Living the Dream
What happens when nearly 300 amateur musicians take on Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius alongside the professionals? I went to Gateshead to join in and find out
As an amateur violinist, I often bewail the lack of connection between amateur and professional classical music institutions. So when a friend in orchestra told me she was taking part in Royal Northern Sinfonia’s Share the Stage at The Glasshouse, Gateshead, playing Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius side by side with professional players and singers, my ears pricked up. I emailed the orchestra, pitched the story to BBC Music Magazine and had two positive responses. Three weeks later, having mugged up the first violin part and familiarised myself with various recordings, I was on a train to Newcastle with my violin, in time for the final three days of rehearsal and the concert last Sunday.
Share the Stage was initiated by Dinis Sousa, who joined the orchestra as Principal Conductor in September 2021, as the world was tentatively waking up from the pandemic (he has since been appointed Music Director). That November he brought together a performance of Verdi’s Requiem (‘The People’s Requiem’), inviting adult amateur singers and orchestral players from across the North East to work with the pros. Following that success, he repeated the feat with Tippett’s Child of Our Time in 2024, and became even more ambitious with Gerontius last weekend, with soloists Benjamin Hulett, Sarah Connolly and Roderick Williams.
Gerontius is ambitious for any group, but there were no dumbed-down adaptations or patronising concessions in Gateshead. This was full-on original Elgar – the work he himself considered to be his finest. It’s a tough nut to crack, whether you’re in the audience or taking part. For the orchestra, it’s a substantial play: 90 minutes of swirling themes and quiet textures, with control-freakish levels of instructions in every bar, whether about tempo, dynamics, accents or style. There are a few moments where you can indulge with a theme, little echoes of other Elgar pieces, and sometimes even Bach or Mahler, but generally, you don’t get to play long romantic phrases as you would in a symphony. There are also some fiendishly fast and high figurations that are the bane of amateurs (well this amateur, at least).
Immersing oneself in the story doesn’t really help. The text, by Cardinal Newman, tells the story of a man approaching death and then purgatory, through drama, vivid imagery, poetry and Catholic theological texts. It is certainly not jolly or easy (especially for a Jewish atheist). If you really listen to the words and sit with the meaning of it, it can become overwhelming (especially if like me, you have an elderly parent). There were several times during rehearsals when I made that mistake, but I tried not to in the performance.
By then, emotions were running high, anyway. Backstage beforehand, the amateurs were buzzing with anticipation. I’m not suggesting that professionals don’t experience performances like this, but maybe they get used to these feelings, or have to put them aside in order to perform at their best. As amateurs, we get to feel all the feels and if we miss a top note or crunch a chord, we are forgiven. (That’s not to sentimentalise amateurs, either – as one fellow amateur put it, there are more divas in amateur orchestras than in the profession.)
One of the main benefactions of such a project is that it gives ordinary (in the best possible sense) people a taste of something extraordinary – profound music, an aspiration towards excellence, practical advice on getting there, a sense of community and new friendships, and even a validation of sorts, playing to family, friends and YouTube on an international stage. In conversations I had with players, there was talk of privilege, but not in the financial sense that has come to overshadow access to classical music. Several players of a ‘certain age’ remembered free lessons at their state school, or class teachers who went above and beyond. That was the privilege that led to this privilege. Of course, access to instrumental lessons has become considerably harder now for lower-income families, and we had several pessimistic conversations about the likelihood of young people accessing such a path today, either to the profession, or to the shared experience we were having.
The selection of the 290 non-professionals of the orchestra and choir, aged 23 to 85, was designed to be inclusive, with no auditions required. Reading music was not even a requisite for singers. Those who don’t had a special rehearsal schedule to learn the entire work by ear and memory – a feat in itself. But to play an orchestral part in Gerontius does demand technical proficiency, as well as experience and understanding of orchestral etiquette and blending. For brass and wind players, it also requires nerves and embouchures of steel. Orchestral amateurs had several sectional rehearsals with the pro players, but there was still a lot of faith involved on behalf of the organisation. Many of the players belong to orchestras across the North East, anyway, and knew each other, but there were others with different backgrounds and life stories, who were more used to folk music or hadn’t played for a while. I heard some very moving stories about players’ connections to music and their instruments.
The vision and generosity that made this possible at The Glasshouse with Dinis Sousa are exceedingly rare, but were there right from its opening in 2004 as The Sage. The original architectural brief even emphasised the combination of performance and education, so the iconic Foster + Partners structure includes a 26-room education centre alongside three performance spaces. The website lists more than 100 adult music classes and has an entire tab for ‘Making Music’. This project is clearly not an add-on: it’s central to the organisation’s identity, philosophy and activities.
I was also lucky enough to join the Berlin Philharmonic’s BEPhil in 2018 to play Brahms’s First Symphony, which was also an extraordinary experience. That used a different format: there were auditions, the orchestra consisted entirely of amateur players from around the world, and there was a condensed week of rehearsals leading to a performance conducted by Simon Rattle in the Philharmonie. The focus was more on the Philharmonie as an iconic international musical hub, with Rattle then at its helm, whereas Share the Stage felt more about connecting and inspiring local musicians and creating a sense of community, while also striving for excellence.
There are many different ways to conceive these projects: I just wish more orchestras and venues would try any. I understand the pressure is to find new, young, diverse audiences, rather than encourage participation, necessarily, but maybe the two are complementary. These are people who are already connected with classical music and want to do more of it, and better. Not to mention their families and friends, who contributed to the near-full auditorium on Sunday, many of them possibly for the first time. Aside from the creative and moral imperatives to engage in these projects, there seems to be a very pragmatic one.
For me, even coming in relatively late, the experience was profoundly motivating and moving. Dinis Sousa kept rehearsals buoyant and positive, even with so many moving parts and such little time. He never talked down or sounded frustrated. Having Sinfonia members peppered throughout the string section anchored the sound and served as a lesson in itself, and concertmaster Joel Bardolet Vilaró was very clear and inclusive in his leads, keeping me on the straight and narrow. In the second half I had the best seat in the house with Roderick Williams as the Angel of Agony, singing right behind me. And just to be so close to a huge choir singing their hearts out was visceral and powerful.
Were we note-perfect? Of course not. Watching the concert back on YouTube, some sections sounded muddier and messier than I’d heard from within. We sounded pretty good, though. Besides that, the exhilaration on the faces of everyone on stage, the little bit of stardust shaken on our musical lives, and the near-fullness of the auditorium, are all proof of the importance of Share the Stage. I hope other orchestras and venues can learn from The Glasshouse.
My BBC Music Magazine article will be published in the March 2027 edition
