Obituary: Michael Pilkington

THE CHURCH TIMES, 17 JANUARY 2025

Garry Humphreys writes:

ENGLISH SONG was the specialisation of Michael Pilkington, who has died, aged 96, but one of his most significant contributions to the world of professional and amateur music-making was to the New Novello Choral Edition, which brought into line with modern scholarship at the end of the 20th century editions of the choral classics that had remained in use since Victorian times and were long past their sell-by dates.

Mendelssohn’s Elijah is a very good example: the whole story is rather complex, though explained in Pilkington’s Preface; but, for example, he returns to Mendelssohn’s original careful underlay of English words rather than the Victorian editor’s adaptation of English words to the German notes and rhythms. Mendelssohn also prepared his own piano part for the vocal score — again largely abandoned in later editions — which Pilkington adopted. Of course, as editor, he was aware of all existing relevant editions, while keeping Mendelssohn’s intentions in mind, including groupings of movements and pauses in between. The result has been a fresher and more dynamic work, without the religiosity and longueurs that long infected performances in Britain. This is just one example, others including Messiah, The Creation, Verdi’s Requiem, and even Maunder’s From Olivet to Calvary. I used to tease him that he was the new Ebenezer Prout.

Michael was perhaps best-known for his editions of English songs and guides to the repertoire, which, as well as recording the technical details, attempted to encapsulate the meanings of the songs and suggestions for interpretation. These range from lute songs to composers such as Peter Warlock (a particular interest) and Ian Venables. I had the privilege and pleasure of working with him as joint editor of A Century of English Song, the ongoing series from the Association of English Singers and Speakers, for which I could always rely on him for sound advice and inspiration.

Michael Pilkington was born in Pretoria, South Africa, of British parents, and attended Marlborough College, St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, and the Guildhall School of Music, where he gained the LGSM in piano teaching and LRAM in piano accompaniment. He began as a freelance accompanist, coach, and répétiteur, working with the Park Lane Group, the New Opera Company, and the French song and opera classes at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and, subsequently, with Walter Gore’s London Ballet, where he arranged and conducted.

His greatest single contribution at the Guildhall was his English Song Class, which he taught for 30 years; many future distinguished names were among his students. He was awarded a Fellowship by the School in 1972. He conducted many English Song workshops at universities in the US (1980-87), and, after retirement, associated himself with various musical organisations. He conducted, played the organ, adjudicated singing competitions, and wrote reviews, alongside producing printed scores and parts for various professional ensembles, which he continued to do up until his death.

Largely unknown by the public, his work enabled both professional and amateur performers to perform or read about music with the benefit of an accessible and agreeable commentator and guide.

Frank Field (1942-2024)

 

A Man of Intelligence, Integrity

and Principle

R.I.P.

Ronald Blythe

There have been so many deaths of people about whom I could write, but did not want to turn this blog into an obituary column! However, news of the death yesterday of Ronald Blythe prompts me at least to refer anyone reading this to the wonderful obituary in the Guardian by Patrick Barkham, at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jan/15/ronald-blythe-obituary

I missed Akenfield when it came out in 1969 but, of course, since moving to Suffolk it has become of particular interest. I first came to notice and appreciate Ronnie’s work when I started to subscribe to the Church Times, as the only way of getting a copy of my own reviews when I started writing for it, and read – usually before anything else – his weekly back-page column, ‘Word from Wormingford’, which I invariably enjoyed. I once wrote to tell him so, and received a lovely reply. His memories of working for Britten and Pears were also very fascinating, especially as told in his book The Time by the Sea (2013). He did well to reach his centenary while still living independently at home.

I never met him, but I thank him for his wonderful evocations of Suffolk life, never sentimental, but always with the ring of truth. May he rest in peace and rise in glory!

