Fancy. Two Richards. Both New Zealanders. Both with the Royal Northern College of Music in their background. Each recently appointed to a senior managerial position with a BBC orchestra.

Richard Knowles, the new orchestra manager of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, hails from Auckland. After studying for an academic degree in music he found managing university concerts a more attractive proposition than studying for a second degree in business studies. When a friend moved to England to take up studies at the RNCM in the early 1990s, Knowles decided to follow suit, taking advantage of having a British grandfather to secure leave to reside in the UK.

Almost immediately came an outrageous stroke of good fortune. 'A contact put me in touch with Chris Yates, the RNCM principal. I went along to see him with my CV. Lo and behold, the college's orchestra manager had just gone on leave for an extended period. Would I like to take on the job? I couldn't believe it.

'There were several orchestras to look after in a range of specialities...and in fact my time at the college coincided with a beefing up of the performing side to the college's activities. Eventually Maggie Brown came across from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic to head up the orchestral department with me as her assistant. It was an enormously valuable experience. We did things like taking the chamber orchestra three times to the Aix-en-Provence festival. The symphony orchestra went to the Montepulciano Festival.

'It was such an exciting time to be in Manchester. When I arrived it was still the time before the IRA bomb. The Free Trade Hall was in many ways missing out on the musical touring circuit. Then came the bomb and the subsequent inflow of government money. Then came the Bridgewater Hall. Suddenly Manchester was a major international musical city. A great place to be - as many Australian and New Zealander music students have discovered, with fees lower than in London and the cost of living not so daunting either. And for me, all that great walking in the Lake District, the Peaks and in North Wales was terrific as well.'

Richard Wigley, the new general manager of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, hails from the unassuming New Zealand town of Palmerston North. Having played as a bassoonist in the New Zealand Youth Orchestra, he took a first degree in music at home, before completing a Masters at the New England Conservatory in Boston, USA. He then decided to try his hand as a freelance musician in the UK, soon learning the facts of musical life. 'I signed up for the Morgensterns list - but Julian was very frank that finding work was ultimately down to me!'

Wigley freelanced for two years, mixing playing with a second job as a door-to-door market researcher, simply to survive in financial terms. 'I was accepting dates for ridiculous sums of money, just to try and get known. But I look back now and wonder if I'd have achieved what I have without that experience. It made me more practical...made me think about how to present myself. In market research you have to sum up the person who answers the door very swiftly...and then frame the reasons why he or she should agree to give you half an hour. One day I knocked on a door and a Jehovah's Witness answered. It was difficult to know who was grilling whom!'

Wigley nonetheless plugged away at auditions with orchestras of varying standards before finally landing a trial with the Hallé, which ultimately led to a job. 'I loved Manchester....just the right size of place compared to the huge dimensions of London.'

Richard Knowles's introduction to the professional orchestra ranks came with the BBC Philharmonic, where he was engaged as a fixer after his time at the RNCM. 'A wonderful opportunity. At the college I'd been in an environment where so many students hadn't yet adjusted their sights to the realities of the musical world - they were still set on solo careers. If more of them had grasped the way the odds were stacked against them, they'd have made every use of the orchestral opportunities that came their way at the RNCM. At the BBC Phil we were receiving well over 150 applications for every rank-and-file vacancy. It made the whittling-down process so much easier if you could see that someone had plenty of orchestral experience already. The great thing about working with the BBC Philharmonic players was that they'd made this positive decision to be committed to orchestral work.

'I soon learned how thankless a task fixing can be, much as I enjoyed it. You're on duty 24/7. You field the calls at 7am on the day of a concert when players fall sick...and so on. But it was a great way to learn about orchestral life and players. You have to know the repertoire and be able to assess who's right for what job. You learn to weigh up awkward situations...for example, do you book a player who can manage all the rehearsals, or a better player who'd have to miss one?

'Diary services make life so much easier, of course, and inevitably I found myself more likely to book a player who was signed up to one. And knowing who had a mobile phone was a very important factor as well, especially when it came to contacting people abroad.'

