page_title: London Philharmonic Orchestra
section_title: 1950s
hierarchical_section_title: London Philharmonic Orchestra / History / 1950s
caption_attribution_description: English: Royal Festival Hall and Shot Tower c1959. Picture taken from Hungerford Bridge and scanned from a rather dusty old slide. The tower was demolished in the 1960's to make way for the Queen Elizabeth Hall.
context_page_description: The London Philharmonic Orchestra is one of five permanent symphony orchestras based London. It was founded by the conductors Sir Thomas Beecham and Malcolm Sargent in 1932 as a rival to the existing London Symphony Orchestra and BBC Symphony Orchestra.
  The founders' ambition was to build an orchestra the equal of any European or American rival. Between 1932 and the Second World War the LPO was widely judged to have succeeded in this regard. After the outbreak of war, the orchestra's private backers withdrew and the players reconstituted the LPO as a self-governing cooperative. In the post-war years, the orchestra faced challenges from two new rivals; the Philharmonia and the Royal Philharmonic, founded respectively in 1946 and 1947, achieved a quality of playing not matched by the older orchestras, including the LPO.
  By the 1960s the LPO had regained its earlier standards, and in 1964 it secured a valuable engagement to play in the Glyndebourne Festival opera house during the summer months. In 1993 it was appointed resident orchestra of the Royal Festival Hall on the south bank of the Thames, one of London's major concert venues.
context_section_description: Van Beinum's poor health obliged him to resign in 1950. Sir Adrian Boult, who had been forced out of the BBC by internal politics, accepted an invitation from the LPO's managing director, Thomas Russell, to take up the principal conductorship. With Boult the LPO began a series of commercial recordings, beginning with Elgar's Falstaff, Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen with the mezzo-soprano Blanche Thebom, and Beethoven's First Symphony. The work of the new team was greeted with approval by reviewers. Of the Elgar, the reviewer in The Gramophone wrote, "I have heard no other conductor approach [Boult's] performance. ... His newly adopted orchestra responds admirably".
  In January 1951 Boult and the LPO made a tour of Germany, described by Boult's biographer Michael Kennedy as "gruelling", with twelve concerts in as many days. The symphonies they played were Beethoven's Seventh, Haydn's London, No 104, Brahms's First, Schumann's Fourth and Schubert's Great C major. The other works were Elgar's Introduction and Allegro, Holst's The Perfect Fool ballet music, Richard Strauss's Don Juan, and Stravinsky's Firebird. Conductors of the 1951–52 season other than Boult included Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten and William Walton.
  In 1952, the LPO negotiated a five-year contract with Decca Records that was unusually rewarding for the orchestra, giving it a 10 percent commission on most sales. On top of this, Boult always contributed his share of the recording fees to the orchestra's funds. In the same year, the LPO survived a crisis when Russell was dismissed as its managing director. He was an avowed member of the Communist party; when the Cold War began, some influential members of the LPO felt that Russell's private political affiliations compromised the orchestra, and pressed for his dismissal. Boult, as the orchestra's chief conductor, stood up for Russell, but when matters came to a head Boult ceased to protect him. Deprived of that crucial support, Russell was forced out. Kennedy speculates that Boult's change of mind was due to a growing conviction that the orchestra would be "seriously jeopardized financially" if Russell remained in post. A later writer, Richard Witts, suggests that Boult sacrificed Russell because he believed doing so would enhance the LPO's chance of being appointed resident orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall.
  The following year the orchestra celebrated its 21st birthday, giving a series of concerts at the Festival Hall and the Albert Hall in which Boult was joined by guest conductors including Paul Kletzki, Jean Martinon, Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, Georg Solti, Walter Susskind and Vaughan Williams. In 1956 the LPO toured the Soviet Union, the first British orchestra to do so; the conductors were Boult, Anatole Fistoulari and George Hurst, and the soloists were Alfredo Campoli and Moura Lympany. After the tour Boult retired as principal conductor, but remained closely associated with the orchestra, and was made its President in 1965. Most of his stereophonic recordings for EMI were made with the LPO.
  Through the middle and late 1950s the LPO worked with new conductors including Constantin Silvestri and Josef Krips. This was a bad period financially for the orchestra, and it was forced to abandon fixed contracts for its players with holiday and sick pay and pensions, and revert to payment by engagement. Financial disaster was averted thanks to an anonymous benefactor, generally believed to be Boult. A historian of the orchestra, Edmund Pirouet, writes that having been on an upward curve in the 1940s, by the mid-1950s the orchestra "was at best marking time".
  In 1958 the LPO appointed William Steinberg, also music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, as chief conductor. He was a noted orchestral trainer, and did much to restore playing standards to their former levels. Steinberg resigned the LPO post after two seasons, advised by his doctor to restrict his activities.
caption: The Royal Festival Hall in the 1950s: the LPO was among the orchestras striving for residency
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