Growing up in the distant city of Omagh, County Tyrone, would seem to be an unlikely background for having a successful career as a bassoonist for many of London's orchestras, on both period and modern instruments. Philip Turbett, who has recently joined the Continuo Foundation as a trustee, travelled just about the furthest sideways across the UK as possible when he went to study at the age of 18 in Essex, where his accent must have been a novelty at the Colchester Institute. While he was there, he teamed up with three other students to form the Ebony Quartet (referring to the wood), all of them playing the clarinet and saxophone, with only Philip adding the bassoon to the other wind instruments. Managing the quartet was also his first step into management.

A year or two later, though, in 1981, he was on the ground that has become familiar ever since—the centre of London: at Trinity College of Music, in those days still behind the Wigmore Hall in Mandeville Place. It was there that he met Linda Brand, who pushed him gently into the emerging world of early music and became his wife. “She is a recorder player, and the modern bassoon doesn't balance well with that,” Turbett says. “She suggested I get a Baroque bassoon so I could play with her. I went to the Director of Studies at Trinity, David Petit, to ask to borrow one, but they didn't have one. He said, though, that I could hire one from the Early Music Shop in Wigmore Street. That was in my second year at Trinity. Luckily, they had Felix Warnock on their books, and I started to study with him.” Warnock, from a distinguished and formidable intellectual background, was becoming a force to be reckoned with himself on the early music scene.

Committing to the Baroque version of the instrument made Turbett a rare creature among the bassoon professionals at the time, and it meant that he was in demand quickly not just for concerts but for recordings too. “I left Trinity in 1985, and my first recording session was with the Academy of Ancient Music for Chris Hogwood and Decca in Handel's 'Athalia' at St. Jude's in Hampstead. Luckily, it needs four bassoons, so I immediately met all of London's important players in the business.” Sixteen years later, he was back at Trinity as Professor of bassoon, early and modern.

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_{Philip Turbett, bassoonist with the Academy of Ancient Music, demonstrates the Baroque contrabassoon in footage from their performance at the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant in June 2012.}

In the meantime, he had performed with all the ensembles directed by the iconic names in the business. “For so long, the Early Music movement was dominated by conductors like Christopher Hogwood, John Eliot Gardiner, and Roger Norrington.” Within a few years of leaving college, though, he closely followed the progress of those forming the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. “The early movement is special in that everyone wants to be involved, to collaborate, and to feel that their opinions matter. There came a point when the players thought it was time they took control. With the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, they were able to do that.” It was, of course, a process that had been gone through by four of the city's five symphony orchestras earlier in the century.

Turbett soon found that he enjoyed the management side of the music business as well as the playing, and he has striven to balance the two. “I've been in management for the last twenty years. So many players don't realise what has to happen to put on concerts.” None of that precluded his commitment to chamber music and to finding audiences outside the concert hall, often using the ensemble from his early student days. The Ebony Quartet's repertoire includes music from the 1500s to jazz and has been a core group for the Live Music Now programmes of community engagement. Turbett found himself helping out the LMN management with the administration of the organisation. The management experience of The Ebony Quartet and LMN led him to English National Opera, with playing taking second place as he became its Orchestra Manager from 2004–09. He says, “Paul Daniel was Music Director at the start—I always liked working with him. I prided myself that, as a player myself, I understood what the orchestra members were thinking and feeling.”

He stayed in opera after the years at ENO but once again was able to combine the early with the modern. “I went to English Touring Opera as player-manager, and that was fun because it had two orchestras, one on modern instruments, one on Baroque. My own career as a player was driven by recordings and touring—often we'd be on the road for five months of the year. It wouldn't happen now. I spent the first half of my career travelling the world. With ETO, I had the chance to tour England at last.”

He finds the state of opera in this decade, manipulated by Arts Council England and the prejudices of government, “all very sad. I really don't know what will happen. I hope young players now can have the same opportunities I did.” Despite the current concern about musicians' future, Philip does feel many things have changed for the better. “I don't think you could have gone to any of the colleges when I was young and done Baroque bassoon as your first study—and the research now is brilliant. In those days, we were sneered at a lot by the modern instrument classical music business. There are certain individuals who are still not convinced, but for the most part, we are respected now.”

He is in the process of freeing himself from some of his managerial duties and is stepping back a little but, he admits, only a little. “This year I'm playing with The Mozartists and then touring with OAE and András Schiff. There are also lots of projects with the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestras, Academy of Ancient Music, and of course Glyndebourne over the summer. Otherwise, I'm trying to wind down a little and play a bit more golf.” As one of nature's multi-taskers, the golf may, like its players, have to wait for its turn.

By Simon Mundy