BOWS
AND ARROWS
By
Julian Lloyd Webber
(Biteback
publishing)
Julian Lloyd Webber’s “Travels with my Cello”, a very early –
some would say premature – autobiography was published many years ago in 1984,
barely into the beginning of what has proved a busy and colourful career for
this much-loved musician.
Now the gap has been filled with JLW’s “Bows and Arrows”, an
enthralling updating which is just impossible to put down, and which, as its
resonant title suggests, is as much about his career as a cellist as the
influence of Cupid on his personal life.
The book’s publication coincides with the celebration of
Julian’s 75th birthday at London’s Wigmore Hall, and his gentle
returning to performing after a cruel RSI injury which terminated his playing
career. I also feel it comes at a time when he is comfortable in his private
life, devoted to his fourth wife, the cellist Jiaxin, and their now teenaged
daughter Jasmine.
“Bows and Arrows” (one thinks, too, of Hamlet’s ‘Slings and
Arrows’) teems with details of JLW’s performing activities and all the
travelling involved, and there is one hilarious chapter “Look out, he’s on the
Fiddle! – subtitled “Never stand behind a cellist at a check-in desk or you
will miss your flight”.
The book is also very frank about Julian’s upbringing, with
his father William Lloyd Webber, so often sadly overlooked as a composer, his musically
fecund brother Andrew, their bohemian mother whose household also included
accommodating a young John Lill and the wordsmith Tim Rice, and their
occasional financial problems.
There is also an absorbing section devoted to Julian’s time
as Principal of Birmingham Conservatoire, and the upheavals of its move to
Eastside, with the attendant addition of the prefix “Royal” to its name – and the
subsequent jealousy and obstructiveness of the London music colleges mafia.
It ends with a passionate plea for the restoration of music
education in the country’s schools. This campaign has no finer ambassador.
Christopher Morley