London Musical Festival

The 1899 London Musical Festival was another of Robert Newman’s commercial schemes to raise the profile of orchestral music in London, within an international context. Taking the model of provincial choral festivals, with two concerts a day across a week, Newman concentrated his earlier experiments into a direct comparison between Charles Lamoureux’s Paris orchestra and the resident Queen’s Hall Orchestra under Henry Wood. Alternating programmes led up to a combined grand finale, followed by three extra joint concerts.

Following Lamoureux’s death in the autumn, he was succeeded by his assistant and son-in-law Camille Chevillard; the second festival followed a similar scheme, though somewhat reduced in scale. 1901 saw a new departure. The QHO was preferred, and Wood shared the podium with a succession of international conductors and celebrities, including Saint-Saëns, Ysaÿe and Weingartner; the same pattern prevailed in 1902.

Newman’s bankruptcy evidently brought the idea to a close, but the QHO management revived it in 1911, coinciding with Coronation Year and the Festival of Empire – now with British conductors, including Elgar premiering his Second Symphony, and several choral concerts of Bach and Elgar.

For programmes of the London Musical Festival 1899–1902 and 1911, download the Calendar of London Concerts 1893–1914, press the Search Series tab at the bottom of the page, and select London Musical Festival.

Further reading  (see also pages for the Queen’s Hall Orchestra and for the Lamoureux and Colonne Concerts)

Leanne Langley, ‘Joining up the Dots: Cross-Channel Models in the Shaping of London Orchestral Culture, 1895–1914’, in Bennett Zon (ed.), Music and Performance Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Temperley (Farnham, 2012), pp. 37–58