Having found his niche with the Hallé, Richard Wigley soon set about exploring the realities of orchestral life in the 1990s. While relishing the highs of great evenings in the orchestra, he also became aware of how dispiriting it could be sitting in front of audiences who were '....only there for the big noise at the end of the piece.' Education work with the orchestra offered the chance to get away from the printed page and make real contact with people, '...while at the same time living on your wits.'

Eventually Wigley bcame the Hallé's education director, surrendering his place in the orchestra in the process. 'OK, it meant leaving the bassoon behind...but I knew the writing was on the wall when I played in a piece on an education tour and found myself just not being able to turn phrases the way I wanted.

'We did all kinds of cutting-edge stuff - a mega three-year community project on Manchester housing estates, for example, and other projects in places like Blackburn and Morecambe. However, at the same time we introduced some very traditional schools concerts. Some might see that as a cop-out...but 10,000 kids a year were hearing orchestral music. I was aware of how many adult supporters of the Hallé would tell me they first came to hear the orchestra when they were 10 or 11...and the experience had stuck.'

Following the Hallé's artistic and financial crisis of the late 1990s, Wigley emerged as Head of Artistic Planning. 'This was a huge thrill for me, embracing one year with Kent Nagano and then two with Mark Elder.' However, working in a small artistic circle was to prove a little rarified after the hands-on thrills of education work. When the job of Head of Performance and Programming came up at the RNCM, Wigley jumped at the chance to take head up a staff of 40. 'The people management side of things appealed...and the idea of managing an orchestra was starting to come into my mind. I was in charge of all the ways in which the RNCM was being used as a concert venue, including choosing performers, assessing budgets and so on. It required a whole range of skills.'

Richard Knowles's UK career was put on hold by the need to return to the Antipodes in order to be close to ailing parents. There was more fixing with the Melbourne City Orchestra, followed by the role of company manager at Sydney-based Opera Australia. 'What didn't the job involve?!!!' he says. 'I was on call the whole time. I had to know every member of a staff in excess of 500. I loved it, but it was all-consuming. After three years I decided I needed a life.

It was then that London started to exert a pull...the attraction of living in a place with such an extraordinary range of opera, concerts and theatrical performances going on every night. Nevertheless it was fate that took a proverbial hand when the job at the BBC SO came up and Knowles discovered that after six years away his previous time in the UK hadn't been forgotten.

He declares himself '....continually astonished at how much live music goes on in the UK, with so many people making a career from it. Amazing. And of course there's the extraordinary speed of British orchestral players when it comes to learning new repertoire.'

Richard Wigley says he could happily have stayed at the RNCM for the rest of his career, but when the job of general manager of the BBC Philharmonic came up just down the road, he knew he had to apply '...even though it was perhaps a year or two sooner than the ideal.'

What he inherits is a thriving orchestra. 'I'm only too aware of what Trevor Green and Brian Pidgeon have done to develop the profile of the BBC Philharmonic through the conductorship of Yan Pascal Tortelier and in the use of the Bridgewater Hall. The players themselves have a great attitude - a terrific work ethic, committed to giving of their absolute best in all they do. If they think that management is wrong about something they might well say so, but it won't for a second alter their utter commitment.

'As for plans....well, of course you put over your big ideas at the interview and then when you're appointed you have to go through a period of assessing things are from the inside. Comparing your dreams with reality! Hopefully you then come out the other side of that process with an enhanced vision and some strong ideas. But I think it's a matter of touching the tiller, not veering this way or that. What's clear is that the orchestra already has this wonderfully broad diet of studio work, concerts in the Bridgewater Hall, tours in the North-West, tours abroad. The repertoire is very broad, including concerts of opera...very strong in the post-Romantic area and developing in the classical repertoire. We have to ask whether the future lies just in classical music or do areas like jazz come into play, with a different audience? The education programme is well-established, to the challenge is to fully realise the potential, not least in the broadcasting context.'