Scottish violinist Daphne Godson has died aged 90

The musician and teacher performed in several ensembles and taught at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music

The Strad, 2 September 2022

One of Scotland’s most accomplished violinists, Daphne Godson has died aged 90. Over her long playing career she was associated with ensembles such as the Scottish Baroque Ensemble, the Berenicia Ensemble, the Pegasus Trio, Merlyn Trio and the Scottish Early Music Consort.

Born in 1932 in Edinburgh, Godson attended George Watson’s Ladies’ College and the Waddell School of Music. One of her earliest notices appeared in The Scotsman in March 1950 when she was only 18, following a Saltire Society recital at Gladstone’s Land in Edinburgh. The concert also featured the counter-tenor George Rizza (later prominent in the world of music publishing). The reviewer noted that Godson ‘had, besides her beautiful tone, a confidence and a maturity about her playing that was quite exceptional’. A solo piece by Kreisler was ‘a tour de force, but it was her grasp of the implications of [Dowland’s] “Go, nightly cares” which was the more remarkable’. On the same page of the same issue a review of the Waddell Junior Orchestra remarks that Daphne Godson, among others, ‘revealed more than latent musicianship’.

She attended the Royal Academy of Music in London and, after being awarded a Belgian State Scholarship in 1954, went on to study at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels with the Hungarian-born violinist André Gertler (who also taught André Rieu). In 1957 she won first prize in the international violin competition held during the Darmstadt Festival of Contemporary Music.

The following year, 1958, she won a consolation prize of 2,000 Zloty in the third International Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition in Poznań, Poland, one of five candidates representing Britain. Among the judges were David Oistrakh, Max Rostal and Gioconda de Vito.

Returning to Scotland she was active as a solo violinist and as a member of Edinburgh Barock, the Merlyn Trio, the Pegasus Trio and the Bernicia Ensemble, recording Rameau’s Pièces de Clavecin en Concert for Saga in 1966 and contributing to the 18th-century volume (‘Baroque and Classical Scotland’) of the LP series A History of Scottish Music (Scottish Records, 1972) with fellow violinist Leonard Friedman. There were also performances and recordings with the Scottish Baroque Ensemble – directed by Friedman – and with the Scottish Early Music Consort (Mary's Music: Songs and Dances from the Time of Mary, Queen of Scots; Chandos, 1984). In 1997 she was violinist and leader on the CD The Big Birl (Lismore Recordings), original compositions by Robert Mathieson, Pipe Major of the Shotts and Dykehead Caledonia Pipe Band.

After a recital in Glasgow with her pianist partner Audrey Innes in April 1962, Anthony Hedges commented in the Musical Times that they, ‘both as a team and as individuals, deserve to be widely heard outside Scotland. Each couples a great sense of artistry with admirable technical accomplishment; each has an ardent musical personality that communicates enthusiasm and enjoyment to the listener.’ In May 1962 she appeared at London’s Wigmore Hall in one of the Incorporated Society of Musicians’ Young Artists’ Recitals.

Daphne Godson was also principal of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (1974–76) and leader of the Edinburgh Bach Players, and appeared as a soloist with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Scottish National Orchestra and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.  From 1964 she also taught at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and at the Broughton High School Special Music Unit.

An interest in early music (she was also an accomplished rebec player) did not preclude composers of other periods, including Hans Gál, whose Concertino for violin and strings she played at Gateshead in 1963 (‘in which she showed technical mastery, beauty of tone, and maturity of interpretation’, according to the composer Arthur Milner, who reviewed it in the Newcastle Journal), Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (with the Bernicia Ensemble, Aberdeen, 1968), and Kenneth Leighton, at whose memorial concert she played in 1989 – the penultimate of 18 appearances she made at the Edinburgh University Reid Concerts series between 1959 and 1999. She also played in the University of Glasgow’s McEwen Memorial Concerts of Scottish Chamber Music.

There were more than 25 radio broadcasts between 1959 and 2004, including music by Hans Gál, Kenneth Leighton, Robin Orr and John Casken; and she was the violinist in a broadcast of David Greig’s play, Dr Korczak’s Example, first broadcast in 2004 and repeated as recently as this year on BBC Radio 4 Extra.

