November 17, 1925 – July 14, 2010

There are so many aspects of our musical lives that are inextricably linked with the name Charles Mackerras that it’s difficult to decide which matter most. Perhaps the best way to sum up the essence of this responsive and essentially civilised musician is to offer a little cameo of Sir Charles the man. I can recall on one occasion emerging from an interview in Covent Garden, when my mobile telephone suddenly rang. “Hello; is that Robert Cohen?” asked a familiar voice at the other end of the phone. “No,” I replied, “I’m Rob Cowan.” “Oh …” said the rather crestfallen caller, evidently rather disappointed that I wasn’t the eminent cellist – until I tentatively reminded Sir Charles that we had once met in interview and, happily, he remembered the occasion. We then shared a very happy 20-minute conversation while I walked back to Leicester Square tube. Such was the man’s willingness to converse. His knowledge of all areas of the repertoire was truly awesome, principally because his professional involvement with music ranged so far and wide. Musically speaking, he was truly a Renaissance man.

Trawling back through Mackerras’s long career, Sadler’s Wells (now English National Opera) – where he achieved some youthful triumphs after returning to England in 1948 from his studies in Prague – is of major importance. He had been learning his conductor’s craft from the great Václav Talich who also introduced him to numerous Czech masterpieces that would later feature so prominently in his concert and recording careers. The recording engineer Tony Faulkner reports that Mackerras also studied the oboe at the Guildhall School of Music in London alongside The Beatles’ producer George Martin, who was a few weeks his junior. At Sadler’s Wells, performances of works by Handel, Gluck, Bach and Donizetti brought Mackerras great success but it was his performances of Janáček operas that really helped bring Mackerras’s name into national, and eventually international, prominence. No conductor in recent times has done more to champion Janáček’s cause, both in Czechoslovakia and in the countries beyond. He directed the Welsh National Opera from 1987 to 1992, where his Janáček productions won particular praise.

Mozart operas were another great passion and area of expertise. One of Mackerras’s career highlights for the 1991 season was the reopening of the Estates Theatre in Prague, the scene of the original premiere of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in which he conducted a new production of that same opera to mark the bicentenary of Mozart’s death. Mozart also figured highly within Mackerras’s discography, most memorably with two sets of the symphonies, an incisive and keenly played complete set with the Prague Chamber Orchestra (for Telarc) and, more recently, a much-praised selection of some of the greatest symphonies with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (Linn).

Mackerras became principal conductor of the BBC Concert Orchestra from 1954 to 1956 and in 1964 made his debut at London’s Royal Opera House, conducting Shostakovich’s Katerina Izmailova. He directed the Hamburg State Opera from 1966 to 1969 and the English National Opera from 1970 to 1977. In 1972, he conducted his Metropolitan Opera debut in New York with Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. For a while he also worked closely with Benjamin Britten.

The year 1973 saw Mackerras conduct the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in the opening concert of the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House, in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II. Later, in 1982, he was the first Australian national appointed chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony, a post he held until 1985.

In 2004 Mackerras became principal guest conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra; prior to that, he was principal guest conductor of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra (1997-2003). Recordings with both orchestras have won wide critical acclaim, most recently Dvořák’s Erben tone poems with the Czech Philharmonic (Supraphon) and Dvořák’s Symphonies Nos 7 and 8 with the Philharmonia (Signum).

Mackerras was also deeply interested in period-performance practice, a fascination that is also tellingly reflected on a number of his recordings. His landmark 1959 version of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks using the original wind-band instrumentation is still for many a credible benchmark and, for his 1965 performance of The Marriage of Figaro, he added ornamentation in an historically informed style. His EMI recording of Handel’s Messiah was noted for its energy, sprightly tempi and lightness of touch, and still holds its own today.

But he wasn’t by any means unresponsive to the repertoire’s lighter side. He was a guest conductor of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company for The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado during the 1975 D’Oyly Carte Centenary season at the Savoy. He later joined the D’Oyly Carte Opera Trust and later still, its Board of Trustees. Most recently, in August 2008, Mackerras was made the new Honorary President of the Edinburgh International Festival Society. He was only the second person to fulfill this post, after Sir Yehudi Menuhin. The Festival had featured performances under Mackerras throughout six decades since his first in 1952. 

Mackerras once neatly summarised his strategy for working with an orchestra with the words, “I believe it’s very important to edit orchestral parts explicitly and as thoroughly as possible, so that the musicians can play them without too much rehearsal. For instance, the other day I did all the Schumann symphonies with very little rehearsal at all. Because the parts were clearly marked, particularly with regard to dynamics, we were able to play them without needing to do that much preliminary work, focusing our attention on the interpretation rather than the technical business of who plays too loud or too soft.” Mackerras was above all a pragmatic, “common sense” musician, for whom excessive interpretative intervention was an alien concept.

Running through Mackerras’s list of recordings is a heady and humbling exercise. He made his first records in the last days of shellac, including a recording of his own compendium of Gilbert and Sullivan tunes and the ballet Pineapple Poll (which was premiered on March 13, 1951). Some of his early recording sessions were for the EMI producer Walter Legge, standing in when Otto Klemperer and other eminent conductors were ill, but among the highlights of Mackerras’s fledgling recording career in the 1950s were epoch-making stereo recordings (for Pye) of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks (as referred to earlier) and, most particularly, a blazing performance of Janáček’s Sinfonietta coupled with a striking sequence of Janáček operatic preludes which, before Mackerras recorded them, very few British collectors had ever heard, or even heard of. For Telarc he conducted Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury, HMS Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado, and The Yeomen of the Guard. In collaboration with David Mackie he reconstructed Sullivan’s “lost” Cello Concerto, conducting its first performance with Julian Lloyd Webber and the London Symphony Orchestra at Barbican Hall, London, in April 1986, with a recording for EMI shortly afterwards. Add the complete symphonies of Brahms (Telarc, based on earlier performing traditions) and Beethoven (EMI and Hyperion), Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor with the Hanover Band (Sony), Dvořák’s Rusalka (Decca), Slavonic Dances (Supraphon), Chopin concertos with Emanuel Ax (Sony), Mozart with Alfred Brendel (Philips), symphonies by Arriaga and Voříšek (Hyperion), etc, and you get the general drift of Mackerras’s immense versatility.

Although known as an Australian musician, Mackerras was actually born in Schenectady, New York, on November 17, 1925, of Australian parents, the eldest of seven children. He was appointed a CBE in the 1974 New Year Honours and was knighted in the 1979 New Year Honours. He died on July 14, 2010, having fought a long battle with cancer. Not that illness stopped him from conducting, or discouraged him from planning future engagements. Indeed, he had been scheduled to lead a Prom on July 25, and also to conduct Mozart’s Idomeneo at the Edinburgh International Festival in August. But it wasn’t to be and now we have to content ourselves with the knowledge that his vital and endearing spirit will live on through a vast and durable discography.

Rob Cowan