Chapter Nine - Bach Comes to Town, 1947–59

Summary

It is with the greatest possible pride that the committee of the Bedfordshire Musical Society announces that Mr. Clarence Raybould has consented to become the Society's conductor. By doing so, Mr. Raybould does honour not only to the Society but to the town at large which first became acquainted with him when the B. B. C. Symphony Orchestra lived and played amongst us during the war. We then began to know him not merely as a name in the “Radio Times” but as a delightful personality as well.

Clarence Robert Raybould (1886–1972)

Clarence Raybould, the Musical Society's new conductor, was born in Birmingham. He was, in 1912, the first person to receive a music degree at Birmingham University. He joined the Midland Institute of Music that same year as a teacher of harmony and counterpoint. He subsequently worked with Rutland Boughton as accompanist, coach and conductor of the Glastonbury Festival and, after that, performed the same role for the first Beecham Opera Company. He then moved to the British National Opera Company, having already established a modest reputation as a conductor and composer before the outbreak of the First World War. His opera, The Sumida River, was performed in 1916 in Birmingham. After the war, he worked as a pianist and accompanist, travelling widely. He worked for the Columbia Gramophone Company 1927–31, and later in films, as a composer, arranger and conductor of film music.

Before his appointment to the BBC, Clarence Raybould had conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra several times. The first time was in January 1935, in the first United Kingdom performances of Roger Sessions's The Black Maskers, George Gershwin's Second Rhapsody and Aaron Copland's Dance Symphony. In the same year, he also conducted the first performance and world premiere of Mozart's Rondo in A. He was appointed chief assistant conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1938 by which time he had conducted new works at fourteen of the orchestra's concerts. He was then nearly fifty-two years old. He moved with the orchestra from London to Bristol, and then from Bristol to Bedford in 1941, and remained chief assistant conductor for the duration of the Second World War – all the time that the orchestra was resident in Bedford. He and his wife lived at 9 Everard Road, Bedford, until 1950.