Among her avocations were hillwalking, reading and dressmaking. She could have had an international career, but said she was ‘perfectly happy in Scotland’.

© GARRY HUMPHREYS, 2022

Edith Muriel Daphne Godson, violinist and teacher; born Edinburgh, 16 March 1932; died Edinburgh 15 August 2022

MARTIN HOW

This obituary was originally written as an ‘advance’ for The Independent before it became wholly digital and with a different policy for obituaries. So it was never published and is presented here in the format adopted by The Independent at the time.

Martin How was a brilliant organist and inspirational choir trainer who spent the greater part of his career in the service of the Royal School of Church Music, as headquarters choirmaster at Addington Palace and as initiator of the Chorister Training Scheme, now adopted in various forms throughout the world. He inaugurated the RSCM Cathedral Singers, which sang at Canterbury Cathedral and elsewhere and frequently broadcast on the BBC’s Choral Evensong, and was an RSCM Commissioner, travelling widely at home and abroad to conduct courses, deliver lectures and adjudicate at competitions.

He was born in Liverpool in 1931, the son of John How, a clergyman who, when Martin was six, and after a period in Brighton, became primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, moving to Glasgow, where How spent most of his childhood. A music scholar at Repton School, then organ scholar of Clare College, Cambridge, he ran the college’s chapel choir of boys and adults, read music and theology and only narrowly missed being awarded a Blue for cross-country running, an activity he kept up well into his time at Addington.

After university he spent one term as a student at the RSCM when it was still at Canterbury, prior to a National Service commission in the Royal Army Service Corps for two years, where he claims that the experience was invaluable in his future career! In January 1955 he returned to the RSCM – now at Addington Palace near Croydon, former summer residence of the archbishops of Canterbury – intent on resuming his studies, but on 28 April the RSCM’s records state: “Mr M. J. R. How appointed H.Q. choirmaster”, a post he took up the following September in succession to Hubert Crook. From 1961-4 he was organist of Grimsby parish church – at the time the only parish church in England to have its own choir school – together with teaching and other musical activities, but soon returned to his former RSCM post and as Headquarters Commissioner. From 1971 until 1992 he was Commissioner for the South, then worked part-time as a Special Adviser, finally retiring in April 1994, but continuing to live in South Croydon and maintaining links with the music of Croydon Minster as Organist Laureate.

In the 1993 New Year’s Honours List he was appointed MBE “for services to church music”, and his many admirers might have felt that this was a somewhat paltry reflection of the impact and influence he had on the thousands from Britain and abroad who met him and worked with him. Perhaps his innate modesty worked against him in an age of celebrity overreaction, even in 1993.

Martin How’s natural charm and seemingly inexhaustible cheerfulness inspired his choristers as much as musical ability. At a reunion at Addington in 2013, Peter Hood, head chorister in 1963 when the college was still residential, recalled: “Martin’s secret was that he could instil discipline and we all had the greatest respect for him but he made it all such fun. I don’t think we necessarily appreciated what a wonderful thing it was that we were involved in; we just knew that we loved it and we enjoyed it. Addington Palace became our spiritual home and Mr How became our father figure and he constructed an enormous family for us.”

Martin How’s name is also familiar beyond Addington because so much of the music he composed and edited, which therefore bears his name, has a worldwide appeal – and worldwide sales. As a practising musician his aim as a composer had always been to provide practical music, appropriate to circumstances, but challenging for performers to achieve just that little bit more than perhaps they thought they could. So much of it reflects his own personal charm and modesty, but can express strong views and feelings too. As well as anthems and service settings, he wrote solo organ music, including an Elegy in memory of Dr Gerald Knight – director of the RSCM during much of How’s time there – and four sets of Pieces for Organ. Ever mindful that the RSCM’s membership includes choirs of all shapes, sizes and abilities, he also gave special attention to producing good music for limited choral resources.

