AI ProfileGAVIN HENDERSON, artistic director, Dartington International Summer School
Gavin Henderson is the kind of fatalist to whom things happen, and he allows his life to go accordingly: trumpet player, sculptor, performer, impresario, director, administrator, academic, he has been led into unexpected places to become ubiquitous in the arts in this country. What makes that un-orientated career all the more remarkable is that he has just begun his 25th summer school in the Capability Brown landscape in the Devonshire countryside outside Totnes.
Dartington is a summer playground for serious and not so serious musicians to mingle, learn, experiment, in the grounds of Dartington Hall. New work by both famous and merely enthusiastic composers issues from this five week idyll.
It was begun in the after-ease of the Second World War when the pianist Artur Schnabel, impressed by the fledgling Edinburgh Festival, said, “But where is the teaching?” His pupil William Glock became artistic dirtector, and it was at first set up at Bryanston School in Dorset.
There was mood for rural summer schools. Tanglewood in the United States had been long established, but they started appearing here too, for drama, poetry, painting and eventually music.
Five years later it moved to Dartington, where Leonard Elmhirst and his wife had founded a school and college of arts, and John Amis, as manager, recruited music students to build stages, shift instruments and create posters. They became known as Trogs because they seemed to appear through holes in the ground, and Amis’s old school chum Donald Swann was recruited to organise them. He and his performance partner Michael Flanders were able to try things out there, and their show At the Drop of a Hat was born.
Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia as written for Dartington’s Barn Theatre, but the Elmhirsts were persuaded to allow it to reopen Glyndebourne instead.
Glock continued as artistic director for over 30 years running it alongside being director of the Proms, and it was from his successor, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, that Henderson took over the summer school, an independent company governed by the Dartington Trust.
The appointment, he says, came as a complete shock. “I thought it was a practical joke” he recalls. “I’d never been to Dartington, though I was in awe of its reputation. I drove down the following weekend and just fell in love. He gave up Bracknell but kept Brighton.
“Over my 25 years it has become more and more part of Dartington, so that now where Dartington will say it is the jewel in the crown, the great thing that trust promotes” Henderson says. The summer school kept growing, and developed to embrace dance, including tango and salsa classes, elements of pop music, a jazz class with Keith Tippett and Herbie Flowers’s RockShop. “But fundamentally it’s about composition” Henderson says, “and it’s about a lot of people talking part - in chamber music, to sing in the choir…”
