To interpret it as a cry for the flaying of tough nuts like Ferneyhough or Birtwistle, however, is daft. He wants more openness towards the lyrical, melodic repertoire which the spiky end of contemporary music shunned in the post-war years. Reading Lloyd Webber's slightly muddled text, it's easy to see why he was misunderstood. Last year, he caused a small storm by denouncing aspects of contemporary music at the World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland. That giant of musicological thought, Charles Rosen, wrote a peppery response in the New York Review of Books entitled 'Who's Afraid of the Avant-Garde?' Now Julian Lloyd Webber, 48, lives alone in a South Kensington mansion flat, his second marriage recently ended, squeezed out by the relentless demands of life as a constantly travelling musician with a full diary, new works to learn and rabbles to rouse. It was a completely different perspective.' 'When I asked him about holding the bow, he just said, "Hold it how it feels most comfortable". He came into his own only when he encountered the international cellist Pierre Fournier. 'Even as a nine-year-old, I never had any doubt that everyone - John, Tim Rice, Andrew - would be successful, that perhaps I would be too.' A pupil of Douglas Cameron, he then went to the Royal College to study with Joan Dixon, but found her analytical approach - scales, studies, finger exercises - too technical. Always mild-mannered, he speaks affectionately of Andrew. Years earlier, he had given up composition, returning to it late in his life in dark circumstances, inspired by a love affair with a much younger woman.Ĭompared with a 'freakish' talent like that of John Lill - 'He could hear something once, then walk over to the piano and play it perfectly' - Julian Lloyd Webber recognises his own skills were slower to develop, harder won. To complicate matters further, William Lloyd Webber had a drink problem, exacerbated by the misery of having failed as a composer, which was not a topic of family conversation. My father was always busy, running the London College of Music or playing the organ at Central Hall, Westminster.' She encouraged me and was the catalyst for all of us really, but we were brought up more by my grandmother, a Christian-Communist Scot who wasn't interested in music. 'My mother was brilliant at teaching other children. He started the cello aged around four and usually practised on his own. There were people coming and going the whole time, including a stream of stray young women to add to the chaos.' From an early age, he had to fix on his goals without much help. I had to do my practice in a corridor between the two flats. 'With all that noise going on you could scarcely hear yourself think. 'Actually it's a wonder I stuck to it at all,' Julian Lloyd Webber says. In the early Seventies, music's boundaries were still set in stone and to us, only the cellist son, Julian, seemed to be making a real mark in our world, despite rather than because of his dazzling brother. Neither wrote the kind of thing we learned in our lessons. She, who rarely went beyond the mile or so from home to the college, had gone to New York in her flat brown lace-ups with army surplus rucksack and vacuum flask, to wander alone around that city's meanest streets and to attend the American premiere of a musical by her elder son Andrew, called Jesus Christ Superstar. Even then, the name Lloyd Webber had a ring to it, though a slight smell of disapproval hung around the son's enterprise, just as a sad air of lost English idyll was associated with the music of Lloyd Webber senior, though none of us had heard a note. One week, Mrs Lloyd Webber missed a lesson. Lessons were filled with tales of life in the adjoining South Kensington mansion flats which were home for the Lloyd Webbers and their Bohemian ménage which included two lodgers, the pianist John Lill, of whom, being musically inclined, we had heard - he had won the Moscow Piano Competition - and someone called Tim Rice, of whom we had not plus the white pet mouse, soon devoured, the longer-lasting elderly mother, the professorial composer husband and the nearly adult sons, one of whom spent much time playing records at top volume while the other, nearly as loudly and certainly as competitively, played the cello.
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