A skilled accompanist, he was accompanist to the (then) Choirboy of the Year competition organized by the RSCM (sponsored by Rediffusion television) from the first competition in 1975 until 1989; in 1992 it combined with the BBC Choirgirl of the Year competition that had run concurrently since 1986, though from 1989 the RSCM competition had also included girls.

GARRY HUMPHREYS

Martin John Richard How, church musician: born Liverpool 3 April 1931; educated at Repton School, Clare College Cambridge (organ scholar), Trinity College London and the Royal School of Church Music; At RSCM: Headquarters Choirmaster 1955-1961 and 1968-70, Headquarters Commissioner 1964-7 and 1970-1, Commissioner for the South 1971-92, Special Adviser 1992-4; organist of Grimsby Parish Church 1961-4; Organist Laureate of Croydon Minster 1994-[year of death]; MBE 1993; died 25 July 2022.

DAVID MICHELL, 1929-2022

 

David and I were very close at one time – we became friends originally as fellow members of the Hampstead Choral Society which I joined within a week of coming to London for library school (North-Western Polytechnic) in January 1967. I think it was at my second rehearsal that he chatted to me, after which we did so many things together: outings (the destination usually to include a cathedral and a second-hand bookshop), joining the Elgar Society London Branch on its formation, joining the Southwark Cathedral Choir. I remember a visit to Rochester where the discovery of a shop with a large collection of 78s took precedence over Evensong in the cathedral – one of the objects of the visit – which he missed and I attended alone.

David was best man at my first wedding. And, of course, it was through David that I met Robert Tucker. (David was quite alarmed to discover that everyone he met seemed to be a librarian!) I'm afraid that we eventually drifted apart and I always felt guilty about it (Robert kept in touch with him), but I felt I had outgrown the friendship, though we still exchanged Christmas cards. I hope he made appropriate arrangements for the disposal of his wonderful collection of recordings and other memorabilia, which could be claimed as of national importance. I once met his brother, who was at St Thomas’s Hospital when I visited David, who was a patient there in the 1970s.

Robert says that, despite his infirmities, David sounded quite unchanged on the telephone, and I can imagine his frustration at having his freedom curtailed so irrevocably. I could have provided the stimulating conversation Andrew Neill says David craved – which makes me feel even more guilty – but the trouble was that David didn’t want anything to change, and was very put out when I (and I think Robert too) got married and, of course, made changes to our lives. He wasn’t a misogynist or (so far as I am aware) homosexual, but just felt that women were a bit of an irrelevance in his life.

I loved his dry sense of humour, though this could sometimes be hurtful or embarrassing: I remember we were in a cafe near Southwark Cathedral, probably when we both sang in the Cathedral choir, and a poor old down-and-out came up to him saying ‘Can you help me, sir?’ to which he replied, rather sharply: ‘No! No one can.’ I remember Ron Taylor complaining that once when David visited him he started picking up and reading letters that were lying around. There was one occasion when, on Christmas Day, he missed the only bus to Southwark (when there were buses on Christmas Day!) for the cathedral services (and presumably taxis were completely booked up or unaffordable) and so, unexpectedly, had to spend the day at home, probably lunching on beans on toast (lunch would have been provided at Southwark, where the choir was also required for Evensong); on hearing this I invited him to Kennington (where I then lived – by then I had moved on from Southwark to St George’s Hanover Square) on Boxing Day for a repeat Christmas lunch when he also had the challenge of entertaining my mother, who had come from Nottingham for the occasion. As my best man (at St George’s), he was a bundle of nerves and, the day before, had to be sent home by my prospective mother-in-law to prevent him driving everyone mad! As I think we said at the time, anyone would have thought that he was the one getting married! Everything was fine on the day, but Janet did not help by telling him (teasingly) that if the groom fails to turn up the best man has to marry the bride!

