22 - Autumn Music

Summary

Not long after my return to London, I was moved to learn that the loyal and caring Stephen Lloyd had arranged that I should receive the Feeney Trust Commission for the following year, and it was agreed that I could use it to complete the Piano Concerto for which I had made sketches three years previously.

Before I could return fully to composition, I had to fulfil one more conducting date at the Proms. With the BBC Symphony Orchestra, I again shared an evening with Sir Malcolm Sargent, finishing the concert with my Polonia.

It was loudly acclaimed, and I was called back to the platform several times, little knowing that it was to be my last appearance at the Promenade concerts for many, many years to come. Though my Polonia pleased the orchestra and the public, it evidently did not please the new Music Controller at the BBC1 – for when I asked to hear the tape afterwards I was told that it had been destroyed.

I still had not fully realised the significance of the retirement of Richard Howgill, nor the full implications for my future of the new regime at the BBC. Longing to fly freely as a composer, I had leapt from the financial security and respected position of Musical Director in Birmingham without noticing that a new fashion was about to grip all the modern music outlets, not only in Britain but throughout the western world, and that, as an independent Pole with an independent compositional style and a considerable obstinacy about allowing anyone to dictate to him, I would, once more, have to write with little hope of performance for a matter of many years before at last my musical voice could again be allowed to filter through.

Meanwhile, I was feeling unusually optimistic about my private as well as my professional life. In the early autumn of 1959, I was introduced to Winsome Ward, a most attractive woman of my own age, with a pale, delicate complexion and light reddish-brown hair. She was a specially English type: as a girl she must have been the ultimate ‘English rose’.