Christopher Morley talks to a husband and wife team helping to shape the future of classical sounds.
Sunday’s concert from the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group will be extra-special for husband and wife team Stephen and Jackie Newbould.
Respectively artistic director and general manager of this world-renowned organisation which has been in existence for well over two decades, they will be presented with the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Leslie Boosey Award for their outstanding contribution to the furtherance of contemporary British music.
How did their commitment to contemporary music come about, I asked them in their charming Edwardian home in Bearwood?
Jackie kicks off: “It was totally Birmingham Contemporary Music Group that did it for me. I studied at Keele University, and there were some really interesting Contemporary Music Network concerts there. But as soon as I heard BCMG in Birmingham, I just realised how exciting it could be.
“To be involved with commissioning, and fixing things, and hearing the results. Every single concert is different.”
Stephen joins in: “I came late to contemporary music. It was only the time I was doing A-levels that I decided that I wanted to study music, and the set composer on the course was Britten, and we listened to just about every work of his.
“For me, this was living music and I found Britten’s work fascinating, and I still love it.”
BCMG has collaborated with the then City of Birmingham Touring Opera (now Birmingham Opera Company) in some memorable performances of the three Britten Church Parables, in Birmingham, in Aldeburgh and at the Proms.
Stephen continues: “It was really coming to Birmingham and the Simon Rattle years – I arrived here in 1985 – and immediately there was this excitement around the CBSO programmes, superbly mixed and unpredictable. That was a large part of my education in 20th century music.
“The classic thing of being in the right place at the right time, when Simon Clugston, my predecessor, and Ulrich Heinen (both CBSO cellists) decided to form BCMG, I happened to be sitting in the CBSO office, so for the first two years the group was run from the CBSO, and we were a CBSO company.
“It was a kind of chance, that, like Jackie, I started to work with the group. Just this discovery of the extraordinary rich landscape of contemporary music.”
BCMG is renowned for its commissioning of new works, not least through its Sound Investment scheme, where a portfolio of supporters contribute towards the cost of a composition and, in return, are involved in every stage of the work’s genesis.
