What do Fred Astaire, Jacqueline du Pre and Noel Coward Have in Common?

London's Barbican Arts Centre Provides a Clue.

Here is a general knowledge question that the makers of Trivial Pursuit forgot to ask. What is the connecting link among Fred Astaire, Dame Sybil Thorndike, the cellist Jacqueline du Pre, and George Martin, who produced the Beatles' hit record, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band?

Difficult? Let's add a few more clues. Where might you have found, at different times, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Noel Coward, Claire Bloom, and Xue Wei, the winner of the 1986 Carl Flesch International Violin Competition? And while you are jotting down the answer on the back of an envelope, let us indulge in a short travelogue.

The Barbican in London is not everybody's cup of tea. A grey mass of flats and windswept walkways, it is a recent example of London's postwar reconstruction program on a site that forty-five years ago felt the worst of the blitz. The nearby dome of St. Paul's Cathedral mocks those who have thus hastened the decline of the age of elegance.

Misleading Looks

But appearances can be deceptive. As you follow the yellow lines on the pavement that lead from the surrounding subway stations into the center of this impressive, or depressive, hulk, you suddenly find an ancient church, lovingly preserved, and a duck pond with its own waterfall and fountains. London is often said to be a collection of village and the Barbican, despite its new Brutalist architecture, aspires to be one of them.

Geraniums hang from window boxes, while an Edwardian conservatory with tropical palms rises above the flat roofs. From afar you can hear, as in old Cornish folk song, the "mysterious tones of the cornet, clarinet, and bass trombones." Behind these forbidding walls lies the largest arts complex in Western Europe.

Cynics have protested that the Barbican Arts Centre is just another piece of civic surgery, an artificial transplant, trying to prove that London's money markets, which built the place, have a soul after all. But Londoners and tourists alike have quickly discovered how pleasant it is to visit the libraries, galleries, concert halls, theaters and cinemas, either one at a time or, like some Americans, all in one go. The lazy British often prefer just to sit around the foyers and listen to the excellent small ensembles who regularly play there.

There is even an Arts Policy and Management Department connected with City University, situated high in one of the tower blocks, where it can keep a watchful eye on the proceedings. "You could spend a lifetime in the Barbican," one French critic told me, lugubriously staring at the maze of signs, corridors, and elevators, "which is very fortunate, for I can never find my way out."

It is a kind of Disneyland for those who are addicted to the arts, and if this sounds disrespectful, let me hasten to add that the Barbican also provides the home for three arts organizations whose worldwide reputations defy any such disparagement -the Royal Shakespeare Company, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Guildhall School Music and Drama.

And that, if you are still wondering, provides the answer to the questions posed above, for all these celebrities (and many more) studied at the Guildhall School, an institution that can be regarded as a triumph of British pragmatism, for it breaks many unwritten laws of arts academics and succeeds by doing so.

Few European conservatories of high standing train actors and musicians under one roof, for the rigorous technical discipline that most instrumentalist undergo is often thought to cramp the theatrical imagination. Fewer still pay attention to high art and low show business, and it is rare indeed, perhaps unique, for a school to produce so many outstanding virtuosi while not neglecting those solid professional performers who have no ambitions to be soloists.

"The Guildhall has great advantage," its current principal, John Hosier, CBE, pointed out to me, "in that it is totally independent." Much of its money, apart from students'fees, comes from a trust fund, City's Cash, established last in the century, which now yields over 1 million pounds a year. This frees the Guildhall from an undue dependence on government subsidy, thus giving it greater room to maneuver and the chance to experiment.

Bold innovations

The Guildhall is famous for its experiments, and most of them work well. It was the first conservatory in the country to take jazz out of the nightclubs and offer it the academic respectability of a full postgraduate course. Now jazz is taught to all first-year music students as a way of helping them to respond more creatively and instinctively to the demands of the music.

