“Music is life, and like it, inextinguishable,” Danish composer Carl Nielsen said of his fourth symphony. Music has the power to soothe the soul and lift the spirit – a therapeutic effect fully embraced by the 100 European medics who recently gathered in Gateshead.
Swapping their stethoscopes and surgical instruments for musical ones, the European Doctors Orchestra (EDO) celebrated its 20th anniversary at Gateshead’s iconic Glasshouse International Centre for Music.
Dave Thomson, who recently retired after 32 years as a Tyneside GP, is the current chair of the orchestra he first joined in 2007. He speaks to me amid final preparations for the big event, an afternoon of uplifting classical music for some 700 concert-goers which raised £15,000 for St Oswald’s Hospice.
“Music just enhances my life,” he says, a passion evident among the medical colleagues he welcomes to the North East. “I’ve had some great conversations about psychosomatic medicine with cellists from Germany and flute players from Holland.”
The idea of a European Doctors Orchestra originated with Miklos Pohl, a Hungarian-born plastic surgeon who proposed an orchestra that would offer medical musicians from across Europe the opportunity to get together for weekends of music-making. Gaining support from a small group of enthusiastic fellow doctors, the EDO’s inaugural event took place at Blackheath Halls in London in 2004.
It’s now grown into a full symphony orchestra, which performs at least two public charity concerts a year in venues across Europe. The standard is remarkably high, and the Gateshead performance took place under a professional conductor, Constança Simas. Over the last 20 years, more than 460 doctors from at least 23 countries have performed, with almost 50 medical specialities represented. In Gateshead there was also a 100-strong local health worker choir.
In that time the EDO has raised more than £250,000 for health-related charities and had a lot of fun along the way. Taking a break from intensive rehearsals in Gateshead, for example, Thomson lays on an evening of North East entertainment for his guests, including a Northumbrian piper and ceilidh band.
But the orchestra is also about improving the wellbeing of the medical workers themselves. “I suspect it wasn’t cool to say that 20 years ago when it was set up, but I think that is now an increasingly clear by-product,” says Thomson.
“Some of the healthcare workers need care… Healthcare systems are under pressure the world over and certainly in post-industrial countries, because we’ve got ageing populations and healthcare is very expensive.
“But I think particularly in the UK, certainly post-Covid, the whole population, they were not in a good way. They were unhappy and they took some of that out on healthcare. I think healthcare’s really taken a beating. Then we’ve had over 10 years of austerity and underfunding by previous administrations. It’s made for a very, very tough environment.”
Thomson is now casting his net wider, hoping to increase both the number of performances and the range of European countries represented.
While medics from 14 countries currently play in the orchestra, there is an over-representation of certain nations, especially the UK, Germany and Switzerland, while some others are poorly represented. The EDO is particularly interested in players from Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and the Baltic but welcomes all applications.
Thomson, who also plays with a doctors’ orchestra in Ireland, has extended an invitation to medics in Portugal and Spain who recently formed their own orchestra. He hopes to welcome several Iberian players at the EDO’s next performance in Frankfurt in May.
Jeremy Blackmore is a freelance music journalist and editor
