TUNE IN – SPRING / SUMMER 2024 –
LPO PEOPLE
BACKSTAGE
What have been your highlights of playing with the LPO so far? Mahler 9 last December would definitely be up there – it’s one of my favourite pieces, and the concerts last year in London and on tour were truly memorable. Also, the Dialogues des Carmélites performance at last year’s Proms was really incredible. Poulenc’s music demonstrates the best of humanity, and the opera’s story depicts a lot of love, but also the most extreme human brutality – it’s both beautiful and harrowing. We couldn’t see much from the pit when we performed it at Glyndebourne, but being on stage with the singers for the Proms performance made it all the more powerful. I was ‘playing’ the guillotine at the end, which consisted of pressing a button at certain points in the final movement, but it got to me, chopping all the heads off. What have you found to be the most enjoyable, and the hardest, aspects of life as a professional musician? Some of the best things are also the hardest things. The travelling, for instance: touring is a wonderful part of the job – it’s a real privilege to visit so many parts of the world, but that can also become quite difficult when it comes to being away from home and/or children. Adrenaline means that nerves can sometimes get a bit jangled
songs you play along to a click track and so it’s much more rhythmically stable, you could say. When playing in an orchestra, things are often shifting about a bit, and you’re constantly making tiny adjustments according to who you’re playing with. In a show, on a percussion chair, you’re often literally surrounded by instruments: marimbas in front, bass drums behind, shakers hanging from the ceiling, different mics to play different instruments into, and three or four music stands to keep on the right page, so the choreography of it is a big challenge. But it’s also good fun!
KAREN HUTT
Karen joined the LPO in May 2023 as Sub-Principal Percussionist. A graduate of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, before joining the Orchestra she enjoyed a successful freelance career performing, recording and touring with orchestras and ensembles across a range of genres. too, but then that can also be what makes it so exciting! The wonderful world of musical colleagues is definitely one of the best things: getting to play and hang out with such a lovely, humorous and talented group of people. The percussion fraternity – and ever-growing sorority – is an especially friendly and supportive one. As well as many of the UK’s orchestras, you’ve also performed in West End shows, and on various film soundtracks. How does that differ from orchestral playing? Among my colleagues there’s quite a bit of moonlighting in West End shows, and I’ve depped on The Lion King for quite a few years now. It’s a bit of an adjustment from playing in an orchestra. You play with headphones on, and are within the rhythm section, so around you there are bass, guitar, keys and drums. In some
What’s the most unusual instrument you’ve been called upon to play in an orchestra? Often it’s things that aren’t actually instruments that get thrown our way. There were so many pieces of foil, bottles, saucepans, chopsticks and paper bags used in Brett Dean’s opera Hamlet [which the LPO premiered at Glyndebourne in 2017] that a fellow percussionist affectionately renamed it ‘Omelette’! Last year, for Rebecca Saunders’s to an utterance, a Nicophone was delivered to a rehearsal, which none of us had ever seen or heard of before (cue Google: ‘How do you play a Nicophone’?!). We’ve also been called upon to ‘play’ electric fans, pebbles, lumps of wood, rhythmical plate smashing ... That’s a nice thing about playing percussion – there’s always something new to master! What LPO highlights are your section particularly looking forward to this spring? Coming up, we’ve got Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique with the famous and terrifying bells (24 Jan), and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, which has lots of colourful percussion writing (22 Mar). Ravel’s La valse (6 Mar) is always a great one to play: there’s nothing particularly crazy going on, but we’re really locked together as a section – almost like an enormous drum kit. In many pieces we’re more dispersed and will be ‘tuned in’ to different parts of the orchestra. The Planets (12 Apr) also has some fantastic percussion parts, like the relentless snare drum in ‘Mars’ and the joyful glockenspiel and tambourine in ‘Jupiter’. KAREN’S CHAIR IN THE LPO IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY MR B C FAIRHALL.
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Can you remember your first encounter with the world of percussion? My first experience of playing percussion was at school, aged about nine or ten. I was in a maths lesson when an old guy (or what I thought of as old at the time) called Mr Kitto came in and asked if anyone wanted to come and have a percussion lesson. I eagerly put my hand up, not knowing what percussion was, but it meant getting out of maths! So about six of us went off, were given a pair of drum sticks and started playing along on a table to tape recordings of marches. Over the coming weeks all the other kids dropped out, but I loved it and so ended up carrying on with my own lessons. We started playing orchestral pieces like Bolero and the Thieving Magpie overture (all still on a table), before I eventually joined the local wind band where they had a snare drum and a suspended cymbal!
