John Lanchbery

Tireless and ubiquitous conductor/composer for ballet

John Arthur Lanchbery, conductor and arranger: born London 15 May 1923; OBE 1990; married 1951 Elaine Fifield (died 1999; one daughter; marriage dissolved 1960); died Melbourne, Victoria 27 February 2003.

A conductor and arranger, John Lanchbery was a pivotal figure in ballet. As arranger he collaborated with choreographers such as Frederick Ashton to compile the scores of many of the most popular ballets of the last half of the 20th century. As conductor he acted as jovial referee between the sometimes opposing visions of performers and composers, and his tactful sensitivity made him the trusted choice of innumerable stars, including Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. Conducting the scores which he had arranged, he reached the top of a field which he had largely created and monopolised. As such, he worked with leading companies all over the world.

He did not set out to link his musical talents to ballet. Everything came to him by chance and, in this, he considered himself very lucky.

Born in London in 1923, he won a Henry Smart Scholarship in Composition to the Royal Academy of Music. Call-up for the Second World War interrupted his studies, but he resumed them, taking on part-time jobs to help his finances. One job was in the music-printing business, working for a Dr Kalmus of the Anglo-Soviet Music Press. Kalmus was friendly with the directorate of the short-lived Metropolitan Ballet (1947-49) and, when he heard they were looking for a conductor, he recommended the young Lanchbery.

Because the company were engaged in a regional tour, they gave Lanchbery a week's trial at the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. The deal was that, if he were no good, they would pay him his £20 wage and give him a ticket back to London. But they kept him and he found himself working with a young collection of dancers – Svetlana Beriosova, Erik Bruhn, Sonia Arova – who were to become internationally famous.

After about six weeks, he thought he was pretty good. One night, though, the company's ballet mistress Celia Franca invited him for a drink after the show. She gave him a list of about 25 corrections for Les Sylphides, the programme's opening ballet. "So I realised," he said in a 1998 interview, "there was a lot to learn." He learnt it all, and more, enabling him to become ballet's most ubiquitous musical name – in rehearsal studios, in orchestra pits, on sheets of music.

Because Metropolitan Ballet could only afford one pianist, he regularly played for company classes, in addition to conducting eight shows a week. That way he began to learn what dancers need from music. He learnt that bodies and steps can't always fit to music played at its original speed: male jumps, for example, take longer and, the bigger the jump, the longer it takes. But that didn't mean he approved of the unnecessary musical distortions that can sometimes surface. "I find that any intelligent dancer will listen to reason just like any intelligent conductor has to damn well listen to the dancers," he said. "Like many things, it's about compromise."

He learnt the importance of breathing in dance, and would himself sometimes remind a dancer of this. "At a rehearsal a dancer will say, 'I want that a little bit slower please', whereas perhaps what they actually want is just a breath at the end of the phrases." He learnt, too, that a conductor must know a score by heart, to be free to watch the dancers on stage. "Apart from marrying the music to the dancer, you also have to get involved in the moment, the drama." Not only that, but no two performances are identical:

The same dancer will feel differently one night from another. Besides, half the fun is instant creation. When you get a dancer who is unusually musical, he or she will play with the music, as it were. Margot Fonteyn, for example, was wonderful at it. It's more than musical expression, it's more than just phrasing, it's like a soloist's approach to music.

He had little time for conductors who kept their head in the score and saw ballet as a step up to becoming symphonic conductors.

Lanchbery packaged his knowledge and experience inside a rotund, bearded physique and jolly demeanour. When Metropolitan Ballet closed, he found freelance work in television, playing the piano and conducting for broadcasts of variety shows and opera. He successfully auditioned for a conducting post with Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet in December 1950 and while there also conducted down the road at the Royal Opera House, for the sister company, the Royal Ballet. In 1960 he became principal conductor with the Royal Ballet.

In 1972 the Australian Ballet invited him on a three-month American tour, to conduct his re-working of Minkus's score for Nureyev's production of Don Quixote. They appointed him their musical director the same year and for a brief time he divided his time between Australia and the Royal Ballet. In 1978 he took up the same post with American Ballet Theatre in New York, where he stayed until 1980, as well as working with other companies all over the world.

All the while he was busy working with choreographers, consulting closely with them to provide scores that matched their dance schemes. He used selections of existing music – usually from the oeuvre of a single composer – orchestrating where necessary, sewing together and composing filler passages for the joins.

The first music he arranged was Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio for John Taras's Design for Strings in 1948, premiered by the Metropolitan Ballet. He collaborated with Ashton on several celebrated creations for the Royal Ballet: La Fille mal gardée (1960), for which he reworked Hérold's score; The Dream (1964), compiling music by Mendelssohn; A Month in the Country (1976), for which he orchestrated selections by Chopin. He arranged music by F. Mompou for MacMillan's House of Birds (1955) and Liszt for the same choreographer's Mayerling (1978) – both for the Royal Ballet.

After Nureyev's Don Quixote (first staged for the Vienna Opera Ballet in 1966), he reworked another Minkus score – this time the La Bayadère score, for Nureyev's 1991 version at the Paris Opera Ballet. He produced many arrangements for Ben Stevenson at the Houston Ballet: for Peer Gynt (1981, Grieg); Dracula (1997, Liszt); The Snow Maiden (1998, Tchaikovsky, a co-production with American Ballet Theatre); and Cleopatra (2000, Rimsky-Korsakov), which came to Sadler's Wells Theatre last year. For another British-born choreographer, Ronald Hynd, he collaborated on The Merry Widow (1975, Lehar) for the Australian Ballet; and Papillon (1979, Offenbach) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1988, Berlioz), both for the Houston Ballet.

However, he does have some original ballet scores to his name: for Michael Holmes's Trio détruit for Metropolitan Ballet and Celia Franca's The Eve of St Agnes for BBC TV. During his gap between the Metropolitan Ballet and Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet, he also composed music for British-made cops-and-robbers films. He returned to the medium in 1971 with Ashton's made-for-film The Tales of Beatrix Potter and in 1977 with The Turning Point, starring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Leslie Browne. In the last decade he wrote scores (which he also conducted) for screenings of two silent classics: D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and John Ford's The Iron Horse.

It was not his conscious choice to be an arranger rather than a composer. "It's come about because it's extremely expensive and troublesome to commission a score from a composer and not many companies do it," he said sanguinely. "For every commissioned score there must be a hundred ballets created to existing music." But, given his appetite for his work as it was, it seems unlikely that he was a frustrated composer manqué. He was, by any standards, tirelessly active and prolific.

Jack Lanchbery was the first foreign conductor to receive the Bolshoi Medal. In 1989 he was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Award from the Royal Academy of Dance. In 1990, he was appointed OBE for his services to music.

Nadine Meisner