The maestro of NW6

Music: When the world's grandest singers wanted to make music, they called at a terraced house near the Kilburn High Road. Michael White remembers its owner, master accompanist Geoffrey Parsons

LONDON is to singers much as Clapham Junction is to trains: they all pass through en route to Covent Garden or the Wigmore Hall, the South Bank or the Barbican. But until last Christmas the nerve centre of international singing in London - or at least, international recital singing - was none of these places. It was a terraced house in Iverson Road, West Hampstead - large but unglamorous, a bit too close to Kilburn and the railway and a day centre for juvenile delinquents - where on an average afternoon you could ring the doorbell and find anyone from Jessye Norman to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in the sitting room. Not to mention Thomas Allen, Victoria de los Angeles, Nicolai Gedda, Olaf Bar, Dame Janet Baker, Thomas Hampson, Felicity Lott, Barbara Bonney, Yvonne Kenny ... the elite corps of the Iverson Road gang which will be out in force at the Wigmore next Thursday and Friday to pay tribute to the gang leader, now departed. He was Geoffrey Parsons; and until he died in January this year he was, almost unarguably, the world's pre-eminent song accompanist.

In a sense, of course, it's paradoxical to talk of an accompanist as a "leader". From the print-size of his name on concert posters to the number of noughts on his fee cheques, the pianist takes a secondary role in song recitals; and that he should have any say in what happens during the performance might surprise concert-goers who judge the significance of an artist by the amount they see of him on the platform. Singers come full-frontal, accompanists only in right-hand profile; and to see Geoffrey Parsons in action was to witness a model of deference. He behaved like an immaculately turned-out butler, standing to one side while Jessye or Dame Janet took the flowers and cheers, bowing politely as the diva's hand reached out in his direction. But as his singers would testify, he was at least as fine a musician as anyone he played for. And to a significant extent, especially in the privacy of Iverson Road where they all came to rehearse, he was in control. Not necessarily over the fundamental issues of how fast or how loud a song should sound, but over the less obvious subtleties of performance. As he once said to me: "All musicians need a second pair of ears they can trust, but particularly a singer. He has his instrument inside him so he can't hear what the rest of us hear. I always ask at the beginning of a relationship, 'Do you mind my comments?' And the answer is nearly always, 'Yes, go ahead' - even if they'd really rather you didn't."

Geoffrey Parsons was good at concert relationships: a quiet master of the art of give and take, and capable of creating the sense of a safety net around his singers. "He was," says Felicity Lott, "a source of calm and strength, utterly professional, apparently with no nerves, even when dealing with a worrier like me. I never saw him lose his cool." And so it was that his singers truly became his singers - with the result that he acquired a status virtually unprecedented. There had been one "celebrity" accompanist before him, Gerald Moore, but nothing like the concert series "Geoffrey Parsons and Friends" staged by the Barbican as one of its major opening attractions in early 1980s. With that series the role of the accompanist was reinvented as initiator, impresario, master of ceremonies. It was a great coming-out; and it placed the next generation of entrepreneur- accompanists under starter's orders, from Graham Johnson to Ian Burnside.

But that said, Parsons was never attention-seeking, never a flamboyant personality, even though his background was in what you might call Entertainment. Born in Australia in 1929, he first came to Britain in 1950 on tour with the then-famous Variety baritone Peter Dawson. It was showbiz, smiles and endless performances of "The Road to Mandalay" that led to his next job in the cocktail bar of the Berkeley Hotel. "I wasn't sure about doing it," Parsons said, "but they told me I could play the odd classical piece if the occasion arose, and mentioned pounds 40 per week. I, of course, accepted, and sat under a crystal chandelier from six to 11 every night, playing popular songs on a white piano."

It was a conceptual leap from the Berkeley to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, whose regular accompanist he became from the mid-1960s; but the connection was, again, the world of Entertainment. Parsons had been coaching singers, principally at Glyndebourne but also in the film industry where he ended up with curious assignments like trying to teach Jayne Mansfield to sing in The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw. She was, Parsons remembered, "totally untalented". But on another occasion he had to supervise the vocal dubbing for the film Trilby, and the dubbed-on voice was Schwarzkopf's. Several years later, when her regular accompanist Gerald Moore was thinking of retirement, she approached Parsons to take his place. Then, as word spread of his painstaking concert preparation, fail-safe technique and encyclopaedic knowledge of the song repertory, he began to attract other star voices. And through his partner Erich Vietheer, a singing teacher who shared the house in Iverson Road, he drew into his circle promising young artists like Ann Murray and Felicity Lott who would become the next generation of stars. He even drew in the odd promising young critic - me - and for better or worse my life as a music journalist began in Geoffrey Parsons' sitting room, hatching a plan to tag along with him and Thomas Allen on a concert trip to Paris that would maybe make a magazine piece.

One of the things I remember from that trip was the discovery that artistic collaborations depend as much on companionship as anything else. Olaf Bar, one of the singers Parsons effectively steered into prominence through his first major recitals and 11 recordings, testifies to how much he learnt in the process: "Geoffrey was incredibly disciplined and taught me a lot - but never like a teacher. He was a friend. Especially when we were on tour and spending so much time together on and off the platform. These things can be uncomfortable; but Geoffrey was someone who really enjoyed life and liked to share his enjoyment - of food, restaurants, places to visit, things to see. He turned the drudgery of touring into pleasure. And now he is gone - what can I say except that he leaves a hole that can't be filled."

Although there will never be another Geoffrey Parsons, it is hoped that the Wigmore concerts on Thursday and Friday will encourage future generations of pianists in his example, with the launch of a memorial trust fund. The singers lined up to perform over the two nights - including Jessye Norman - are probably the most illustrious gathering the Wigmore has ever housed; the battery of pianists (let no one forget them) is impressive too; and the tickets are sold out. But if you're persistent, the number is 0171 935 2141. !