Barry Tuckwell
Musician known as ‘the god of the horn’ whose virtuosity, flamboyance and showmanship transformed the image of his instrument
BARRY TUCKWELL, who has died aged 88, was the greatest exponent of the horn of his generation, mastering one of the most murderously difficult of orchestral instruments and transforming its image for the better. With another virtuoso, Dennis Brain, 10 years his senior, Tuckwell helped to popularise the horn (often erroneously called the French horn) which for too long had been associated in the popular imagination with John Peel and the English hunt. As a virtuoso soloist, Tuckwell – while lacking Brain’s golden command – embraced the horn as a lyrical instrument that could speak and sing as well as summon up the blood.
The “beautifully cool, mellifluous horn tone of Barry Tuckwell” noted by Robert Henderson in The Daily Telegraph in 1974, was also admired further afield. “He almost never misses a note,” observed Winthrop Sergeant in the New Yorker magazine in 1977. “His agility might be compared to that of a coloratura soprano.” To Sergeant, Tuckwell was one of the finest horn players who ever lived, no less than the Jascha Heifetz of the horn.
From the moment he arrived in England from his native Australia in 1950 Tuckwell’s professional progress was astonishing: from assistant first horn in the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, via the Scottish National Orchestra and the Bournemouth Symphony, to principal horn of the London Symphony Orchestra at the age of 24.
During his 13 years with the co-operatively run LSO – “a terrible orchestra when I joined, and sinking” – he was the musicians’ representative on its board. In 1963, as the orchestra’s fortunes were recovering, he was appointed chairman of directors, a position he held for six years and which, after a falling-out with the other directors over policy, he likened to “sitting on a volcano”.
In the same year he made his first BBC broadcast and became professor of horn at the Royal Academy of Music, an achievement curiously at odds with the fact that (as Tuckwell pointed out) he had never passed an exam in his life.
During his years with the LSO, Tuckwell earned a reputation for showmanship and flamboyance, hoisting the bell of his instrument high and proud regardless of the composer’s intentions, while at the same time becoming recognised as a more earnest soloist and recording artist. In 1968 Tuckwell finally resigned from the orchestra to develop his solo career and, more challengingly, that of a conductor.
After André Previn invited him to conduct for the 1977 South Bank Festival in London, there were further engagements in Germany, Holland, Scandinavia and the US.
By the late 1970s Tuckwell, the only musician to earn his entire living as a horn soloist, had recorded more works for the instrument than anyone else, and in 1977 – “the god of the horn”, as someone anointed him – cut his 26th disc. This was a virtuoso account of a newly discovered work by an early 18th century Czech composer, Johann Zelenka, which, with notes nearer the piccolo end of the register than that of the horn, Tuckwell found “physically the most difficult piece I have ever played”.
In truth, though, Tuckwell and the horn were made for each other; aged 13 he took to the instrument immediately, achieving technical mastery of the most treacherous member of the modern orchestral family within a matter of years.
His virtuosity soon flourished, astounding critics and concertgoers alike, and before long the most important composers of the day were queuing to write for him: Oliver Knussen’s Horn Concerto Op 28, for example, and the virtuosic Horn Concertos by Don Banks and Thea Musgrave. In 1976 a hard-pressed Richard Rodney Bennett delivered the score of his single-movement Horn Concerto to Tuckwell in instalments, page by page.
Although Tuckwell continued to play on concert platforms, he preferred to work as a soloist or in small chamber groups such as the Barry Tuckwell Wind Quintet, which he founded in 1969 with Jack Brymer (clarinet), Peter Lloyd (flute), Derek Wickens (oboe) and Martin Gatt (bassoon). He served two terms as president of the International Horn Society. But all the while, concerned about maintaining a faultless embouchure into middle age, Tuckwell again felt the itch to take up the orchestral baton.
In 1980 he returned to Australia as chief conductor with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra; what was supposed to be a one-year appointment extended to four. Tuckwell continued to criss-cross continents as a conductor and as a horn soloist: in 1981 EMI hosted a 50th birthday celebration for him in London, in which Vladimir Ashkenazy accompanied him at the piano in Schumann’s tortuous Adagio and Allegro, Op 70, and the following year Tuckwell began a long engagement as conductor of the Maryland Symphony Orchestra.
His globetrotting once led The Sunday Telegraph to wonder whether he spent more time queuing up for visas than playing. And there was a panicky moment at La Scala in Milan when Tuckwell realised he had forgotten his bow tie and cummerbund, obliging the world’s pre-eminent horn player to perform with a towel girding his middle and a British Airways paper napkin folded into place at his throat.