I sat in on one of these early sessions where the tutor, Lionel Grigson, patiently explained the sequences of chords and rhythms to a group of young, classically trained musicians who looked appalled at the prospect of not reading from the dots. By the end of the hour, they were all cheerfully manhandling "St, Louis Blues" and looking forward to subjecting "Sweet Georgia Brown" to the same treatment.

Hosier sees this as necessary training for most professional musicians, "so that if they are asked to improvise funk-style for sixty-four bars in a West End musical, they will know what they are doing." The Guildhall is one of the unseen influences behind a surprising recent trend in British theater, toward large-scale musicals of a type previously associated with Broadway.

The Guildhall actors learn how to sing, tap-dance, and move, if not quite with the grace of ballet dancers, at least with a musical drive and energy. In its main theater, the Guildhall has staged splendid revivals of forgotten or neglected musicals, such as Leonard Bernstein's Wonderful Town (now running in the West End), Frank Loesser's The Most Happy Fella, and Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along. One of its recent students, the composer-lyricist Charles Hunt, worked with Andrew Lloyd-Webber on his latest hit, The Phantom of the Opera.

Agents, managements, and critics crowd into the Guildhall's first nights, for it has become known as a place where new works can be tried out without incurring huge financial risks. New plays, even new operas, are part of the annual programs, and in 1986, in addition to staging the first British performance of the Russian play, Exchange, translated by Michael Frayn, the Guildhall contributed a lavish production of Bernstein's Mass, directed by Bill Bryden, to the Bernstein Festival at the Barbican.

This, of course, provides wonderful opportunities for Guildhall students to be spotted as potential stars, who emerge even from small-scale, end-of-term workshop productions, as the soprano Juliet Booth did from The Thread of Commedia, a compilation of opera extracts in December 1986. The Guildhall has always tried to offer practical help to young artists, realizing that plain talent is sometimes not enough to survive in the hard world outside the college. Since the arts are always changing, their courses are designed to anticipate trends rather than tag along behind them.

In 1880, for example, when the Guildhall School was founded, there was a great demand in Britain for orchestral players. Many Victorian towns had their civic orchestras and bands, while there were more than a thousand theaters, each with large orchestral pits. The Guildhall School started with 250 students learning their trades in a vacant wool warehouses, but within five years, this number had increased to 2,500 and new premises were built at Blackfriars near the Thames, where the school stayed until 1977 and then moved to the Barbican.

Now, however, the pattern of music making has changed. There are fewer orchestras, but they are of a higher caliber, and the Guildhall students have often attended specialist music schools before entering the college. The standards -and the competition -are demanding, exceptionally so in the case of soloists.

Hosier recognizes that only a handful of virtuosi ever manage to survive in the international market and proudly points to the fact that the two most famous British string players in this century, Jacqueline du Pre and William Primrose, came from the Guildhall. The head of the Advanced Solo Studies at present is the renowned violinist, Yfrah Neaman, who attracts outstanding young musicians from all over the world, including the Fulbright scholar, Gennadi Filomonov, who left Odessa in the Soviet Union at the age of ten and has since studied and lived in New York.

Balanced Outlook

But colleges rarely survive on such exceptional talents. "Generally speaking," Hosier explained, "the activities in the music school are related to the shape and size of the symphony orchestra," with more string than woodwinds, for example, and the Guildhall has a close, if unofficial, relationship with its neighbors in the Barbican, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Members of the LSO and the RSC teach at the Guildhall, while some students join these companies on graduation, aware that they both have their different kinds of house style.

The head of the drama school is Tony Church, a long-established RSC actor, who was recommended to this post by the RSC's director, Trevor Nunn. Watching the Guildhall students in rehearsal, with two Brecht productions and struggling with the complexities of a Shakespearian text, I was immediately reminded of the RSC's Less Miserables -the same confidence with choral singing, the same emphasis on clarity.

