The Times, UK
Jan 20 2005

Felix Aprahamian

Irrepressible writer, critic and enthusiast for music in Britain, who
helped to shape the nation’s cultural life for many years

FELIX APRAHAMIAN was a critic, organist, publisher, broadcaster,
adjudicator, lecturer, editor, concert organiser and much more
besides. Above all, he was an enthusiast: an animator, with a
cosmopolitan touch, of British music, musicians and musical events
over a period of more than 60 years.

Generous, quick-witted, energetic especially in the cause of French
composers, he did much to sustain music in England during the war by
his work for the London Philharmonic Orchestra. He did no less, once
the fighting was over, to build bridges with the Continent. For many
years his short, tubby, goatee-bearded presence, spectacles flashing
with delight, made him a magnet at London musical events.

Felix Aprahamian was born in London in 1914, of Armenian parentage,
and educated at Tollington School in Muswell Hill. He began
contributing articles to the musical press when not yet out of his
teens.

An early enthusiasm for Delius sent him off to the composer’s home at
Grez-sur-Loing, some 45 miles south of Paris, and was sustained
throughout his life: he was an adviser to the Delius Trust from 1961.

In 1940, abandoning a business career, Aprahamian became assistant
secretary and concert director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra,
then in economic difficulties and feeling the loss caused by Sir
Thomas Beecham’s departure. Aprahamian, refusing to compromise,
devised enterprising programmes that included, in 1944, the first
performance of Tippett’s A Child of Our Time.

In 1946 Aprahamian left the LPO to become, nominally, a consultant to
the firm United Musical Publishers, but in effect he made himself
through the firm’s Paris connections one of the main agents, along
with the French cultural attaché Tony Mayer, of the promotion of
French music in Britain.

The Concerts de Musique Française which they organised between 1942
and 1964 not only introduced French music to London but also brought
to British notice artists including Gérard Souzay, Monique Haas,
Yvonne Lefébure and, with Poulenc, Pierre Bernac.

His gift for friendship stood him in good stead, and the
affectionately signed photographs festooning his office were a sign
of real appreciation from composers including Poulenc and Messiaen,
conductors including Ansermet, Munch and Désormière, and many other
artists.

Aprahamian’s particular interest in organ music – he had an organ in
his house and encouraged young organists to use it for practice – led
to much greater English awareness of the riches of the French
repertory.

He was honorary secretary of the Organ Music Society from 1935 to
1970 and was made an honorary member of the Royal College of
Organists in 1973 and an honorary fellow in 1994. He was energetic in
the successful campaign in the early 1970s to save the Alexandra
Palace organ which the GLC was proposing to sell, and led an appeal
to restore it; this became a much greater challenge when it was badly
damaged in a fire in 1980.

In 1948 Aprahamian also became deputy to Ernest Newman as music
critic of The Sunday Times. Especially when the aged and increasingly
Olympian Newman’s weekly articles tended to become reflections or
pronouncements, Aprahamian provided urbane and well-judged reviews of
the London concert scene. It was a testament to his abiding respect
for Newman that he found the time to edit two volumes of his senior’s
essays in 1956 and 1958.

He also much enjoyed his forays on the paper’s behalf to the
Edinburgh Festival, where he held something of a court in an obscure
hotel, and where his amusement at his own exotic aspect once led to
him, when driving along Princes Street in a tourist horse-drawn open
carriage in his scarlet-lined opera cloak, to toss halfpennies as
largesse at the feet of some awed Americans. He relished his fleeting
appearance as an art dealer in the John Schlesinger film Darling
(1965).

Aprahamian’s immense capacity for hard work took him in many other
directions. From 1942 he was a regular and well-loved broadcaster,
especially on Music Magazine.

He lectured widely, including at Morley College, the City Literary
Institute and Surrey University, and from 1989 he was Visiting
Professor of the University of East London. In 1991 he was Regents
Lecturer at the University of California.

He was a regular member of international juries in Geneva, Montreux
and Biarritz. His musical editorship of The Listener drew
contributions of a high standard, so that he was able to edit a
selection for publication. He served on the BBC Central Music
Advisory Committee from 1958 to 1961.

As president of Putney Music, he helped to make it one of the most
important gramophone societies in the country. In 1995 he was made an
honorary doctor of music by City University.
Aprahamian’s house in Muswell Hill – which he liked to refer to as
`the stately pleasure-dome’ – was one dispensing boundless
hospitality.

He did not marry, and in the postwar years, his much loved, much
put-upon widowed mother would cook vast, wonderful meals for streams
of visiting friends, who would play chamber music with him, be made
free of his enormous library, be shown his Proustian treasures or
explore his beautifully tended, floodlit garden in the Japanese
style.

Felix Aprahamian, musician and writer, was born on June 5, 1914. He
died on January 15, 2005, aged 90.