![]() ![]() Then Rostropovich came to England when I was 13 and my prayers were answered, since it was he who introduced the world to so much new repertoire. The pieces one heard on the radio were pretty much always the same - the Dvorak Concerto, the Haydn concerti, and so on, and I grew impatient hearing them over and over again. It was through this process that I became interested in lesser known works. I’ve still got a bunch of those old reel-to-reel tapes, even though they probably don’t work anymore. When I was around 11, I started taping music off the radio that contained a solo cello. ![]() I never felt like playing was a chore, it was more like a pleasurable hobby, and I practiced longer and longer as I became increasingly interested in playing. My mother immediately went out and brought home a 1/8-size cello and I took to it right away. ![]() ![]() It looked so natural, especially when compared with the violinists. I was fascinated by the look of it, and by the look of somebody playing it. One day my mother took me to a children’s concert at Festival Hall in London and I saw a cello in the orchestra. JLW: My mother tried to start me on the piano when I was four years old, with her as my teacher, but as is often the case, studying with one’s own parent isn’t a great idea. TJ: Did you go through a series of instruments before choosing the cello? Needless to say, my home was a noisy place to live. There was even a concert pianist, John Lill, who lived with us. TJ: I would imagine you were surrounded by music as a child? She used to teach young children the piano, specializing in four- to six-year-olds. He adopted it professionally to avoid confusion with another organist, William Webber. TJ: Is your last name “Lloyd Webber,” or is there a tradition in your family of using the same middle and last names? Your brother, Andrew, also shares this. At the very end of his life - he died in 1982 - he started writing again, and several recordings of his works have come out in the last few years. He went into academia and became a professor at the Royal College of Music, and then he became the director of the London College of Music. His music was very melodic and romantic, all the things that music in the 1950’s wasn’t, so he felt completely out of step with the times. He started out as an organist and composer, but he virtually stopped composing when music took its modernist turn in the 1950’s. TJ: There is a picture of William Lloyd Webber on your website. Julian’s recording of the Glass concerto with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic conducted by Gerard Schwarz will be released on the Orange Mountain label in September 2004. Recent concert performances have included three further works composed for Julian: Michael Nyman’s Double Concerto for Cello and Saxophone on BBC Television, Gavin Bryars’ Concerto in Suntory Hall, Tokyo, and Philip Glass’s Concerto at the Beijing International Festival. Julian has given more than fifty works their premiere recordings and has inspired new compositions for cello from composers as diverse as Malcolm Arnold and Joaquin Rodrigo to James MacMillan and Philip Glass. Julian’s twenty-year partnership with Philips/Universal Classics has produced many outstanding recordings, including his Brit-Award winning Elgar Concerto, conducted by Yehudi Menuhin (chosen as the finest ever version by BBC Music Magazine), the Dvorák Concerto with Vaclav Neumann and the Czech Philharmonic, Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations with the London Symphony under Maxim Shostakovich, and a coupling of Britten’s Cello Symphony and Walton’s Concerto with Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, which was described by Gramophone magazine as “beyond any rival.” Julian has also recorded several highly successful CD’s of short pieces for Universal Classics, including Made In England, Cello Moods, and Cradle Song: “It would be difficult to find better performances of this kind of repertoire anywhere on records of today or yesterday” – Gramophone. Widely regarded as one of the most creative musicians of his generation, Julian Lloyd Webber has collaborated with an extraordinary array of musicians, from Yehudi Menuhin, Lorin Maazel, Neville Marriner, and Georg Solti to Stephane Grappelli, Elton John, and Cleo Laine. ![]()
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