|
He was born in
Wallasey in 1955 and educated at Wallasey Grammar School. He joked recently, that to
be both red-haired and interested in music in Wallasey, seriously set you apart
from the rest of the town. He relished it. He was a man put on earth to
lead, both organisations and people. When we see that in someone, we are
naturally drawn to it, because it gives us hope and succour. Ray never
disappointed.
Even in his teens, at
the Royal Northern College in the 'seventies, friends
have been remembering this week, the level of celebratory energy, the
grasping of life with both hands, that he had. And it was not just for
music; it was for football, cricket, for talk, for the intensity of
youthful friendship. Of course, his utter passion for music was
overwhelming and that distinguished him too, but it wasn't only the
technical mastery of all the percussion instruments that people remember,
it was the musicality of his playing, the conversion of technique into
artistry. That went on developing right to the very end of his life. His
technical mastery was always underpinned by the work of a proper scholar
and researcher, whose knowledge of theory and musical biography so enriched
us. It was there in the little concert talks, the programme notes, the pub
talk. And he was a great talker, articulate and learned. You could hang on
to every word he said, because there was content in it. Always. It was
informed talk. And that made him such a pleasure to be with, not least
because he was just so generous with that knowledge, so free with it.
After College, he
began a long and distinguished career at the BBC Philharmonic, playing
under every leading conductor of his generation. People have been saying
that he could lead from the timps and his style again was energised, direct
and accurate. According to the strings, the louder passages were
characterised as 'forte, fortissimo and cymbal Lomax.' All of us who
heard Ray play with the Phil will remember that accuracy and tightness and
excitement that he brought to the orchestra. As a timpanist and
percussionist, he seemed undaunted by the most complex of contemporary
music. Those of us who sang in the first performance of Michael Ball's Nocturnes
will remember not only the fearsome difficulty of the percussion parts but
the effortless interplay between Ray and Paul Patrick as they rendered that
piece exciting and meaningful. He had the ability to hold so many complex
rhythms and conflicting time sequences in his head, and yet convert them,
with intelligence and feeling, into richly musical performances. And
moreover, he could persuade us that we could do it too. And we did.
Whilst still
working at the BBC, Ray also gave enormous amounts of time and energy to
the Stockport Youth Orchestra and to the fledgling Festival Chorus. Again,
he was an inspired leader of young people. Kids in orchestras are often
there under sufferance, because their parents want them to be there. But
with Ray it was very different. They cheered his arrival on the podium. The
cheers were real, because under Ray, something really exciting might
happen. I remember one Christmas show, where, in the middle of a rehearsal,
talking all the time to the orchestra about other things, he gently got
down, made his way to the timps and quietly showed the lad on them how to
do a really dramatic roll. It was wonderful teaching, natural, effortless
and generous. It summed up the man perfectly.
Whilst at the BBC
and the Youth Orchestra, and no doubt doing countless other things, Ray was
also conducting St George's Singers. He made them into
a formidable singing unit. He toured abroad with them &endash; always
good for improving morale and musicianship &endash; and brought back
wonderful pieces to sing. I only came when they were short of tenors, so
for me, the most memorable of these was Ingvar Lidholm's ŠA Riverder le
Stelle, which was priceless. But others have been talking this week of
David Fanshawe's African Sanctus. I missed that. We shall all miss
things like that now.
