Giles was a welcome regular at concerts of British and contemporary music. Wearing his Arthur Bliss Society hat, Giles once told me that when Bliss’s forty-minute Metamorphic Variations was premiered (1973, LSO/Vernon Handley, Fairfield Halls, Croydon) it had to be cut due to lack of rehearsal time. The concert (live on BBC Radio 3) also included Stokowski conducting Tchaikovsky 6, who refused to give up any of his rehearsal allocation (maybe he needed the time to tinker with what Tchaikovsky had written) even when asked by his fellow conductor. That premiere performance was subsequently issued on a BBC CD, and I believe Barry Wordsworth’s Nimbus recording is also cut. Hopefully, David Lloyd-Jones’s Naxos version is complete (I’m sorry to say I don’t have it).
Sad news: Giles Easterbrook – “musical polymath” (composer, promoter, publisher…) – has died at the age of 72.
I met Giles a few times at modern English evenings of often quite obscure composers. He was a doyen of the local contemporary scene , a man of great knowledge and a person who gave a lot of support to up and coming composers. In his prime I don’t think the female race existed along with everyone else including the BBC. How times change not always for the better. Young, Anglo-Saxon male straight composers could do with help and support from Giles today!
Sad news indeed. Giles was a familiar face to me during my early days as an independent recording producer. He and Hyperion’s Ted Perry, who gave me my first break, were firm friends and mutual admirers: hugely knowledgeable and approachable iconoclasts, eccentrics of the best kind. A breed all but vanished from the profession these days. But….Edward, do I infer correctly your implication that the sidelining of composers who were female, and bigotry against non-white gay males, was in any way a good thing? Do we really want to encourage those attitudes of former times? I would love to think that such an unbelievably offensive standpoint was not what you meant.
Lloyd-Jones’s version of the Metamorphic Variations is widely available on digital platforms, YouTube and Spotify included. He’s longer than Wordsworth by a minute (38:49 against 37:40) – both conductors do all 14 movements. Giles Easterbrook’s notes can be accessed through https://www.naxos.com/mainsite/blurbs_reviews.asp?item_code=8.572316&catNum=572316&filetype=About%20this%20Recording&language=English#
Thanks Ates for the clarification: Giles had inferred (or I misunderstood) that the cuts Tod Handley was forced to make were carried into the score and therefore Wordsworth’s recording of it. I must seek out DLJ’s version.
Giles was a dear soul. A dream publisher, totally genuine, utterly unselfconcious in everything he did. He had a magnificent intellect allied with a warm heart and a selflessness that I have rarely encountered in others. When I was a Maecenas composer I knew from the outset that it was a publishing firm for musicians by musicians. As Bob Simpson once said he was ‘a necessary man.’
Incidentally, Giles was, rightly, an enormous admirer of so much of what the BBC did, and many of his closest friends were female also.
Dear Giles! I remember him so well, from my early days with John. Giles was then doing promotional work at Novellos. One of my abiding memories is of Giles, in his elderly (hand-me-down?) greenish-black dinner jacket, climbing up the fuschia-lined lane with us in the evening sun to a concert in the church on the headland at the wonderful Fishguard Festival, as led and built up by the irrepressible John Davies. It was the Gabrieli Quartet, of happy memory also. Happy, and apparently eternal days… Another is of Giles with his ancient bicycle, which surely he rescued from the Ark. Giles was indeed knowledgeable and caring about music, and a committed professional in promotion. He and John shared pipe-smoking in common (bad habit, I know) and I gave him one of John’s as a memento. RIP Giles – you did well, while you were here – no harm to anyone, and doing good and useful work.
Andrew, I record a sign of the times only as witness.
But not, Edward, an unbiased one: ‘How times change, not always for the better’.
As a friend who was at school with Giles, lived close to him, knew him for some 55 years and owes to him so much detailed knowledge of classical music plus the fact that he encouraged me to take up the viola, I was totally devastated by the news of his premature passing. He lit a passionate flame for music, and above all the best of English music, in so many hearts and let’s pray for that flame to be passed on as he would have wished. I will never ever hear the Bliss Meditations on a Theme by John Blow without thinking of him and feeling immense gratitude for his life. Raise a glass to him in his memory, especially at the Christmas and New Year that he will never see. He would be so happy to think his friends had done that. RIP Giles and thank you for the wonderful contribution that you made to my life and to the life of so very many others. God bless.
Giles’s passing was indeed both shocking and sad: shocking, as his very many friends and admirers would have wished for at least another twenty years of his life on earth – he has left us way too soon; and sad because none of us, any longer, can anticipate his always-positive company, but we each have precious memories – not only connected to music. Giles’s love of cheese and wine (not necessarily in that order) will be an abiding memory for me at our lengthy lunches long ago, and it is always so life-enhancing to recall having been in the company of a true musician, in the fullest and most encouraging sense of the phrase.