page_title: London Philharmonic Orchestra
section_title: 1960s and 70s
hierarchical_section_title: London Philharmonic Orchestra / History / 1960s and 70s
caption_attribution_description: Glyndebourne HouseGlyndebourne
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: In 1962 the orchestra undertook its first tour of India, Australia, and the Far East. The conductors were Sargent and John Pritchard. The latter was appointed the LPO's chief conductor in 1962, presiding over what one player described as "an era of supremely good taste". From its outset in 1932, harpists (traditionally female) excepted, the orchestra had maintained Beecham's "men only" regime; in 1963 the rule was dropped, the first woman violinist was recruited, and within two years female players achieved equal conditions of membership with their male colleagues.
  Pritchard was also music director of Glyndebourne Festival Opera in Sussex, and it was partly due to his influence that in 1964 the LPO replaced the RPO as Glyndebourne's resident orchestra, providing the players with stable guaranteed work in the slack summer months. The number of LPO concerts in the provinces fell during the 1960s, and ceased to be a major factor in the orchestra's finances. During the 1960s the orchestra gave fund-raising concerts in which guests from outside the world of classical music appeared, including Danny Kaye, Duke Ellington and Tony Bennett. Its regular complement at the end of the decade was 88 players.
  In 1967 the LPO appointed Bernard Haitink as its principal conductor. He remained with the orchestra for twelve years, to date (2018) the longest tenure of the post. His concerts made a strong impression with the public, and within months the LPO was playing to ninety per cent capacity audiences at the Festival Hall, far outstripping the other London orchestras. Among the composers with whom Haitink was associated were Bruckner and Mahler, whose symphonies featured frequently in the LPO's concerts during the Haitink period, as did those of Shostakovich, particularly the Tenth, which Pirouet describes as the calling card of the orchestra and conductor. With Vladimir Ashkenazy, Haitink and the LPO gave a six-concert cycle of the Beethoven symphonies and piano concertos, for which the Festival Hall was full to capacity. In The Times, Joan Chissell described the orchestra's playing as "worthy of any festival". There was some discontent within the LPO that Haitink's prolific recordings were almost always with the other orchestra of which he was the chief conductor, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. Pirouet comments that as Haitink recorded exclusively for the Dutch firm Philips it was to be expected that the Amsterdam orchestra would be preferred, and in any case the LPO was recording extensively with Boult, Solti, Daniel Barenboim and many others. In the 1970s international tours continued, with itineraries taking in the US, Western Europe, the Soviet Union, and, in 1972, China, long inaccessible to Western musicians, where the orchestra met an enthusiastic welcome.
  In 1973 the LPO was caught up in a recurring phenomenon of London orchestral life: the conviction in official circles that having four independent orchestras is too much for one city, and that two or more of the existing ensembles should merge. On this occasion the targets were the LPO and the New Philharmonia; the latter, a self-governing body formed under its new name when the Philharmonia was disbanded in 1964, was going through a bad patch, professionally and financially. The proposed merger would inevitably have led to redundancies, and the player-owners of both orchestras rejected the plan.
  One of the constant difficulties of London orchestras was the lack of good rehearsal space and facilities. In 1973, acting jointly with the LSO, the LPO acquired and began restoring a disused church in Southwark, converting it into the Henry Wood Hall, a convenient and acoustically excellent rehearsal space and recording studio, opened in 1975.
  Guest conductors in the 1970s included Erich Leinsdorf, Carlo Maria Giulini, Eugen Jochum, Riccardo Chailly, Klaus Tennstedt and Solti. When Haitink announced in 1977 that he would step down as principal conductor at the end of the 1978–79 season, Solti, who had been principal guest conductor since 1971, agreed to succeed him.
caption: Glyndebourne, where the LPO took over as resident orchestra in 1964
exif: {"Image Make": "Panasonic", "Image Model": "DMC-LX1", "Image Orientation": "0", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Ver.1.0", "Image DateTime": "2006:08:01 16:56:18", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "418", "Image PrintIM": "[80, 114, 105, 110, 116, 73, 77, 0, 48, 50, 53, 48, 0, 0, 14, 0, 1, 0, 22, 0, ... ]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "6821", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4953", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/320", "EXIF FNumber": "4", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "80", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2006:08:01 16:56:18", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2006:08:01 16:56:18", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "4", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "3", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "63/10", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "3840", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2160", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "6697", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "0", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "28", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF GainControl": "None", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF ImageUniqueID": "dec375b406b180f242dc5bddcb02d010"}