When he left the
BBC, Ray seemed to come into his own. He was free from the shackles of a
full-time job and he could do what he was so very, very good at
&endash; performances; planning them, instigating them, battling for
them, pulling them off. And in doing that, he enriched the lives of so many
hundreds of other people. He had been involved with Stockport Festival
Chorus from very early on and when one looks at the repertoire that we have
sung over the last twenty years, that alone would stand for a lifetime's
achievement for any man. Not just those magnificent major works
&endash; the Monteverdi Vespers, the War Requiem, Gerontius,
Elijah, but all the things we had never heard of &endash;
Nielsen's Springtime in Funen, Boito's Mefistofele, Jongen's Mass,
Vierne's Messe Solonnelle. These are the things we will sing just
once in our lifetime. Ray gave us that chance. They were all worth it. We
are richer beings because of it. The fact that Sfc was just a part of Ray's
achievements is what makes him so remarkable. Twice a year, he brought some
sense of energised, creative vitality to a town characterised, for me, by
its supreme dullness. When it comes to culture, Stockport seems a place where
philistinism has been raised to a civic virtue. We know the endless battles
that had to be fought to get those wonderful performances staged. Other
boroughs would have lionised such a man in their midst. Yet it was only
someone of Ray's indefatigable spirit and persistence who could fill that baroque
hall twice a year, for over twenty years, with such wonderful music. We
trudged home from those concerts, two or three hundred of us, exhilarated,
our repertoire increased, our musicality enhanced, our souls fed. At one
Sfc concert at St George's Church, I was amazed to find the
conductor lugging the staging back to the Town Hall afterwards. That was
the man. For Ray, the whole process of a concert was a unity. His energy
was spread seamlessly throughout the whole enterprise, physically,
intellectually, musically. There was an enviable completeness about the
man. And we all benefited so much from it.
Ray seemed to have
an inexhaustible list of contacts, right throughout the profession and all
over Britain. He &endash; and so, we
&endash; was also blessed with formidable organising skills. He could
draw together the very best of amateur players and singers and mix them
with professionals and raise the level of playing of both. As an amateur
solo singer, he was simply wonderful to work under. He had patience,
sympathy and enormous tolerance for our limited skills. And of course, he
had the mastery of the orchestra to make it easy for us. He did everything
for us, as singers, with that generosity of spirit that so distinguished
him. His achievements with Sfc were, for many of us, brought to supreme
embodiment in the magnificent Bridgewater Hall performances of Mahler's
8th and Turandot. The Mahler was transcendent and is as near to
heavenly bliss as some of us are going to get. And, when the last cymbal crash
of Turandot rang round the Bridgewater, I watched the audience
rise like a Tsunami behind Ray, in utter rapture. We felt the same. Those
concerts were his greatest public achievements, as organiser, teacher,
conductor and musical interpreter. The privilege for us, was to be there,
when someone at the very height of his powers.
His last great
achievement was Amici, that loose collection of singers and players,
brought together whenever a request for a concert materialised. We sang in
the splendour of Lyme's courtyard, on the crooked floors of Little Moreton
Hall, in the gardens of Biddulph, in stately homes and humble churches. For
several years, we sang each summer at the 900 year old church at Buckworth
in Cambridgeshire and raised several thousand pounds to keep that tiny
church, and its tinier congregation open for worship. We did the well
heeled of Bunbury and Tarporley, the Catholic community at Middlewich, the
excluded of Gorton's Pugin Monastery. All these benefited equally from the
electrifying passion which was around Ray when he had a choir or orchestra
under his control. What made him great to work under was that there was no
cynicism, sneering or snobbery in Ray, and even to the last, when we did a
packed Manchester Arena with Russell Watson, he was planning still more
concerts because he simply wanted to bring music to as many ears as was
practically possible.
The ache of his
death is beyond comfort and unbearable for Judith and his children. When he
took our last rehearsal in January, although he was very ill, his energy
was undiminished, his eye and ear as keen as ever. We sang the sublime Locus
Iste, and then that old Stainer pot-boiler, God So Loved the World.
Like most of Ray's friends, I have sung all my life. Nothing I have ever
sung moved me like that. His tempo, slower than normal, was perfect for
that very special occasion. He knew what he was doing. We knew what we were
singing. Under the discipline of his control and the immaculate shaping of
his musical phrases, that piece was profoundly moving. It is what art is
about and what human love is about. And we were enormously privileged to be
there. Walter Pater said that the function of art is to help us 'burn with
a hard gem-like flame.' That was Ray. His flame ignited something of the divine
in all of us who sang and played under him.
Eric Northey
|
