Classical music in the West is under threat, according to the British cellist Julian Lloyd Webber. "We live in a pop culture," he says, and quickly counters this statement by asking: "Do we? Who said so?" Son of the English composer William Lloyd Webber and younger brother of Andrew, as a world-class solist he has committed himself to expanding the cello repertoire as well as actively stressing the accessibility and universal appeal of classical music. Popularising does not, he feels, have to mean lowering musical standards.
An interesting aspect of his personality is that he is an outsider who has remained an individual without resorting to eccentric behaviour or artistic compromise. This, even while his eloquent exasperation with music politics, marketing tactics, the emphasis on sales - "If it does not sell, delete it from the catalogue" - and state of music in general hovers on the polite side of outspoken.
This weekend he and pianist John Lenehan perform the two final recitals in the AIB Music Festival in Great Irish Houses series, which are long booked out. LLoyd Webber started playing the cello at four. He was under no pressure to play but had turned to the instrument because the piano did not appeal to him. Music he says "was pretty much inevitable in a family like mine". His mother, Jean, was a piano teacher and her pupils came to the family's Kensington flat for tuition, while his father not only composed music and was an organist, but was director of the London College of Music.
The young Julian was no prodigy. "I liked it but I didn't work very hard. It was not until I was about 12 or 13 that I decided `I want to do this well' and started practising." So he was not one of those children sent off to a school for the gifted? "No," he laughs, "I went to a school for the normal as opposed to the abnormal." His demeanour moves easily between absent-minded amusement and intense seriousness. As a boy, though, was he not put off by the sheer physical size of the cello? Again, he laughs. "Well, no. I was always a big bloke even when I was 12. I never thought of the cello as large. I just always felt comfortable with it. People often remark when I come on stage I carry it quite high" - he demonstrates, holding up an imaginary cello as if it were the size of a small rabbit - "so I suppose I never really thought of its size."
Growing up in London during the 1960s proved valuable for an aspiring musician. "We were spoilt for choice. There was plenty of international performers coming and going any day of the week. I saw Rostropovich play at his absolute peak in 1963 and 64. I was listening to international cellists all the time." Even at that age, he was taping performances and discovering new and forgotten pieces. It is easy to imagine him as an intense, perceptive schoolboy. About that time, Lloyd Webber was attending the University College School in Hampstead. Music, he admits, began to overshadow his ordinary school work.
In 1968, aged 17, he began studying at the Royal College of Music where he remained until 1972. The regime there did not strike him as particularly oppressive and by then he was intent on a professional career. On graduating, he spent a year training in Geneva under the great Pierre Fournier. His international concert career soon began. In 1980, he first played the Britten Cello Symphony which Rostropovich had asked the English composer to write for him. A powerful, symphonic work, it really is a symphony, not a concerto. Last year Lloyd Webber recorded it with Walton's Concerto for cello and orchestra, under Neville Marriner.
Few contemporary British classical soloists have served 20th-century English music better.
The pieces are dramatically dissimilar and Lloyd Webber's treatment of both is superb. Critically, the recording is regarded as his finest to date, something which does not diminish the quality of his Elgar Cello Concerto. His discography has combined the standard repertoire as well as less recorded, and often premiere recordings. "I like mixing the familiar with the unfamiliar."
His specialist area is late 19th and 20th century, although his programme on Saturday includes Bach's Air, Suite No 3 in D major. Later this year, he is recording work by Bach and Boccherini. On Saturday, he will also be performing Faure's beautiful Elegy which he recorded in 1991 on a CD of French music which includes Saint-Saens Cello Concerto, the first recording of D'Indy's Lied, op 19 as well as Arthur Honegger's jazz-inspired Cello Concerto.
Since 1984 he has recorded exclusively for Philips and the company commissioned the English composer Gavin Bryars to write a cello concerto for him. Farewell To Philosophy was the result and it is probably the best work Bryars has written. Lloyd Webber recorded it in 1996.
Ask him who he admires as a cellist and of course he mentions Rostropovich, who he has described as "the incomparable colossus with the matchless technique". He also praises the Chinese American Yo Yo Ma and another American, the brilliant Lynn Harrell, who appeared in Dublin recently with the British violinist Kennedy. Lloyd Webber is, however, worried about the standardisation of playing and refers to a collection of recordings made a few years ago, featuring the finest cellists of the century.
