PR - Welcome Laurie. It truly is an amazing achievement as you’ve been a member of the KPO for fifty years. Doing my maths, that means you joined in 1972. This was also when you qualified as a solicitor and joined the solicitors firm Charles Russell.

LW – Yes, I joined Charles Russell in February 1972. I had done the old-fashioned five-year articles of clerkship, starting in 1964, which I was lucky enough to do in a very nice firm in Oxford. I didn’t do a degree, and, in those days, it was no barrier to becoming a solicitor.

PR- And the rest is history, as they say, because, once you came up to London, you didn’t move from Charles Russell.

LW- Yes, I suppose I am a bit of a dinosaur as I stayed with one firm for my whole qualified career. I joined in 1972, became a partner in 1974 and senior partner in 1998. I retired as a partner in 2006 staying on as an active Consultant until 2018.

PR- So have you officially retired now?

LW- From the firm, only! I don’t regard myself as officially retired from anything!

PR- Well indeed. I notice you’re also member of the Association of British Orchestras.

LW- I’m an honorary member which is rather curious. I kept getting these emails and I asked Mark their CEO why. He told me “oh, because we have made you an Honorary Member” although I am not an orchestra which is rather sweet! It keeps me in touch with everything that’s going in the orchestral scene in the country. I chair their Trust and give them occasional advice.

PR- Let’s get back to the musical side. You play the French horn - it’s not an obvious instrument to pick up as a child.  When did you start playing it?

LW- When I went to Tonbridge School in 1959. Although I had played the piano up to the age of 10, I gave it up at 11. However, I had a hankering to play something. I had - and still have - the Observers’ Book of Music with a rather crude picture of a French horn, but it never occurred to me that it would be taught at school.  So, when I went to Tonbridge, I asked whether I could play the clarinet and George Cooper, the wind teacher, said “Of course you can play the clarinet, but I should mention we already have 36 clarinet players, and it just happens that we only have three French horn players and we’d really quite like a fourth. Would you like to consider playing the French horn?” I couldn’t believe my ears because that was the one instrument I wanted to play, so I did!

PR- Amazing! And, Laurie, did you come from a musical family? Did you have musical siblings, did your parents play instruments?

LW- My mum was at the Royal Academy. She was a pianist, violin teacher and singer and very musical. My dad wasn’t particularly musical. He took up the bagpipes at the age of 42!

PR- Are you planning on taking up the bagpipes, Laurie? (laughter)

LW- No! It was bad enough having one in the family. He was banished to our attic to practise the chanter and also used to practise up the road at the local School for the Deaf, where he was their doctor.

PR- Where were you brought up, by the way?

LW – We lived in Basingstoke, in Hampshire, where my father was a GP.

PR- Let’s go back to 1972. In September 2022 we will celebrate your fifty years in the KPO so presumably you joined at the very time you came to London to start at Charles Russell. How did your association with KPO start?

LW- I can’t remember exactly except that an oboist in the Oxford Orchestral Society who introduced me to someone, who said they were looking for a fourth horn player in the KPO.

PR - Which had been founded in 1965, of course

LW – Well, it was called something else. Roger Gabriel took it over and transformed it and renamed it as the Kensington Philharmonic Orchestra.

PR- Obviously you’ve seen a few conductors - is that right?

LW- Roger retired and, sadly, is no longer with us. For a short while we had Alex Briger who was terrific. He wanted to make a career as a conductor, and it was an opportunity to play works he wanted to play. And then Mark Fitz-Gerald came along; he was very energetic. Mark is a fine musician; we were all very impressed by him. Right up to the time he retired from KPO we relished his skill as a really fine interpreter, particularly of the Russian repertoire.

PR- Now we have our new conductor, Claudio di Meo.

LW- Indeed. Claudio is so inspiring and a great collaborator.

PR- Talking about being fanatical about music, you have had an amazing, non-playing, connection with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Your involvement has been a major part of your life, really, as part of its larger family. In fact, it combined your love for music and your work in the end, didn’t it?

LW- It has in a curious way. When I started my articles in Oxford, I was particularly bored with probate and trusts! It got so worrying that I seriously thought about applying to music college to study the horn as a future professional. My decision not to do so was the first time, probably, that I had ever made a responsible decision on my own. In contemplation of this major change, I remembered that at school, when at the age of about 16, there was another young horn player who was a superb natural talent. I realised I’d never be good enough to be professional. So, I stayed with my articles, very sensibly, but one of my oldest and great friends had gone on to Music College.  He joined the London Symphony Orchestra as fourth horn and then moved to the LPO as second horn. Having regularly listened to him at LSO, I then started going to the LPO concerts. It just happened that the Kingsway Hall was a short walk from my office in Lincoln’s Inn. In those days the LPO would record there for Decca. I used to go to there during my lunchbreak – I heard some wonderful music there!

Anyway, towards the end of 1976 the LPO had a particular legal issue going on concerning one of their players. I got a call from the managing director asking me to give the orchestra some advice. It all went to court, we won the case, won the subsequent appeal. It was a lot of fun, but very nerve-wracking, especially when I had to interrupt a recording session with Sir Georg Solti with the news. They were lovely and I got to know all of them. That’s how I got involved.