He had a great love of names: in the musical world Graupner (composer) and Bronsgeest (singer) amused him; it was David who named Wulstan Atkins (with his utter devotion to Elgar) as ‘the Thirteenth Apostle’ (also, ‘Woolsack’). Other Elgarians earned similar epithets (no names no pack drill). We once visited (I think on a dull November day, having travelled by train, including an excellent lunch on board – those were the days! – and walking from Worcester to Lower Broadheath) the Elgar Birthplace, met by Alan Webb and – sworn to secrecy – CAKE provided by Mrs Webb! And there was that instantly recognizable cough that punctuated many a London Branch talk. He was a great friend (and fellow Cornishman) of Bill Harris (William Lewarne Harris), composer, whom I also got to know, the baritone Donald Francke, and of course Inglis Gundry. We were also frequent visitors to William Reeves, near him in south London, for second-hand books and music and I remember hesitating to spend the then considerable sum of £3. 10s. on the two volumes of Percy Scholes’s The Mirror of Music (I succumbed. They sell for up to £90 the pair now!). I remember my first wife Janet commenting on how his flat was surprisingly (for a bachelor!) comfortable and ‘chintzy’. There was also the Block instrument, indicating ‘train on line’ when the doorbell was rung. Did you ever notice that, though tall, he had very small feet?

The Hampstead Choral Society often sang in Promenade Concerts, usually as part of a vast composite choir: we sang in the Beethoven Choral Symphony conducted by Boult in place of Malcolm Sargent who was mortally ill. We thought how slow the scherzo was, until we heard the broadcast repeat and realized it was spot-on, the more particular pointing of the rhythm giving far more impetus than mere speed; another year we sang in Belshazzar’s Feast (David loved the alternative German title that then appeared in the vocal score: Belsazers Gastmahl!), conducted by John Pritchard with a choir of thousands; so many in fact that we planned, when they all shouted ‘Slain!’, to shout ‘Shit!’, but I can’t remember whether we did. David later joined the London Philharmonic Choir.

He often played recordings down the telephone when talking to me: I remember in particular the Eugene Goossens recording of the 1920 revision of the Vaughan Williams London Symphony and comparing it with the published score. He recalled, as a very young man, meeting Vaughan Williams (I think in Cornwall) and discussing a piece for which not all instruments were available locally (unfortunately I can’t now remember what the piece was) and RVW suggesting ‘You could try saxophones’, of which there was no shortage in the dance bands of the local seaside hotels at the time! David also recalled as a child witnessing the Crystal Palace fire (1936), which could be seen from the road where they lived.

This has been mostly about music, but David's interest in railways was significant too (I think he was in ‘planning’ at Waterloo when I first knew him) and he relished a recording of steam locomotives tackling the Lickey Incline. He was also a Territorial and, in our early days, was occasionally called for periodic training sessions; I think he may have been awarded the TD (Territorial Decoration).

As for the pronunciation of his name, it was definitely ‘Mitchell’, despite the actor Keith Michell pronouncing it ‘Meeshell’. I remember Robert Tong ringing me up about a concert at Queen Mary College that he was conducting and in which David was interested and Tong asking if my friend Michelle was coming – my first reaction was that I didn’t know any girl called Michelle!

Finally, as David tended to collect friends who were younger than himself, I always used to refer to him, teasingly, but quite truthfully, as ‘my oldest friend in London in both senses of the word’. (Actually John Bishop and Betty Roe probably also qualified but it was a pity to spoil the joke!) David was quite sensitive about his age (compared with us) though he would only have been in his 30s/40s at the time.

 

NIGEL ROGERS (1935-2022)

Nigel Rogers the great baroque tenor died on 19 January, aged 86.

In the 1970s, when I first heard him, his command of the baroque coloratura was unique and absolutely stunning. Everyone can do it now - though no one does it quite as well as him - but in those days the audiences were literally on the edge of their seats in amazement. It’s still thrilling to hear and, mercifully, well preserved on record.

