Classical music writer who spent 13 years at the Telegraph
MATTHEW RYE, who has died from a cerebral haemorrhage aged 60, was a much-loved and quietly authoritative classical music critic who contributed to the arts pages of The Daily Telegraph for 13 years; his wide-ranging and distinguished freelance career included editing 1001 Classical Music Recordings You Must Hear Before You Die (2007) with a foreword by the cellist Steven Isserlis.
It covered 900 years, with recommendations from austere choral works and dancing baroque concertos to windswept romanticism and vibrant contemporary music. While accepting that opinions differ – “that is in the nature of art” – he regarded the book as a launch pad for listeners, with suggestions for alternative interpretations. “Rye’s editing has ensured accessibility without dumbness, sneaking in much lightly worn scholarship,” noted Gramophone
magazine.
Rye’s own passions included visiting German opera houses to review unusual repertoire, the more obscure and offbeat the better. He was meticulous in his planning, creating a spreadsheet with train times, accommodation details and comprehensive details of what he was seeing. He also published an online traveller’s guide to opera in Germany.
While he covered lesser-known works by Hindemith (Mathis der Maler), Henze (The Bassarids)
and Dessau (Die Verurteilung des Lukullus), he was also a self-described “Wagner nut” and visited Bayreuth to review the two most recent Ring Cycles for the Backtrack website, where many of his reviews have appeared in recent years.
Matthew Colin Rye was born in Norfolk on May 15 1962, one of three children of Peter Rye, a clergyman, and his wife Greta (née Colin), who worked in publishing. He was educated locally and played the flute, though his interest lay in composition.
He read music at Magdalen College, Oxford, and continued his studies at Birmingham University, where he wrote incidental music for the theatre, before joining Radio Times. He was soon appointed assistant editor of The Musical Times,
where his colleague Jessica Duchen recalled plentiful discussions about thenunfashionable composers such as Erich Wolfgang
Korngold and Franz Schreker, and an unlimited supply of coffee and jokes.
The managing director had a habit of playing a Bach violin concerto as a prelude to redundancies, and one day the Bach played for Rye. He became chief sub-editor and reviews editor at BBC Music
Magazine, contributed to
The Independent, and in 1995 joined The Daily Telegraph, where he reviewed concerts and CDS and interviewed some of the biggest names in music, including the French pianist and composer Yvonne Loriod and the British pianist Graham Johnson.
Rye was disappointed in 2008 when the paper’s arts coverage changed focus and his services were no longer required. But his lightly worn erudition and goodnatured writing remained in demand elsewhere, and he reviewed CDS and concerts, wrote programme and liner notes, and sub-edited books and magazines.
He was reviews editor for
The Strad, contributed to the
Wagner Journal, wrote chapters for The Rough Guide to Classical Music on CD (1994) and The Blackwell History of Music in Britain (1995), and was the author of
Masterpieces of Music,a series of ebooks with titles on Bach’s Mass in B minor, Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony and Brahms’s Piano Concerto No 1.
Rye, a keen gardener and cyclist who adored his cats, split his time between Madeira and a converted 19th-century barn in Buckinghamshire, which during the war had been used to store paintings from the National Portrait Gallery. Ever curious, he recently visited the gallery to inspect its records and was writing up his findings.
Matthew Rye met David Gilmore, a computer analyst, in 1992. They had a civil partnership in 2006 and were married last year. Gilmore survives him.