Lecturing posts at Cardiff College of Music and Drama (1951-59) and the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire (1959-65) led to a readership at the University of Wales. Together with its nocturnal intensity and dense chromatic colouring, there is a distinctive edge to this music which marks it out from anything previously composed in Wales (or the rest of Britain) and which can be heard at its finest in the orchestral Variants of 1966 and the middle-period symphonies (Nos 2, 3, 4 and 5, 1962-73). The fluent neoclassical style of this work ensures that it is still played regularly (with a new recording by Robert Plane due for imminent release), but by 1954 Hoddinott's musical language had developed beyond recognition into the much darker, brooding and aggressively rhythmic idiom which characterised his early maturity. This was the work that brought him international recognition when it was publicly premiered at the 1954 Cheltenham festival by Gervase de Peyer, the Hallé Orchestra and Sir John Barbirolli, with a Proms performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sir Malcolm Sargent the following year. The BBC in Wales gave the first studio performance of his Clarinet Concerto in 1949, when Hoddinott was still a student at Cardiff University. It was therefore fitting that his last work was called Music for String Quartet, premiered at London's Wigmore Hall on the day of his death.Īlthough he dismissed the idea that he was a prolific composer, Hoddinott was in fact legendary for his capacity to compose at full stretch to tight deadlines, and his vast and versatile catalogue runs to nearly 300 individual works, which include six operas, 10 symphonies and over 20 concertos. Already composing prolifically at Gowerton grammar school, he always said that his musical thinking was that of a string player and never a pianist.
Its opening in 2009, in what would have been his 80th birthday year, will now be a poignant celebration of the distinguished doyen who was always a modest gentle giant and never the grand old man.īorn at Bargoed, Glamorganshire, Hoddinott began his musical career as a child-prodigy violinist, and in 1946 was a teenage founding-member of the National Youth Orchestra of Wales playing the viola, traditionally a composer's preferred string instrument. A fitting recognition of his unique role in the cultural life of the nation was the announcement on St David's Day last year that the new home of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales at the Wales Millennium Centre is to be named BBC Hoddinott Hall - Neuadd Hoddinott y BBC. The composer Alun Hoddinott, who has died aged 78, was the genial father-figure of Welsh music: he, more than anyone, directed its postwar path to full professionalism and creative renewal.
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