Following the difficult decision to retire from public performance last year, celebrated cellist and conductor Julian Lloyd Webber began his tenure as Principal of the Birmingham Conservatoire in September. A long-term, passionate advocate for the improvement of music education, Lloyd Webber is a natural fit for the role, as part of which he will oversee a relocation to a brand new, £40million building.
 
“This building works well enough, but we'll be going somewhere so much better,” says Julian, sitting in a large office at the conservatoire's current home in the Adrian Boult Hall. “The new place is going to be state of the art, totally focused around music. There won't be many rooms like this around - most of the admin will be next door. It's a very exciting time for me to join.”

Set for completion in 2017, the new conservatoire will be the UK's first in around thirty years. Located on Jennens Road, between Millennium Point and Birmingham Ormiston Academy, it will include over seventy music practice rooms and five performance venues: a four hundred-seat concert hall, a one hundred-and-fifty-seat recital hall and smaller rooms dedicated to jazz, organ music and experimental work. Naturally, of course, the transition will bring difficulties, but the new principal wonders whether these might not prove a blessing in disguise.

“When we lose the Adrian Boult Hall at the end of June, it won't be easy, but we're taking it as an opportunity to go out and play concerts all over the city. We've got a new outreach manager here, Richard Shrewsbury, and we have lots of plans to get out and engage with the community, particularly with young children. I want the conservatoire to be right at the centre of what's going on in Birmingham, not something that's hidden away.”

As founder and chairman of music development charity Sistema England, Lloyd Webber has long been involved in outreach and community projects, providing him with experience which he hopes to use in his new role at the conservatoire. Dismayed by limited access to music tuition for children, he recently hit out against plans to spend £500million on a new London concert hall, calling it a “wrong priority”.

“It upsets me so much to see that the majority of children aren't getting access to classical music. Music lessons and instruments are increasingly paid for by parents. In my view, children have a right to experience music, and they should get that in school. It's all very well having gleaming new concert halls - but to splash out £500million when most children aren't learning music at all, because of the cutbacks, seems wrong. Where are the audience going to come from? People don't just walk in to things - it's very rare that they'll pay a lot of money for a ticket to something they don't know whether or not they'll enjoy.”

But it's not all about facilitating access to music for children and young people: Lloyd Webber hopes to make audiences of all ages more aware of the conservatoire's diverse, exciting and very affordably priced public events. 

The programme for the new term includes concerts and masterclasses from acclaimed performers like pianist Peter Donohoe and baritone singer Roderick Williams, the continuation of the ongoing Completely Brahms season - with two concerts each in January and March - and an ambitious, five-day Schubert Festival in February which will see staff and students explore the composer's work via up to five concerts per day. It's not only classical music on offer, either: March's Frontiers Festival will celebrate experimental, boundary-pushing work from contemporary composers, as well as showcasing original music by the conservatoire's composition students. 

With most events priced at under £10, a glance across the programme should leave you feeling spoilt for choice. 
“People need to realise how many public concerts there are going on here, many of them free. The value is unbelievable: if you were listening to an equivalent concert in London, you'd be paying about four times the price. We had a concert by a famous pianist called Robert Levin at the beginning of this term, and he was playing the same concert at the Wigmore Hall near Marylebone Station. I worked out that it was cheaper to get the train from Marylebone to Moor Street and listen to him here than it was to hear him play in London.”

Greater expense is just one of the many things Lloyd Webber doesn't miss about London, where he lived his whole life before his recent move to Birmingham. 
“There's nothing you can get in London that you can't get in Birmingham. Symphony Hall and Town Hall are amazing concert venues, with things of a very high standard going on all year, and the CBSO is a world-class orchestra. I don't think people elsewhere realise how much is going on here: you could be out every night if you wanted to. Another thing I like about it here is that everything is within walking distance. That's so different to London.”

The ‘tight-knit’ nature of Birmingham's city centre allows connections to be fostered easily between related organisations, and Lloyd Webber hopes to bring arts institutions together so that the city can begin to act “as a single entity”. 

Another of his aims is to equip students with practical skills to help them forge careers in the music industry - something he feels was lacking in his own education. 
“There's often a very regimented approach to learning instruments, where you shut yourself away for six hours a day and practise playing the same music everybody else plays. We've got to think outside the box more. There are many different things you can do in music besides being a concert musician, and I want the students to find different ways to use their individual talents. Some of the most successful people I've met in music didn't think they would end up where they are now when they went to college, like being a record producer, for example. We've got great people coming in from all sides of the industry to talk to the students.”

Nevertheless, Lloyd Webber himself remains best known as a concert musician, and adjusting to a new life without his cello has taken time. In 2014, he announced he was retiring from public performance due to a herniated neck disc which was affecting his ability to play.
“I will always miss performing. If you're lucky enough to be a solo player and have that contact with an audience, it's an incredible thing. It's unfortunate that the injury was so specific in causing a loss of power in my bowing arm - I might not have even noticed anything was wrong if I wasn't a cellist. But it's a really full-on job here, so I don't have much time to think about it at the moment, which is good. I’ve always been passionate about education, and I have a huge amount of knowledge about working in music to share, so I'm doing something which I think is very valuable now. I wouldn't be here if it hadn't happened, so there are positives.”

To find out more about programming at Birmingham Conservatoire visit bcu.ac.uk/conservatoire