducts opera.”
He said, “How are you going to do that?”

I said, “Well, I’m just going to persevere in the hope of obtaining engagements.”

He told me, “Then you have to go somewhere remote where everyone thinks you’re mad to go, and you have to learn the repertoire: the Brahms symphonies, the Mahler symphonies. Get away from the public spectacle, that is to say, away from the London critics or from eagle-eyed agents, and just learn the repertoire.”

A few years later, I toured Canada for the first time, and I was offered the job of artistic director of the Winnipeg Symphony. Everyone told me I was mad to go to Winnipeg, which was, in those days at least, miles from anywhere. But I decided to take Peter’s advice, and in 1989 I uprooted and moved to Manitoba.

In a sense, I equate it to the CEOs who work their way up from the shop floor. From my point of view, it didn’t matter how good a musician you were; you had to still learn the ropes, and the best way to do it was to have an orchestra of your own. That’s very, very hard in the U.K., where there are hardly any orchestras, so to have that opportunity to go to Winnipeg was actually terrific. I’ve ended up with a North American career that I never even thought was possible for an Englishman of my generation.