Basil Cameron, 1884-1975
Cameron conducted more than 400 Proms.
Brigg Fair was part of this programme:
- Sergey Rachmaninov – Concerto for Piano No. 2 in C minor, Op 18
- Sergey Prokofiev – Peter and the Wolf, Op 67
- Rossini – William Tell
- Emmanuel Chabrier – España
- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky – The Nutcracker, Suite, Op 71a (from BBC Proms Archive)
Basil Cameron was certainly missed in this year’s collection of past performances. The proms website says that he conducted 431 works. Surely a few could have been found. Although he did not illuminate the standard classics greatly, he was an excellent accompanist and gave many notable readings of later works. The most memorable performances that come to mind of those I happened to attend were: Sibelius 4, Vaughan Williams 6 and Janacek Sinfonietta..
Cameron conducted the Torquay Municipal Orchestra before World War I under the name Basil Hindenberg (I believe the surname was his father’s). At the 1913 Torquay Festival, Cameron (as Basil Hindenberg) conducted the British premiere of Stravinsky’s Symphony in E flat Op 1. Cameron was an excellent conductor of the music of Stravinsky, and for his 80th birthday concert (at the Proms !!!!!) which he was invited to select himself, he chose to end the programme with a truly stunning account of the Symphony of Psalms. He could be a simply wonderful interpreter of 20th-century music. Pity no-one at the BBC Proms office seems to know that.
I for one have lamented the absence of earlier Proms favourites such as Basil Cameron whose range was wide and sometimes deep.
Playing Bax’s Fourth Symphony recently I discovered he gave the premiere in New York. How often did he conduct abroad please? I think of him as a domestic maestro keen on Sibelius whose 8th Symphony he claimed to have seen when on a visit to Ainola in the 1930’s.
That performance of Brigg Fair is good. I have it on a CRQ Editions CD. And as a ten year-old the second LP I ever bought was Basil Cameron’s Decca ‘Peer Gynt’ suites on Ace of Clubs. Nice black-and-white fjord scene, the disc inside worn with multiple playings. Cameron was an important name in the upper foothills of British music making during the first half of the 20th Century. His neglect in the context of the proms archive broadcasts, while not as howling an omission as that of Sargent, is nonetheless a pity.
“An important name in the upper foothills of British music making” – nicely put, and indeed he was. My first encounter with him was at one of Hochhauser’s Sunday evening all-Beethoven concerts at the Royal Albert Hall. 10 January 1960. 2nd Tier Box. London Philharmonic. Egmont, Seventh and Eighth Symphonies. Moiseiwitsch played the Emperor.
And isn’t that violinist Manoug Parikian in the photograph? Correct me if I’m wrong.
No Endre Wolf.
I thought it was Leonid Kogan???