Bob Simans
Orchestral musician who taught violin to a young Simon Rattle
BOB SIMANS, who has died aged 80, was a gifted violinist, pianist and music teacher; in addition to a distinguished orchestral career under the baton of conductors such as Pierre Monteux, Malcolm Sargent and Karl Anton Rickenbacher, he taught violin to Simon Rattle and accompanied Nicola Benedetti in her early years.
A prodigious talent, Simans was equally adept at the piano, on which he was self-taught, as on violin, and flourished as both conductor and composer.
On one occasion he was prised by Rickenbacher from the violin section of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra to deputise for the Romanian concert pianist Radu Lupu during a rehearsal of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 1, which he sight read. Although Lupu appeared for the performance, friends only half-joked that Simans would have made a most able replacement.
Another time, on arriving to give a recital to a community group, he realised that the piano was a tone lower than the required pitch and transposed the entire programme as he went along.
Simans understood the value of music as a source of enrichment to the soul and to the wider culture. This was reflected in, among other things, his cofounding in 1980 of the BBC Scottish Symphony Club, initiated when he discovered that the BBC was planning to mothball the orchestra.
Robert Casper Peter Simans was born into a Jewish family at Harrogate on March 8 1937. At the Royal Academy of Music he studied violin with Robert Masters and composition with Norman Demuth. He then did National Service, including leading “Orchestra B” at Sandhurst. On one occasion he performed for Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand, recounting, with some amusement, how a later offer to direct The King and I was gently rebuffed.
He went on to enjoy an orchestral career, recalling with particular fondness a performance of Debussy’s La Mer with the 88-year-old Monteux in 1963. From 1961 he spent five years with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. While on Merseyside he gave violin lessons, counting among his pupils the seven-year-old Rattle, whom Simans remembered as a “highly inquisitive” student with a “keen ear”.
Simans and his wife, a native of Dundee, then settled in Glasgow. His career continued to flourish, notably in the first violin section of the Scottish National Orchestra under Alexander Gibson. He also worked with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, where he was reunited with Rattle, the orchestra’s assistant conductor in the 1980s.
After stepping back from full-time orchestral playing Simans made a remarkable contribution to civic life, displaying an unrelenting concern for the elderly, the disabled and the homeless. Of particular note were his 1,600 concerts for the Council for Music in Hospitals and his performances in Glasgow’s homeless hostels.
The greater part of his later life, however, was devoted to nurturing the young. He accompanied Nicola Benedetti in her early recitals and over the past 20 years volunteered as a teacher and mentor to aspiring young musicians, especially through the Glasgow-based Academy of Sacred Music. In October 2017 the Academy gave the premiere of his work All of Light, written for the 100th anniversary of the Fatima apparitions.
Since the age of 15 Simans had held an interest in Catholicism, eventually finding his way into the Church under John Keenan, now Bishop of Paisley.
It would have been a source of great delight to him that a host of the Academy’s musicians sang at his Requiem Mass; it featured a Hebrew Lament, written by his father.
Bob Simans is survived by his wife Kathleen (née Malone), a fellow musician; they were married in 1966.
Bob Simans, born March 8 1937, died March 6 2018