Lynne Walker: Music and theatre critic for The Independent

Lynne Walker was a journalist who viewed the cultural life of Europe with an unusually and daringly wide-angle lens. Initially a press and marketing officer, she was to leap over the fence and become a critic and broadcaster.

She complemented her career as a multi-faceted journalist, most notably as the theatre and music critic of The Independent for the north, with musical performance, playing the piano and oboe, conducting and singing; she was also chair of the ensemble panel of the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards, a board member of the Psappha ensemble and a consultant on the Onetree woodlands project.

A late and much-loved child of her parents, Nancy and Stuart, Lynne Walker was born in Edinburgh in 1956 and attended The Mary Erskine School and Napier College. This was followed by a Postgraduate Certificate in Education at Moray House, before she went on to study for a BA at the Huddersfield School of Music from 1977-80. She received a Hesse Scholarship to the Aldeburgh Festival in 1977, and a Founders' Travelling Scholarship subsequently enabled her to study choral conducting in France with Arthur Oldham.

As a student, Walker was already attending the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival every year, and would soon be busy there reviewing, interviewing and broadcasting. Her professional career began in Glasgow as publicity and marketing officer for the Scottish National Orchestra (now RSNO), with a special responsibility for the SNO's contemporary music festival, Musica Nova. She worked from 1987-94 as marketing director at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, and in 1989 married The Guardian's music critic Gerald Larner, with whom she enjoyed a deeply enriching personal and professional partnership until the end.

Always keen to view a subject from every angle, and to recharge her creative batteries, in 1982 Walker had begun a parallel career as a freelance journalist, contributing reviews and features to BBC Radio 4's Kaleidoscope, to the Glasgow Herald and to The Scotsman, before starting to write classical music and theatre reviews for The Independent in the late Nineties. She became prolific at this, and was the voice of the paper in the north of Engalnd and in Scotland, writing regularly until a matter of weeks before her death.

By 1991, Walker had set up her own editing consultancy, Edgewise, run from her Cheshire home on Alderley Edge. She and Larner would work together, commissioning and writing programme notes for concert halls and festivals nationwide, including the Barbican, Wigmore Hall and Edinburgh Festival.

In her 10-year association with Kaleidoscope, Walker widened her brief to include the shrewd assessment of new literature and non-fiction, as well as classical music, theatre and the visual arts. For the programme's last two years, Walker was an elegant presenter and interviewer, often easing the nerves of anxious writers and artists, and facilitating their conversations. This skill was also revealed in Walker's work as a presenter on Radio 4's Dancing for a Living and on Radio 3's In Tune. And, within the last 10 years of her life, right up to the point when the debilitating effects of cancer prevented her from working, Walker would host the BBC Philharmonic's pre-concert Preview in Bridgewater Hall. Here, her clear-headed presentation skills and her warm rapport with both her audience and her subjects, cast illuminating light on the forthcoming concert. She worked regularly with the BBC Philharmonic at many levels, often sharing valued professional advice with the orchestra's marketing manager. And Manchester's rival band, the Hallé, also benefited from her skills – and from her singing voice. Even as a critic, she auditioned for the Hallé Choir, because she was so keen on singing in Elgar's The Kingdom.

The range of Walker's professional passions was equalled only by her private ones. As a daughter particularly close to her mother, she could often be spotted, a lone figure in a remote landscape such as the marshes of Aldeburgh, searching for a mobile signal in order to chat to her mother, whom she devotedly visited in Scotland. To her extended family, Walker was energetically committed; she would take her niece on culture-packed trips to Italy and Finland, and helped to provide work experience in the theatre for her nephew. Walker was a true bon viveur: she and Larner would search out the best restaurants in any city in which they found themselves, in order to entertain friends and colleagues. At home, the hospitality was generous.

At the Cheshire funeral service which she had herself planned – down to a recording of the pealing bells of the church of St Cuthbert in her native city – Walker was described as "a lady full of intricate detail". When illness took its toll, Walker's energy and creativity were channelled into the beloved garden of her home in Alderley Edge. Preferring to talk about this rather than to embarrass and worry friends with the grave state of her illness, her every phone call, every last email would be full of excitement about new pergolas, new species of clematis and the newly planted cherry, plum and apple trees she had planted, and whose blossom and fruit will be a lasting memorial.

Lynne Walker, journalist: born Edinburgh 24 October 1956; married 1989 Gerald Larner; died Alderley Edge, Cheshire 10 February 2011.