He was particularly inspired by the technique of the Indian classical singer Bhimsen Joshi, though he once told me he had never actually met him, contradicting the well-known story that Nigel had heard him singing and went up to him and asked ‘Tell me how you do that’! He was a superb linguist which made his performances in German, Italian and French (as well as English) so convincing.

Two bits of trivia: he sings the role of Maintop in Britten’s Billy Budd, rather hauntingly, in the recording (and BBC Television relay, now on YouTube) with Pears, Shirley-Quirk, Peter Glossop, etc.; and is also in the choir as a choral scholar in the first television relay of the Service of Nine Lessons and carols from King’s College, Cambridge, in 1954 – also on YouTube. (He was also Mosbie, Alice Arden's lover, in the premiere of Alexander Goehr's Arden Must Die in 1974.) 

I was privileged to have some lessons with him in the 1970s, but never even remotely succeeded in approaching his vocal skills in the baroque repertoire (and in any case, he insisted I was really a tenor, not a baritone!). I know it’s a tired old cliché, but he really was unique!

 

DR FRANCIS JACKSON

THE CHURCH TIMES, 21 JANUARY 2022

Garry Humphreys writes: DR FRANCIS JACKSON, who has died, aged 104, was for 37 years, from 1946 to 1982, Organist and Master of the Music at York Minster; but he was in fact associated with the Minster for most of his life. In 1929, aged 12, he became a chorister under the legendary Sir Edward Bairstow — “the rudest man in Yorkshire”, according to some — whose biography Jackson was to publish in 1996. He also recorded his complete organ works, despite Bairstow’s aversion to the gramophone.

Jackson was an accomplished writer with a delightful style and dry humour, and a keen observer of those around him, as he revealed in his autobiography, Music for a Long While (adapting the title of Purcell’s famous song), published in 2013, when he was 96. It might be criticised for going into too much detail, but it is this detail that makes it such an illuminating account of a world now largely lost.

He brings a more personal view of Bairstow than in his formal biography, and one of the highlights of the book is his charming description of a visit in August 1951 to the composer Ravel’s house at Montfort l’Amaury, during a holiday in France. Ravel’s housekeeper Madame Reveleau was still in residence. “It was a remarkable thing to meet her who had been in such close touch with him,” he wrote; “as remarkable as seeing the things he had had around him, exactly as he had left them.”

He had admired Ravel and Debussy from a very young age and, as an organist, had promoted in his recitals the music of Franck, Vierne, Widor, and Dupré.

Francis Alan Jackson was born at Malton, 18 miles north-east of York, in 1917. His mother was a Suddaby — he was second cousin to the soprano Elsie Suddaby, one of the original dedicatees of Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music — and Francis could not remember being unable to play the piano. The family were also enthusiastic listeners to gramophone records.

“I was born with a natural talent,” Jackson wrote; “and working at it and developing it was pretty well unalloyed pleasure.”

After singing in the choir of Malton Parish Church, he went at 12 to be a chorister at York Minster. Under Bairstow’s guidance, he recalled, “my horizons were widened and I learned that music was not just an exercise merely to be got through but rather a natural expression of one’s very being . . . Bairstow . . . made music alive and, above all, enjoyable and fulfilling . . . And music had to be beautiful.”

Jackson left school at 15, became organist of Malton at 16, and from 1933 was a full-time student with Bairstow; in 1937, he received the degree of Bachelor of Music from Durham University (his doctorate followed in 1957). He succeeded Bairstow at the Minster in 1946.

The transition was a smooth one, but Jackson’s sympathies were much wider than his predecessor’s; for, as a composer, he wrote not only church music, but a symphony, an organ concerto, chamber music, songs, and incidental music for plays. Among his more unusual compositions are two monodramas with narrator, Daniel in Babylon (1962, to celebrate the consecration of Coventry Ca­thedral) and A Time of Fire (1967, for the Norwich and Norfolk Triennial Festival). Both were written in collaboration with the actor-dramatist John Stuart Anderson.