At Opera Australia, Knowles was used to fire-fighting as a fact of life, reacting to situations and crises rather than feeling on top of things. Arriving at the BBC SO he has been grateful that despite the traditional BBC burden of meeting after meeting, '....there's more time to think, to consider policy, to look at where the orchestra is going...the larger issues. There are two immediate and major tasks...the finding of a new chief conductor and a leader for the orchestra. So it's an exciting time, with many possibilities to consider about the way the orchestra moves ahead.

'The BBC SO always has to find a healthy balance between the 'niche' work it does as a major provider for Radio 3 and broader repertoire. Contemporary music, as long as it's of good quality, will always be important to us of course, but it's so important to have a balanced diet...we'll never say goodbye to the Mozart Requiems and Mahler symphonies. We're lucky to have a very rounded diary...the studio work, the Proms, the series at the Barbican, the touring, and so on.'

Knowles is confident there will always be a demand for live music, but that doesn't mean the current number of symphony orchestras will survive or that their traditional role will be maintained. 'The worrying thing is that concertgoers seem less willing to commit themselves to subscription series. There are so many entertainment options on any one evening and late decisions can be made. Perhaps only a few orchestras - like the Vienna Philharmonic, perhaps - will have the allure that guarantees consistent support. As an administrator, you have to boil things down to basics. You're in the service-providing business. My job is to provide the best possible environment for live music to happen.'

'Every day, every orchestra has to justify its existence,' says Richard Wigley. 'If you can't do that...if you fall back on yet another Beethoven 5, you might as well give up. In business terms, the reasons why we do some of the things we do may be soft...but you can't quantify the experience that artistic adventure offers. What I sense in audiences is a move away from the idea that to appreciate music you have to have a certain skill/knowledge level. I think the audience base is broadening...it's less Žlite, with people enjoying the experience purely through listening. I think we have to take this on board and adapt our approach accordingly. You don't have to learn Italian to appreciate Italian culture.'

Wigley is clear that flexibility is the key for musicians in the future: 'The fact is that modern orchestral players are going to have a more fulfilling and enjoyable career if they explore their potential to the full...which applies to freelances as well, of course. Whether it's instrumental teaching, education work, chamber music or whatever, it makes for a more rounded career.'

And the option of going into music administration? Wigley is encouraged that these days RNCM students can look more realistically at music administration as a career choice. 'It's taken more seriously these days....and there are examples of people heading that way into full-time administrative jobs in music. Playing is not the only choice. In my sort of job, you need the ideas and creativity, the ability to find the money to make those ideas work, and the ability to marshal the people and the structures to bring it all to fruition.'

Knowles says that in his kind of job '....it's vital that you have a feeling for people. Having worked as a fixer I'd learned to interact with an awful lot of individual musicians. In my new job I'm line manager to 110 people...and you can't do that without having a feeling for people.

'You also have to accept that there can be a menial side to jobs like this. Some won't be able to handle that....the idea that you might have to give up an afternoon off because there's something wrong with a piano and it needs fixing before the concert tonight.

'The number one skill is to be able to prioritise. I opened a book when I arrived here in which I wrote down the jobs that needed doing. There are some things on the first page that I haven't got round to doing...and may never get round to doing. The point is that you have to deal with what's important now....and know what can be delayed, what goes on the backburner.'

Coming from outside the UK, Knowles is perhaps able to bring a certain detachment to his views on the health of British cultural life in the early 21st century. On the one hand, he says, the country has '...an incredible cultural fabric - but the question is how far it's embraced by the wider public. I see signs of hope in the numbers of younger people you see visiting Tate Modern, for example. I'm very impressed. Would a new theatre be being built in Newcastle if there's not a feeling that culture is important and will be supported. I think passion for the arts isn't always so obvious here - the British aren't always overt and demonstrative...but they do care. Maybe that's only really shown at crunch points, when there are real threats to culture.'

Andrew Green

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