The Stage

John Gardner

Published Tuesday 17 January 2012 at 17:07 by Michael Quinn

John Gardner composed more than 300 works in every conceivable form, but he will be best remembered for just one: his carol Tomorrow is my Dancing Day, a perennial fixture in Christmas concerts since its premiere in 1965.

Born in Manchester on March 2, 1917, after graduating as an Oxford University organ scholar, he began teaching at Repton School, Derbyshire, before enlisting in the RAF in 1940. After war’s end, he joined the Royal Opera Company as a repetiteur, coming to prominence in 1951 when conductor John Barbirolli championed his First Symphony at the Cheltenham Festival.

Its success announced a fully formed talent with a gift for brilliant scoring framed within sophisticated structures, and was matched the following year by the oratorio Cantiones Sacrae (for Hereford’s Three Choirs Festival) and the ballet Reflection, at the Edinburgh Festival.

He combined teaching - at the Royal Academy of Music (1956-85), St Paul’s Girls’ School (1962-75), and Morley College, London (1965-69) - with composing, reworking A Scots Overture for the 1954 Proms, and, in 1957, his First Piano Concerto (Cheltenham Festival), Seven Songs (Birmingham), and the staging of his second opera, The Moon and Sixpence, at Sadler’s Wells.

Among other significant works are two symphonies, two operas, The Visitors (Aldeburgh, 1972) and Tobermory (written to mark the opening of the Sir Jack Lyons theatre at the Royal Academy of Music in 1976), and the cantatas The Ballad of the White Horse (1959) and A Burns Sequence (1993). Recent works included the Irish Suite (1997) and a concerto for bassoon (2005). Recordings of his music have begun to be released by Toccata Classics and Naxos.

Awarded a CBE in 1976, his death, at the age of 94, on December 12, 2011, has robbed British music of one of the last surviving members of a golden generation that included Walton, Vaughan Williams and Arthur Benjamin. He is survived by his three children.