PR- Amazing. And now they have made you an Honorary Member, no less.

LW- Yes, well, I have done a multiplicity of things for them – I could write a book about it. I might even do so!

PR-Actually talking about recording, I do know that the LPO CD label has actually used some of the recordings you made.

LW-Indeed, rather a lot. My first commercial recording wasn’t for the LPO. I was acting for Lady Evelyn Barbirolli, Sir John’s widow. The BBC wanted to release their recordings of live concerts by Sir John. During this time, I met and got to know a number of BBC people, and I happened to mention a particular performance of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty with Rozhdestvensky and the BBC SO, a sensational performance which I had recorded for myself from BBC Radio 3. Their subsequent commercial performance was very good but frankly not a patch on the performance on my recording. The BBC engineers turned my live recording into a commercial release. It has since been regarded as the number one version of Sleeping Beauty.  So, when the LPO started their label they also started using my recordings of LPO concerts made during the late 1970’s and 1980’s plus a few from the 1990’s. 23 of my recordings are on the LPO label and another seven on BBC Legends.

PR- You are obviously an ardent concertgoer. Has there been one conductor you would rush to see over the years, or is there one concert that still sticks out in your mind?

LW- Well there have been quite a lot but two immediately come to mind: Klaus Tennstedt conducting Mahler’s 2nd symphony and also his Mahler 8th. I remember being almost being incapacitated by emotion in both performances. For me, no-one did those symphonies like he did.

PR- So just to move away from music for a moment, do you have any quirky

LW - I try and make my orchids flower; I enjoy photography, cooking, and cosmology, popular physics, astrophysics, Stephen Hawking, all that sort of stuff. I like reading his books even though I don’t understand half of it (laughter).

PR- What about travelling? Obviously with your work, I did notice you are a member of the Commonwealth Lawyers Association, in fact you’re now their Honorary Treasurer.

LW- Yes, I’ve been active in the CLA since about 2008. They organise Commonwealth Law Conferences every couple of years. As my firm have a number of Commonwealth Government clients, for whom I was the partner in charge, and those governments always attended the Conferences, we attended too.

LW- Also, still on travel, one of my cases had introduced me to many legal contacts around the world and I became the main firm contact for our international legal association (ALFA International). I was on their Board. For 25 years I was travelling for the firm and for them. It was wonderful. The problem is you get spoilt for it and suddenly it all stopped for everybody in 2020.

PR - Now not quite retirement but less work as such, how do you see retirement - playing the horn?

LW- Well during my career, I also advised orchestras and orchestral musicians. For example, in the late 1990’s, I was involved in a very tricky case where I was acting for every major orchestra in the country against the Musician’s Union. Since I retired from my firm, orchestras still ring me up for advice. If they want a formal advice, I’ll get one of my former colleagues at my firm to sign it off! I was in the court of appeal two or three years ago for a case concerning a viola player who claimed against the Royal Opera House for acoustic shock. The appeal was successful.

PR- Laurie, have your children carried on the music?

LW - Alex, my eldest is a lawyer like me and he plays the jazz piano. My younger son, Theo, is in China. He enjoys it but does not play anything.

PR - And are you involved in encouraging young music talent?

LW- I have been a trustee of Awards for Young Musicians for some years now which is a lovely trust. The charity is country wide; we find talented children and then means-test the parents. We also train schoolteachers to spot talented kids and we link up with music hubs around the country. AYM is doing an amazing job.

        
PR - Any other hobbies?

LW- Well, my other big hobby is art - painting and drawing.

PR- …and there’s the easel (our interview is in Laurie’s front room).

LW- I used to win art prizes at school. I paint in oils, and I draw all the time.

PR- And when you go on holiday do you do little watercolours and sketches?

LW- I sometimes do a lot of drawing but have never worked in watercolour. I should say that Harry, my eldest grandchild in China, is showing outstanding talent - he’s only 8.

PR- What would you say your art is - figurative, abstract?

LW- it’s a sort of surreal impressionism.

PR- I can see you like strong colours.  Have you always got a painting on the go?

LW- I do.

PR - And just to end Laurie. For our next concert in June 2022, we’re doing one of your favourite pieces in your honour, Dvorak’s Symphony No 7.

LW – Dvorak writes wonderfully for the French horn. Of all his symphonies, the horn section carries major sections of the 7th. I have always wanted to play the first horn part in it.

PR- We, cellos, always have a fabulous time!

LW- Yes, he does, always writes marvellously for the cellos.

PR - And, finally, have there been any particular horn players that you have especially admired?

LW- Dennis Brain obviously, although I never went to a concert of his as I was only eleven when he died. I think I admire the late Nicholas Busch, who was principal horn of the LPO for a long time and was one of the most remarkable orchestral horn players. He went for everything and when he got it right it was so fabulous. In recent times, David Pyatt  - I know him and like him. He moved from the LSO to the LPO and more recently to the Royal Opera House Orchestra.

PR - Laurie, thank you.