"I was struck by their individuality. No two sounded the same, even if they were playing the same piece of music. Some of them were brilliant, some of them were bloody awful. But the fact is they all had their own sound. If that were to be done nowadays - you know, record the present generation - I think it would be impossible to tell them apart."
Was his father an influence? "No, he wasn't. My father was . . ." a long pause, ". . . remote. It was the generation - no, not a class thing. English parents of that time did not really relate to their children," he says. "It's not like now, where people speak with their children."
He does not appear to feel deprived but he gives the impression of having been left to his resources. Far from growing up with his father's music as a part of his life, Julian appears to have known little about it then. It appears that William Lloyd Webber - who was born in 1914 and began composing in the late 1930s - was part of a generation whose romanticism fell out of favour by the early 1950s. Despair drove him to depression and alcoholism.
For more than 20 years William Lloyd Webber composed nothing. In 1982, he presented Julian with a piece, Nocturne, which he had written in the 1940s as part of a sacred work. Now in the form of a cello and harp piece, it is performed on the new album, Invocation. William Lloyd Webber died in 1982, from a blood clot following an operation. His younger son was only later to discover the full range of his music: Invocation is the first selection of his father's secular and sacred music he has recorded. It is the first of four proposed recordings. The music is highly romantic, personal and often haunting. The title piece, written for strings and harp, and Nocturne, here performed by cello and harp, are particularly beautiful. Lloyd Webber will be performing Nocturne in both of his recitals this weekend.
This is not, he says, an attempt to place his father in the context of mid 20th-century British music: he believes the works will stand by themselves. "Did you like the recordings?" he asks, "I think the music has great quality." Dressed in jeans and white Reeboks, Lloyd Webber is a rangy character, standing about 6 foot 3 inches, with the look of a second row forward or a javelin thrower. Thanks to his haphazard hair-cut and sulkily good natured boy's face, he looks a lot younger than his years. "I'm 48, no, I mean I'm 47 -I was 47 in April. Andrew was born in 1948, I was born in 1951." Even his voice is youthful; he sounds like a clever, articulate, confident student. His deep-set, hooded eyes are white-blue and often look surreal or at least extraterrestrial in photographs. Better looking in person, he is also a lot more handsome than his brother, as well considerably taller. At times Julian's facial expression bears a vague resemblance to the late James Hunt. He has none of the spoilt petulance or air of privilege which surrounds many of even the most even-tempered performers.
A good test of this is his response to the fussy photographer, who on arrival at Lloyd Webber's flat announces that he thinks he has photographed him before but can't place him. "Were you reading something, a poem or something?" he asks. Lloyd Webber looks bewildered and slumps down lower in his chair, resigned to adopt whatever pose is requested. The photographic session is tortuous: Lloyd Webber looks as if he doesn't know whether to laugh or cry, so he settles for gravitas.
The casual clothes are not an affectation, he seems to live modestly. Although the apartment is in a tall mansion block next door to Christie's auction rooms in London's Kensington, and the car showroom a few doors down is displaying the latest top of the range Rolls Royce, the Lloyd Webber flat is comfortable and bright rather than luxurious. A TV guide lies open on the table.
He lives here with Zohra, his second wife, who he married in 1989, and their six-year-old son, David. It is unassumingly decorated.
A small photograph of Lloyd Webber with Yehudi Menuhin, who conducted him in his magnificent recording of Elgar's final masterpiece, his Cello Concerto, catches the eye. Last year that performance was chosen by Gramophone magazine as the finest-ever recorded version of that work, surpassing even Jacqueline du Pre's version. Elgar has always been special to Lloyd Webber. "He is special, the first English composer for 100 years: he brought music back to the centre stage": he acknowledging Elgar's uniquely Germanic qualities and diversity, remarks on the passion and pain, particularly of the Cello Concerto. Among the records on shelves in the room, two bound Elgar albums are prominent. Beneath them, on another shelf is a copy of Nigel Kennedy's premature autobiography. In fact, most of the books are music-related. Lloyd Webber points to the stacks of old-style reel-tapes, relics of his boyhood during when he was busily recorded great performances from the radio. Elsewhere in the room, there is a photograph of Lloyd Webber's parents.
