Alison Balsom announces that she will retire...
Has she gone too soon? Should she have gone at all? And won’t she miss it? For once, the main talking-point at this year’s Last Night of the Proms wasn’t the conductor’s speech or whether the EU flags outnumbered the Union Jacks. It was Alison Balsom’s announcement that the concert – in which she dazzled playing pieces by Hummel and Bernstein – would be her last as a trumpet soloist. She is, it seems, retiring at 46.
When I asked her why, I received an honest answer: that the trumpet’s solo repertoire is too limited and she is frankly bored with playing it. Balsom was also candid enough to admit that we would be having ‘a very different conversation’ if she wasn’t married to a successful film director (Sir Sam Mendes) and therefore not in desperate need of another concert fee.
When should musicians retire? Depends on the instrument...
Even so, her decision has ignited a debate. It’s not just stars who have to know when to bow out gracefully or risk facing the humiliation of having the decision made for them. Every musician, professional or amateur, famous or obscure, eventually has to acknowledge that the passage of time has sapped the power in their fingers, or diminished their hearing, or coarsened their vocal cords, or slowed their reflexes. Or, no less tragically, drained their desire to make music at all.
And it’s at this point that musical life can seem at its most unfair. Brass players, channelling enormous energy through the mouth and lips, often have shorter careers than, say, viola players. Baritones and basses, who tend to play older characters in operas, seem to go on forever, whereas sopranos are often sidelined when they don’t look like Japanese geishas or Parisian consumptives any more.
And, despite attempts to reform the profession, it’s still true that many wonderful women musicians are in effect forced to retire from top-class playing in their thirties and forties because the brunt of raising a family falls on them, and it’s incompatible with the inflexible demands of life in an orchestra.
When should musicians retire? Changing attitudes towards age and experience
There’s another factor at work these days, too – and that’s changing attitudes towards age and experience. Put bluntly, they used to be venerated much more than they are now. Years ago, I asked Sir Simon Rattle when he thought he would reach his peak as a conductor. ‘There’s probably a point, somewhere around 70, when conductors start getting competent,’ he replied. He was being funny (and modest) – but also reflecting what was, until quite recently, a generally held view: that conductors simply get more profound as they get older. To quote one of Stephen Sondheim’s most famous songs, they seemed to be like ‘dinosaurs surviving the crunch’.
Today, it appears, the people who appoint or book conductors and soloists think the opposite. The jobs are all going to whizzkids in their thirties and even twenties. The theory is that we music-lovers are crying out for new faces. That may or may not be true, but it has had a devastating impact on a whole generation. I can think of dozens of perfectly good conductors and soloists over 50 who may as well retire to nice professorships in conservatoires (if they haven’t already done so) because they probably won’t land another permanent conducting position in their lives.
When should musicians retire? Better to leave on a high...
Well, that’s showbiz, I guess. In many ways I admire Balsom’s decision to get out while she is still at the top, mesmerisingly virtuosic to her very last note. Far better than a slow, embarrassing decline, where first your colleagues, then your public and finally even the music critics notice that you aren’t what you were.
Even so, I do wonder how it is possible to voluntarily cut music-making out of your life (at least in public) when it is what has defined you and shaped you as a human being since childhood. I couldn’t do that. It would be akin to spiritual death.
But perhaps the difference is that I write words for a living and make music for pleasure. I don’t feel my livelihood is on the line if, like Eric Morecambe, I don’t play all the notes in the right order. Which is just as well. However, if I do decide to draw my organ-playing days to a close, you can rest assured that I will not be hiring the Royal Albert Hall for a farewell recital.
