The London Chamber Orchestra: Maximizing Minimalism

It was easy for Christopher Warren-Green to put his stamp on the London Chamber Orchestra when he took it over in 1988. He fired everybody.

Nobody--well, hardly anybody--got upset, he says, because that’s what he was brought in to do.

“The orchestra was slightly in the doldrums,” the 39-year-old conductor-violinist said in a recent phone interview from his home in London. “Players had left. The standards were not very high.

“To be honest, the very first time the job was offered to me, I didn’t want to take it. Then they came back to me and said, ‘To be honest, we’d rather you re-form the orchestra.’ So I sacked all the players.”

Warren-Green was 32 at the time. Always something of a musical whiz kid, he had joined the prestigious Academy of St. Martin in the Fields as a fiddler when he was 19, became concertmaster of the BBC Welsh Symphony at 21, concertmaster of the Philharmonia Orchestra of London at 24 and returned to St. Martin’s as concertmaster at 30. He stayed there until he moved to the LCO.

As if that’s not enough, Warren-Green also teaches at the Royal Academy of Music and plays a Habaneck Stradivarius violin on loan from that institution.

Yes, he’s another conductor-violinist in the tradition of Neville Marriner, who formed the Academy of St. Martin’s in 1959. “My dream was really to do both--play and direct from the violin and conduct when necessary,” Warren-Green said. “It wasn’t one career or the other. More and more instrumentalists do that.”

To reconstitute the London group, which--founded in 1921--is the oldest chamber orchestra in Great Britain, Warren-Green assembled a nucleus of 13 musicians who have independent careers as soloists or as members in chamber groups or other orchestras.

“That’s the only way to get a higher standard of player,” he said. “I would far rather have really good quality players than augment the ranks and then risk somebody not being equal to the others.”

On its current U.S. tour, which includes an Orange County Philharmonic Society-sponsored concert Friday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, the group travels with 14 musicians, although as many as 22 play at home.

“I would never want the group to work more than six months in any year. A lot of British orchestras work too hard. We will have 27 concerts this year in America. More than 100 concerts, that would get too much. It’s a kind of super-group idea.”

The super-group plays in a now uncommon arrangement--first and second violins flanking the podium--”as orchestras used to be (seated) before 1920,” he said. In another departure from standard operating procedure, he has the musicians play while standing.

“They can make more sound that way,” he said. “They play much better. We even record that way.”

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Recordings and concerts by the revitalized orchestra have been earning enthusiastic reviews. But when the group began playing at several rock festivals in Europe, classical-music critics got upset.

“They said, ‘Oh, they’ve sold out to commercialization.’ Nothing could be further from the truth. You’re taking a hell of a risk playing at a rock festival. Rock audiences essentially will throw bottles at you if they don’t like you.”

Getting people to like them--and to like the music--is a key concern for Warren-Green. The conductor made frequent disparaging references to what he called “the petrified atmosphere” in many classical-music concerts.

“I remember a young teen-ager who started to applaud at the end of the first movement at one concert,” he said. “No one else did. People shushed him. I was worried, so I spoke to the audience. I said, ‘In Bach’s time, if people wanted to applaud, they would have. So feel free.’ People did.”

The story had another happy outcome. Sometime later, he said, a stranger came up to him at the end of a concert and said, “ ‘I was that lad. I would never have gone to another concert, but I’ve gone ever since. I went from feeling like a heel--you made me feel like a hero.’

“That kind of (snobbery) really worries me. So many people won’t come to concert house for that reason. They don’t want to be patronized.”

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Warren-Green feels “absolutely dedicated to get new music to the people, especially young people; who really love 20th Century so-called ‘classical’ music. But they’re not just getting it. So they’re going to Michael Nyman,” composer and performer of “The Piano” film score.

“Music, for me, if you can describe art at all,” he said, “is anything that makes you feel--right across the board.”

That includes 20th-Century music, which the group will play here. Britten’s “Simple Symphony” and Bartok’s Divertimento for String Orchestra have gone into the mainstream repertory. But John Adams and Philip Glass, whose works round up Friday’s program, remain outside that august company despite their popularity.

Still, Adams’ “Shaker Loops for Seven Strings,” Warren-Green said, “has the most extraordinary effect on me. I have to admit it. Even though I am a professor of music, it took me a few listenings to understand it.”

He is equally direct about his reactions to Philip Glass’ “Company” pieces, written for the Samuel Beckett play of the same name.

“They’re four very pretty pieces,” he said. “That’s an awful way of describing them. I really like them. I don’t like everything Philip Glass wrote.”

* The London Chamber Orchestra conducted by Christopher Warren-Green will play works by Britten, Bartok, John Adams and Philip Glass on Friday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. 8 p.m. $14 to $25. The program is sponsored by the Orange County Philharmonic Society. (714) 856-5000.