But only a few students can move thus smoothly into the world of major professional companies, and John Hosier is equally concerned about those who may be equally gifted but less lucky. Hosier, soft spoken, in his mid-fifties, gives the impression of restlessly seeking the answers to questions that others prefer not to ask. What is the future, for example, of symphony orchestras at a time when there are so many rapid developments in electronic music? Are the days of the great concert halls, "these temples of music," numbered?

"Two years ago we started a Music Performance and Communications course, which was intended to get our good performers out into the community and find whole new ways of presenting music to people who would not normally go to concerts." Small music ensembles, trained like actors in group improvisation, go out into schools, hospitals, and even prisons, where they are encouraged to develop styles of playing appropriate to the different social environments.

The foyer at the Barbican presents one sort of challenge, with friendly but passive audience and the continual background chatter from the bars, coffee shops, and bookstalls. The West Indian children in an inner-city school offer another challenge. Eager to take part, they will start clapping and dancing at the slightest excuse. In one hospice for old people, the team wrote music to verses supplied by the residents and performed a moving choral concert.

The drama department has similar courses -in theater for young people and for elderly -and if this approach sounds perhaps a little too worthy and do-gooding, there is another side to the story. All artists, musicians, jugglers, conjurers, and actors alike were once described in British law as "rogues and vagabonds," because they used to travel around from place to place, living on their wits and often with no visible means of support.

They were social gypsies, and however much the authorities may have frowned upon them, this wandering existence provided them with a wealth of knowledge and understanding about how people live their ordinary needs and longings. Later on, artists acquired a greater professional status and respectability, but if they are confined to recording studios and theaters, they quickly lose touch with the outside world -and it is not just they and their audiences who suffer but the arts themselves.

Tap into Source

The Guildhall School is trying to redress the balance to ensure that the arts in the brave new world of tower blocks and unyielding concrete do not lose their contact with the deep wells of human experience that originally brought them into being. I asked some acting students in the coffee bar what they had gained -or hoped to gain -from the courses.

One, Will Perry, had a degree in microbiology and surprisingly argued that acting was a natural extension of his scientific training. "Many of the acting classes are concerned with an analysis of emotion, and my background education in genetics and animal behavior is very useful in discussing how people think." Another, Clive Rowe, a black actor from Manchester, had no other degree but did have some experience in acting in amateur musicals.

Rowe thought that the movement sessions were particularly useful, making the actor aware of his presence on the stage, and they all paid tribute to the way in which the voice classes, under Patsy Rodenburg, and movement, under Sue Lefton, complemented each other, so that the actor's whole body became an expressive instrument. Paul Mercier, an American student from Washington, came from an American drama school to study Shakespearian acting in Britain, and he particularly admired the technical control achieved at the Guildhall without any loss of emotional insight.

But what would happen, I asked them, if they were never able to earn their living after college? Would the experience still be worthwhile? They all answered, as expected, "Yes," but gave different reasons. "It's an educating experience," said Perry, "whether you finally get on the stage or not." Rowe thought that it was a useful way of "finding out about yourself," while Samantha Bignall believed that she had most benefited from working with fellow actors in groups, competing, criticizing, and supporting one another. "You have got to believe that you have something to offer -and you have got to go on believing that, even if you don't get the parts you want."

And had I, as a professional theater critic, spotted any future stars? Well, yes I had, about 250 of them, enough to keep British theater and its opera houses going for the next few years, for the most enjoyable side to visiting the Guildhall is that its atmosphere of warm friendliness and the range of its work encourages the blossoming of young talents.

As you wander through the corridors of the Guildhall School, you hear these strong, youthful voices from the opera studios, the virtuosity of its instrumentalists, the dedication and intensity of the drama sessions, fierce combat from the gym, chorus lines tapping out a new routine, tumbling and improvisation. "I come out of the Guildhall," Clive Rowe said, "and think I can do everything."

They're all cockeyed optimists, of course, but who's complaining?