‘I was suicidal aged 10. My only friend was Mozart’

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When Charles Hazlewood was an ambitious conductor in his twenties, he was sacked by his agent. “I got hauled up in front of the managing director and told, ‘We’re going to let you go because you’re a maverick,’” he says. The message was: “Either perfect your Bruckner or bugger off.” In some respects Hazlewood, now 57, toed the line. He spent decades conducting orchestras around the world as well as presenting on the BBC. Yet he remained most comfortable operating as “a little guerrilla force somewhat outside the mainframe”, and his ambition never dwindled. He founded an opera company in a South African township, joined forces with Deborah Meaden from Dragons’ Den to put on a Somerset festival called Play the Field and in 2011 he set up the Paraorchestra.
At that point there were no professional orchestras championing disabled musicians in the UK, even though government statistics suggest about one in five people in the country is disabled. The Paraorchestra led the way. It gave its first performance at the closing ceremony of the Paralympic Games in 2012. Hard to beat? This month the group comes to the BBC Proms for the first time, and Hazlewood hopes the audience will feel the same thrill the orchestra does. “It’s a real point of arrival,” he tells me when we meet in Bristol, where the orchestra is based. “I started this funny little thing however many years ago, and I didn’t think that at some point we were going to get welcomed in out of the cold and put in a Prom.”
The Paraorchestra’s debut will be on home ground at the newly revamped Bristol Beacon. Its Prom turns the orchestra inside out, almost literally. Instead of being on stage (“Nothing wrong with that, by the way,” says Hazlewood), the players will perform on the floor where the stalls seats usually are — on the move and from memory as well, with dancers added to the mix. There are gallery tickets for people who want to watch from the comfort of a seat, but the real draw is the opportunity to wander among the performers. “Music is made by humans for humans,” says Hazlewood, who hopes listeners will “get so close to the trumpeter you can see the sweat on their upper lip or see the enormous changes in the shape of the ribcage in a bassoonist when they go for a big musical entry.”
“The idea goes back to when I was about six,” he says. “My mum took me to see an orchestra rehearsing at Cheltenham Town Hall and she left me alone in the auditorium. The conductor paused and said, ‘Why don’t you come and sit among us while we rehearse?’ So I shyly stumbled on stage and sat down in the middle of the viola section. And, well, my life changed. I know that sounds extravagant, but it did; this incredible waterfall of harmony and rhythm coalescing over my head. Ever since I’ve been a professional musician I’ve been looking at ways to recreate that experience for anyone and everyone.”
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The Paraorchestra itself was inspired by personal experience. When Hazlewood’s daughter Eliza was born with cerebral palsy, his attention was drawn to the lack of opportunities for disabled musicians. “I had so many miles on the clock with orchestras and you just don’t find musicians with disabilities. Where’s their voice? Where’s their platform? That’s not just chronically unjust, it’s a waste of talent,” he says, in typically zealous fashion. “If an orchestra can’t hire certain people because the halls aren’t configured or they don’t have the right protocols in place, they are squandering talent all the time.”
Today Paraorchestra has about 50 musicians who identify as disabled, deaf or neurodivergent, playing alongside non-disabled musicians. Integration is key, Hazlewood says: “The idea of ghettos is failed logic. The long game was always finding a way of creating a really beautiful, balanced mix.” The band appears in leading concert halls but just as often outside them. It has put on a wind and brass band karaoke parade called Smoosh! on the streets of Weston-super-Mare and Bradford, and in 2016 became the first classical orchestra to play Glastonbury. Its repertoire ranges from Beethoven to Barry White, Schubert (on next year’s programme) to Shardlake (it recorded the soundtrack for the Disney+ series). And its aim is always artistic excellence. “We all strive for that,” says Siobhan Clough, assistant music director and violinist with the Paraorchestra, who notes that they still encounter the patronising idea that disabled musicians can’t be first-rate. “There’s a want to prove people wrong and to live up to the narrative we’re trying to sell.”
It’s a vision that convinced Arts Council England. The Paraorchestra was one of the success stories in the now notorious 2023-26 funding round, which made ruthless cuts elsewhere. The group’s annual pot increased from about £250,000 to nearly a million pounds. “It’s made such a difference to our projects and artistic output,” Clough says. “We’ve been able to take some of our bigger works out on tour to different parts of the world. It’s given our musicians opportunities for continued professional development and funding for software and technology. It’s a big win for everyone.”
Many of Paraorchestra’s musicians use assistive technology to make playing possible, and electronic instruments are standard. Clough tells me about Clarence Adoo, a former freelance trumpet player who was paralysed in an accident and now plays a breath-controlled electronic instrument called the Headspace. Meanwhile, Liza Bec plays the robo-recorder, which has metal strips designed to trigger different musical responses. Using instruments not often seen in a traditional orchestra opens up creative doors too. “Fundamentally, all this is about having fun and enjoying what you do,” Clough says.
A case in point is the Proms programme. Titled The Virtuous Circle, it weaves together new music by the composer Oliver Vibrans with Mozart’s Symphony No 40. “We have very modern electronic elements in the orchestra,” Vibrans tells me, explaining that he sees his music as being in dialogue with Mozart. “I’ve done a lot of experiments with taking recordings of the Mozart and manipulating the music with electronics, then orchestrating the results as a way to create that dialogue.”
Behind the choice of Mozart’s darkly hued symphony lies a horrific, painful story. In 2021 Hazlewood publicly disclosed he had been sexually abused as a child, by men who had, he tells me, “a monster within”. “I was a very traumatised child and badly damaged,” he says. He is learning to manage the impact, but says it is like scar tissue: “It never goes away.” Mozart has been, he says, his constant ally. “I got sent to a boarding school and I was suicidal aged ten. My only friend was Mozart and the Walkman in my dormitory bed under the covers in the middle of the night. There’s a humanity to him, a kindness, a depth, a lack of pomposity and grandstanding.”
But while that’s the backstory, that’s not what Hazlewood wants the audience to take from the Paraorchestra Prom. “Yes, of course Mozart is front and centre, but it’s about how he uses the materials and what that says about humanity,” Hazlewood says. Clough takes up the baton. “I guess the goal is that people experience a wonderful, brilliant piece of art. They get to see a different way of creating art, and experienced musicians who do absolutely everything in lots of different ways. They’ll learn something new.”The Paraorchestra performs at Bristol Beacon on August 24 (bbc.co.uk/proms). It performs Gorecki at the Royal Festival Hall on September 29