Michael Hext

Michael Hext: First Name on a List That Never Stops Growing

In 1978, when BBC producers invented a national contest to find Britain's most gifted young classical musician, nobody knew what the winning instrument would even be. A seventeen-year-old trombonist from Bedford settled the question, and Michael Hext's name has opened every retrospective of the competition ever since.

A Schoolboy Answers an Open Question

Hext was educated at Bedford Modern School before going on to study at the Royal College of Music under John Iveson, one of the era's most respected trombone teachers and a former member of the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble. The trombone was, and largely remains, an unglamorous instrument in the concerto repertoire — orchestral, choral, rarely a solo showpiece — which made Hext's victory at the inaugural BBC Young Musician of the Year in 1978 an unlikely outcome. There was no established template for what a "young musician" champion should sound like. Hext supplied one.

Building a Career on Orchestral Chairs

Rather than chase a solo career, Hext did what most brass players of real ability do: he climbed the ladder of principal chairs in Britain's major orchestras. In 1983 he became Principal Trombone of the Hallé Orchestra, and a year later moved to the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the same role, a post he held for nine years. He later took the principal trombone chair with the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, moving to sub-principal there in 2000 — a shift that reflects the ordinary arc of an orchestral career rather than any decline, since sub-principal players often specialize in different repertoire demands within the section.

Alongside the orchestral work, Hext performed with the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble, the pre-eminent British brass group of the late twentieth century and the direct professional lineage of his own teacher, and toured with the European Union Youth Orchestra under Claudio Abbado, one of the most sought-after conducting posts a young player could land. He appeared as a recitalist at Wigmore Hall, the Royal Festival Hall, and the Queen Elizabeth Hall — the three venues that make up the backbone of London's serious chamber and orchestral recital circuit.

Widening the Repertoire

One of Hext's lasting practical contributions to his instrument was commissioning a trombone concerto from the British composer Edward Gregson, later published by Novello. Concert trombone repertoire is thin compared with that of the violin or piano, and every new concerto commissioned by a serious player adds permanently to what the next generation can perform and record.

Teaching

Hext went on to hold professorships in trombone at both the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music — the two conservatoires that dominate London's classical training pipeline — meaning that decades after his own competition win, he was training the trombonists competing to inherit his title.

Why Michael Is Called a Genius

"Genius" is a loaded word to hang on Hext, and the available record does not support it in the intellectual or creative sense the word implies for a composer or an inventor. What Hext possesses, by every account of his career, is virtuosity: the physical and interpretive command of a notoriously unforgiving instrument, refined under one of Britain's leading pedagogues and then sustained across four decades in some of the country's most demanding orchestral chairs. Winning the very first BBC Young Musician competition took nerve as much as talent — there was no winning formula to study, no back catalogue of trombone triumphs to draw on. That the description is craft rather than genius does not diminish it. Principal trombone in the London Philharmonic Orchestra for nine years, and in the Royal Opera House orchestra beyond that, are jobs held by a small handful of people in the country at any one time, and they are held through relentless consistency under pressure rather than flashes of inspiration. If there is a case for the word "genius" here, it rests on the audacity of an unranked, unprecedented seventeen-year-old convincing a panel of adjudicators — and a first-time television audience — that his own instrument, rarely heard as a soloist, belonged at the top of a brand-new national competition. The honest counter-case is that no obituarist or biographer has attached the word to him at all; this is a working orchestral musician's career, admirable for its longevity and standards rather than for any singular flash of invention.

Legacy

Hext's real legacy is structural rather than sonic. He is the answer to the perennial pub-quiz question about who won BBC Young Musician first, but more importantly he is proof that the competition, from its very first year, could reward an instrument nobody expected. Every trombonist who has since reached the final — including a future occupant of the same title, Peter Moore, thirty years later — plays in a competition whose credibility began with Michael Hext.