Lennox Berkeley

Good work for examinations and recitals by an important British composer. Duration c.6'. AMEB (Australian Syllabus) 2004. Programme notes as follows:Lennox Berkeley was born in 1903 and died in 1989. After reading modern languages at Oxford he had no intention of becoming a composer until he met Ravel in 1926 who encouraged him to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. He stayed in Paris until 1932 developing his own musical language. In 1936 after the death of his mother he went to Barcelona for the International Society for Contemporary Music festival where he met Benjamin Britten. The two lived together at Snape in Suffolk for a while until the outbreak ofwar before Berkeley moved back to London to work for the BBC. Here he met his future wife Freda Bernstein. He taught at the Royal Academy of Music in London from 1946 until 1968 where his pupils included Richard Rodney Bennett Nicholas Maw and John Tavener among others. He was knighted in 1974. In early February 1971 I was playing in a concert at St. John's Smith Square London then only relatively recently restored as a superb venue for music. The programme which I believe was being broadcast included Berkeley's Serenade Op.12. It was a work I had always enjoyed playing and was standard string orchestra repertoire at the time. There was initially no platform at St. John's and so the audience sat virtually on top of the performers. So close were they on this occasion that I had to ask for a little more room in order to play. At the end of the piece the orchestra acknowledged the applause and the gentleman who I had all but practically decapitated with my over-enthusiastic playing stood up and took a bow. I had been almost playing in Lennox Berkeley's lap! The opportunity was too good to miss and I wasted little time in introducing myself. Mr Berkeley said that he had been fascinated by my playing and asked me to write to him about a possible commission.This I did on 6 February mentioning that