For many of the greatest singers of the last century, Martin Isepp was, professionally speaking, ‘the other half’, accompanying great names such as Janet Baker, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Elisabeth Soderstrom, Hughes Cuenod and Jessye Norman at the piano with both the virtuosity of a soloist and sensitivity of a therapist.
Younger singers benefitted, too, from one of the most professionally punctilious and personally amiable of emigre talents to emerge in and define British music life in the immediate post-Second World War era, as a result of his four decade long association with Glyndebourne Opera, latterly as its head of music from 1978-93, and as head of music studies at the National Opera Studio from 1978-95.
In North America, he held teaching posts at New York’s Juilliard School and at Alberta’s Banff Centre.
Born in Vienna on September 30, 1930, to a noted artist father and singing teacher mother (who was related to Mahler and Freud), he arrived in the UK at the age of seven when his Jewish parents fled Nazi persecution at home. After studies at the Royal College of Music, he joined the English Opera Group and, in 1957, Glyndebourne Festival Opera.
Away from the piano, he enjoyed a parallel career as a well-respected conductor, taking the podium at the Metropolitan Opera and with Glyndebourne, both in its Suffolk home and on tour.
He died, aged 81, on December 25, 2011, and is survived by his wife and two sons.
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