Jackson regarded “Tree at my window” as his best song, setting the poem by Robert Frost. It was written during the Second World War when he was serving with the 9th Lancers in 1942 in the desert campaign near Tobruk. He remembered writing it “in my tent by the light of an oil lamp made from a cigarette tin. There is a bit where the wind blows in the song, and it was actually blowing quite a gale in the desert at the time. I know I kept wondering if the tent was going to fly off.”

Francis Jackson was an outstanding organist — one of the foremost recitalists of his generation — in demand throughout the world; he also acted as adviser to many churches and cathedrals considering organ rebuilds. He was responsible for the rehabilitation of the “Toccata” from Widor’s Fifth Symphony by using it instead of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” at the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Kent in York Minster in 1961, preferring a genuine composition for organ to a hackneyed arrangement of an orchestral piece. He served as President of the Royal College of Organists from 1972 to 1974.

As well as his widely used settings of the Canticles in G (“Me in G”, as he used to call them), he wrote a hymn tune called East Acklam, after the village where he lived, as an alternative to Ar Hyd y Nos for “God that madest earth and heaven” for an Old Choristers’ reunion in 1957. But it was not until the Methodist hymnwriter Fred Pratt Green wrote “For the fruits of his creation” for it in 1970, that it achieved great popularity and wide use as a harvest hymn of freshness and realism.

His colleague Simon Lindley, organist of Leeds Parish Church, sums him up: “The affection in which FJ is held by so many throughout the world stems not only from his professional distinction and musical brilliance but also from a disarmingly modest personality — always big-hearted and immensely caring of his fellow men.”

Francis Jackson never really retired, spending his latter years “composing and giving organ recitals” — clearly an effective recipe for longevity. He was appointed OBE for services to music in 1978; the CBE followed in 2007. He died peacefully on 10 January in a care home in York, surrounded by his family. He leaves three children, Alice, William, and Edward.

 

 Jill Anderson

So sorry to hear this morning that Jill Anderson – BBC Radio Three announcer – has died from cancer. I first met her when she was a student at the Royal College of Music in the 1970s and we both sang for Denys Darlow in the Tilford Bach Festival Choir.  I last saw her at Martha Knight’s funeral – which I’m surprised to realize was in 2008, thirteen years ago! – where she contributed a reading, but we kept in touch with occasional e-mails. However, as is so often the case, despite living quite close to each other in north London, we never got round to accepting her open invitation to tea, and now it’s too late (and we no longer live in London).

She was an excellent announcer – always preferring the old-fashioned term to the currently-fashionable ‘presenter’ – and unlike so many over-excitable, personality-conscious broadcasters on the air today – displayed a calm, authoritative, but friendly approach, which I’m sure had many grateful admirers. She was also an excellent player and teacher of the clarinet, and a thoroughly nice person.

May she rest in peace and rise in glory.

Death of Jan Krenz

The Polish conductor Jan Krenz died yesterday, 15 September, aged 94. I heard him on 19 October 1962 conducting the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra at the Nottingham Albert Hall. The programme began with Michal Spisak’s Concerto Giocoso (1956), followed by Walk to the Paradise Garden (Delius), Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (Rakhmaninov – soloist Wladyslaw Kedra), and Tchaikowsky’s Fourth Symphony; all superbly played, and very exciting for a sixteen year old schoolboy only in his second season of serious classical concert-going. (Nearly sixty years later, I’ve never lost that initial excitement, I’m glad to say!) And a great occasion for Nottingham with its large Polish community, which turned out in force. (Many had served in the Polish Air Force during the War, based in Nottinghamshire, and had stayed on and married local girls.) Earlier in the year the Czech Philharmonic had come, conducted by Karel Ancerl, and the following February we were to hear the Hungarian State Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gyula Nemeth. I note from the programmes that all three concerts were promoted by the City of Nottingham Corporation, in association with Borsdorf and Company. Those were the days!