It was not until his mother's death five death that there was any suggestion that the Lloyd Webber household throughout the brothers' childhood had been less than happy: his father's return to composing after 20 years silence was inspired by his love for a woman 40 years his junior.
On the wall in the hall hang two gold discs - neither are for The Elgar or the Britten/Walton recordings - one is in recognition of the sales of his Paganini Variations recording in 1978; the second for Lloyd Webber Plays Lloyd Webber, a 1990 CD not of his father's music, but of Andrew's work. There also a few, wonderful maps, including some antique county maps and an historical map of the London tube system as it actually is constructed beneath city.
Beauty, lyricism and a warm sound are the hallmarks of his playing which is always sensitive, highly intelligent and adventurous. There is no doubting his passion for music, nor his quest for artistic perfection. He is also a romantic and, for all his ambitions regards music, there is nothing about Julian Lloyd Webber to indicate he is particularly ambitious materially. Concerned about the status of classical music, he never refers to the financial imbalances of the music business.
Surely he must be frustrated by the amount of interest placed on his relationship with his brother? Does he feel his career has been overshadowed by Andrew Lloyd Webber's commercial success in popular musical theatre? Long gasp, eyes ceilingwards. "I know this sounds unbelievable. But I never think about it. I mean, why would I? We don't do the same thing. I may as well tell you this: if he played the cello I'd probably kill him; if I were to write popular musicals, he might be a very unhappy man. But as it is there is nothing to compare. There is no like with like." Referring back to the "packaging" of classical music, he objects the cult of the soft-focus CD cover. "It has been particularly bad over the past three years." I refer to the cover of his Elgar which features Menuhin and him posing in 1985 with a bust of Elgar. "That's really old-fashioned now," he says ironically. "They don't do covers like that any more." This brings him back again to the subject of classical music's crisis. Last February he was invited to play at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and later to address the forum as well. "The idea was I was supposed to speak for about 10 minutes on a classical music-related topic. So I did, on something which I feel strongly about."
It was not a nostalgic discourse. Practical, logical and hard-hitting, Lloyd Webber came out fighting and pointed to "declining audiences, government cuts, disastrous CD sales, sponsors pulling out of the arts, fewer children learning instruments and a total lack of interest from the general media - unless semi-naked bimbo violinists or something like the David Helfgottt circus are involved. This is the reality of classical music in the West today." In the course of his speech he challenged the breakfast TV companies, "those arbiters of the young", to give him four weeks of daily, three-minute slots and he promised to deliver a variety of musicians who would testify to the range, diversity, quality and mass appeal of classical music. What he got was a week - and the public reaction proved he was right.
"The fact is that people like classical music. You don't have to know a piece, or who wrote it, to like it. I think this is always being overlooked. Much of the elitism is made by non-classical people." Having been criticised in his younger days for his willingness to play on a non-specialist TV show, he says, "as long as you play a piece as well as you can, what's the problem?" The evening after the speech, he performed Tchaikovsky's Rococo Variations. So far this year, his performances have included Paris, Copenhagen, New Zealand and cities throughout Britain. The night before the interview, he had performed Rachmaninov for a charity concert: later this month, he will appear in the Princess Diana memorial concert at the Althorp estate along with soprano Lesley Garrett, who he admires.
He plays a Stradivarius. "I'll get it for you." Returning to the room, he is proved right. Carried aloft by a person of his height, the instrument looks surprisingly small. Made in 1690, it is beautiful. "I've had it since 1982, it has a wonderful sound." The photographer looks on and comments: "I suppose it's the musical equivalent of my Rolex camera." Not quite.
It is time for Lloyd to bring David to the park. Has his son shown any interest in music? "Oh yes. But then he has little hope of getting away from it."
Invocation, the music of William Lloyd Webber, performed by Julian Lloyd Webber, Tasmin Little, Skaila Kanga and Ian Wat- son under Richard Hickox is available on the Chandos label.