In May 1988 Tuckwell was one of a remarkable assembly of talent that appeared at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, celebrating Australia’s Bicentennial with a gala concert attended by Princess Alexandra. Tuckwell shared the stage with Dame Joan Sutherland, Richard Bonynge, Sir Charles Mackerras, Douglas Gamley – and Dame Edna Everage.
At the Proms in 1996 he gave his farewell London concert in a performance of Mozart’s Third Concerto with the Philharmonia Orchestra. After several attempts at retirement in the US – he became an American citizen in 1997 – Tuckwell returned to Melbourne, to conduct and teach.
Barry Emmanuel Tuckwell was born in Melbourne on March 5 1931 into a musical family of Welsh descent, all of whom possessed perfect pitch. His father played the piano and the organ, not in church but in cinemas, at the console of the “mighty Wurlitzer”. He and an older brother gave Barry lessons in violin and piano, but the boy’s fingers lacked the necessary dexterity, even though he could read music before he could read words.
When he was four the family moved to Sydney, where Barry attended St Andrew’s Cathedral School, sang in the cathedral choir, and (once he could reach the pedals) served as an organist.
When he was 13, following a chance conversation over coffee between his sister, Patricia, Charles Mackerras, and Richard Merewether, second horn in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Barry’s musical direction changed completely. “What can we do about Barry?” asked Patricia. “He’s musical, and he must be able to play something.” “Well,” Merewether suggested, “why doesn’t he try the horn?”
“It was a simple, wonderful and, for me, historic moment,” Tuckwell recalled, “because if they hadn’t been sitting together at that particular moment in that particular coffee lounge in Sydney, I may have become a music critic or something dreadful like that.”
Abandoning the piano for the notoriously difficult horn, Tuckwell won a scholarship to the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music to study under Alan Mann. Within two years he had landed a post as a horn “extra” with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
His progress continued apace: after a spell with the Melbourne Symphony he returned to Sydney as the principal horn player with the SSO, and there he performed every major horn concerto in the conventional repertory.
In 1950 he moved to London, studying informally with Dennis Brain. Though influenced by Brain, he developed a totally distinctive style, also drawing inspiration for the instrument’s melodious singing quality from the records of the jazz trombonist Tommy Dorsey.
He took a summer job with an orchestra of 30 playing light classics at Buxton Spa. This led to his engagement at the Hallé in Manchester under Sir John Barbirolli, touring for two years and playing in some 500 concerts. In 1953 he spent a year with the Scottish National Orchestra, and from there moved to the south coast as first horn with the Bournemouth Symphony. In 1955, aged 24, he was offered the post of first horn with the LSO.
By then he was branching out as a soloist, although critics held his feet to the fire. “Technically incomplete,” sniffed one Telegraph reviewer.
But by the early 1960s Tuckwell was drawing more admiring notices. John Warrack in the Telegraph praised his performance of Mozart’s Second Horn Concerto as “technically … well-nigh flawless, and gifted with a wonderfully liquid tone almost more French in style than German.” His 1962 recording with Benjamin Britten (piano) and Peter Pears (tenor) of Britten’s poignant third Canticle (1954) was also well-received.
Meanwhile, Tuckwell continued to teach at the Royal Academy of Music, even though he could have been making 20 times the fee in a television studio. He had an ambivalent approach to tutelage, since “anybody who learns from me learns my secrets”.
To his amusement, Tuckwell found himself in the gossip columns and the news pages in 1967 when his sister Patricia, then 38, and known as “Bambi”, married the Earl of Harewood, the Queen’s cousin, having been named by the earl’s first wife in her divorce petition.
With his plain-speaking Aussie persona and Mephistophelian air, Tuckwell wore his accolades lightly, and was modest about his natural aptitude for an instrument that he compared to “driving a fast car on an oily road – bloody hard work and horribly unpredictable”.
Identified by the Grove Dictionary Of Music as “the leading horn player of his generation”, and the most recorded of all players, Tuckwell was nominated for three Grammy awards, was a noted editor of horn music, and wrote Playing the Horn (1978) and The Horn (1981).
He was appointed OBE in 1965 and a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1992. In 2007 Live Performance Australia presented him with the James Cassius Williamson Award.
By the time he retired as a soloist at 65, Barry Tuckwell had played horn professionally for 50 years, released some 50 or more recordings, averaged up to several hundred concerts a year and seen his first two marriages suffer as a consequence.
He married first, in 1958, Sally Newton, with whom he had a son and a daughter; secondly, in 1971, Hilary Warburton, with whom he had another son; and thirdly, in 1992, Susan Levitan.