Malcolm Lipkin
Composer of melodic chamber work and powerful symphonies
MALCOLM LIPKIN, who has died aged 85, was a composer whose music attracted acclaim in the 1950s for the way in which it emerged from the works of Bartók and Stravinsky with its extended melodies, persistent rhythmic pulses and clear tonal frameworks; his First Violin Sonata, from 1957, was performed on more than a hundred occasions and led to several significant commissions.
He told how his Sinfonia di Roma (1965), a work of uncommon power, was inspired by a traffic jam in Rome. “I was dismayed to find that the Villa Borghese looked more like a dodgem circus than a park,” he said. “The place was filled with the sounds of screeching car-brakes, of savage hooting, and, above all, the massive roar of traffic.”
In the early 1960s Lipkin struck up a friendship with Christopher Finzi, the son of Gerald Finzi, the composer, and his wife Joy. Several of his works were composed at the Finzis’ home in Hampshire and his Suite for Flute and Cello (1961) was written to mark Christopher’s marriage to the flautist Hilary du Pré.
Soon Lipkin was struggling to meet his deadlines, the demands of his publisher and the wishes of the concert-going public. During one conversation with Benjamin Britten he wondered if his music was becoming old fashioned. The senior composer advised him “to be true to yourself ” and thereafter Lipkin ploughed his own musical furrow, lonely though that could be.
Malcolm Leyland Lipkin was born in Liverpool on May 2 1932, the son of Reuben, a doctor, and his wife Evelyn, a fashion assistant with John Lewis, which later commissioned his setting of Psalm 96 (1969). He recalled that his “musical awakening occurred at the age of 11, when my parents began taking me to concerts by the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra”.
While at Liverpool College he took piano lessons and in 1949 won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music to study piano with Kendall Taylor and harmony with Bernard Stevens. In 1950 he played for George Enesco at Bryanston Summer Music School and over the next decade his music was enjoyed at the Cheltenham Festival. His youthful Third Piano Sonata, described as “remarkably purposeful and arresting”, was premiered at the Gaudeamus Music Week in the Netherlands and heard in London in 1952.
He then studied privately with Mátyás Seiber, the Hungarian composer, under whose guidance he further refined his compositional technique. Seiber’s death in a car accident in Kruger National Park in South Africa in 1960 had a profound effect on Lipkin, who wrote the poignant middle movement of his Violin Concerto No 2, commissioned by Yfrah Neaman and first performed by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, as a tribute.
His works of the 1970s and 1980s were fewer in number, smaller in scale and programmatic in outlook. Clifford’s Tower, for eight instruments, stems from the 12th-century massacre in York of Jews who had taken refuge in the tower, while his Second and Third Symphonies take their titles, The Pursuit and The Sun, from the work of 17th-century poets, and reflect the transient nature of life.
Lipkin found it hard to promote himself, but his work had its admirers. The BBC commissioned a Wind Quintet for the Nash Ensemble in 1985; From Across La Manche (1998), a suite for string orchestra, was performed on both sides of the Channel; and his music was featured at Chester Summer Music Festival in 2002.
In 1968 he married Judith Frankel, a South African quantity surveyor. She died a week before him and he is survived by their son.
Malcolm Lipkin, born May 2 1932, died June 2 2017