Dame Thea King

Thea King, clarinettist: born Hitchin, Hertfordshire 26 December 1925; Professor of Clarinet, Royal College of Music 1961-87; OBE 1985, DBE 2001; Professor, Guildhall School of Music 1988-2007; married 1953 Frederick Thurston (died 1953); died London 26 June 2007.

Thea King was one of Britain's best-loved musicians, a treasured presence on the classical scene for over half a century. As soloist, chamber and orchestral musician and teacher, she influenced two generations of clarinettists; the listeners who enjoyed her playing, in concert, on disc and over the air, must rank in the millions.

Born in Hitchin, Hertfordshire in 1925, the daughter of Henry King, director of a family engineering company, she attended Bedford High School before becoming a student at the Royal College of Music, taking an ARCM in 1944 and 1947. But her musical training began long before her formal education, as she recalled in an interview:

My mother was very musical and taught me the piano as soon as I could read. The clarinet came later, in my final year of school when I was offered the loan of a simple system clarinet in an effort to help start a wind section in the school orchestra. The teacher who had been using it only had time to practise in the evenings, but it gave her indigestion!

The scholarship to the RCM was won by her performance on the piano, which she studied with Arthur Alexander; for the clarinet, her second study, she went to Frederick ("Jack") Thurston, principal clarinet of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from its foundation, in 1930, until 1946, when he left to concentrate on chamber music.

At the Royal College of Music the clarinet was a useful second study to my main line (the piano) and I loved accompanying for Thurston's clarinet students (Gervase de Peyer and Sir Colin Davis among them) and later for Jack himself.

Thurston had been a student of Charles Draper, then still a living link with the clarinet repertoire of an earlier epoch. Draper had premiered the Stanford Concerto in 1903; he died only in 1952, two days short of his 83rd birthday. Thurston inherited Draper's stylistic elegance and vibrato-free playing, passing the legacy on to his own students.

The student-teacher relationship grew into something deeper and in January 1953 King and Thurston got married. But their time together was to be short: he died that December, of cancer. She never remarried.

As Thurston's most prominent student, King was to become in turn a link in the chain, taking what she admired from her teacher ("Most importantly, he taught me that it was possible to play more beautifully and convincingly musically than I had ever dreamed of and that it must take incredible courage and idealism") to forge a style that was distinct and individual, as her colleagues readily acknowledged. Gervase de Peyer (a contemporary of King's at the RCM - indeed, they won their scholarships on the same day) admired her ability both to observe tradition and find her own way:

Her distinguished career and recordings have helped illuminate for all music lovers the breadth of Frederick Thurston's achievement, whilst the depth of her own musicianship and dedication to teaching has inspired many generations of clarinettists.

And her student Colin Bradbury, later principal clarinet of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, felt that she

would readily have been forgiven, after his untimely death, for assuming the role of bearer of the Holy Grail and upholder of a great tradition. Instead she developed her own voice and became the player we hear on recordings, never afraid to experiment and always in search of new ideas.

To begin with, the piano remained her principal focus:

In those days it helped if you played two instruments, however poorly. But slowly the clarinet began to emerge to the point of domination in freelance work, orchestras like Harry Blech's London Mozart Players, the English Chamber Orchestra, chamber music and recitals, all helped by the BBC's Third Programme.

Her first position came when she joined the orchestra of Sadler's Wells in 1950, remaining for two years. They were on tour in Italy at the time and she had had no time for rehearsal, impressing the conductor, Charles Mackerras, with her rapid understanding of the stylistic demands of Italian opera. In 1953 she was one of the founders of the Portia Wind Ensemble, an all- female double wind quintet; in her 13 years with the group it acquired a reputation for adventurous programming and gave a number of important premieres.

It was in 1955 that she joined the London Mozart Players, succeeding de Peyer as principal a year later; she played with the LMP for 18 years. Her enjoyment of chamber music found a public platform in 1974, when she joined the Melos Ensemble, appearing with them until 1993. She also spent periods with the English Chamber Orchestra and the Vesuvius and Robles Ensembles.

In the meantime, her own teaching career had taken off. She joined the staff of her Alma Mater, the RCM, in 1961; leaving the college in 1987, she became professor of clarinet at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1988. The list of her students over those years reads as a roll-call of the most important British clarinettists, from now-senior figures such as Colin Bradbury to the current leaders, David Campbell, Michael Collins and Richard Hosford among them.

Her husband preferred the concert hall to the recording studio and the recorded testaments to his playing are few in number. Thea King, by contrast, was entirely at ease in front of the microphones and developed an impressive track record, first as a broadcast recitalist and then on LP and CD. The very first recording issued by Hyperion, in 1980, was her coupling of the concertos by Stanford (another link with her past) and Finzi, the performances hailed as definitive by The Penguin Guide. BBC Music Magazine hailed its re-issue on CD with unalloyed praise: "Thea King's shaping and colouring of Finzi's almost improvisatory melodic lines is more deeply persuasive than any other recorded version I know."

She went on to make 17 more recordings for Hyperion, her catholic choice of composers running from 18th-century figures such as the Finn Bernhard Crusell and Mozart's student Franz Süssmayr via the standard clarinet classics, Mozart and Brahms, to her contemporaries Malcolm Arnold, Howard Blake, Benjamin Britten (for whom she had played at Aldeburgh in the 1950s and 1960s), Arnold Cooke, Benjamin Frankel, Gordon Jacob, Elizabeth Maconchy, Alan Rawsthorne and Robert Simpson, earning their considerable gratitude - indeed, Blake's Concerto, Frankel's Quintet, Jacob's Mini Concerto and Maconchy's Fantasia are dedicated to her.

King's interest in the early-music movement didn't extend as far as performance (she lacked the time to specialise, she explained) but she readily learned from it, and was one of the first to play the Mozart Concerto and Quintet on a basset horn: "Playing the basset horn in Mozart's divertimenti convinced me that the concerto was written for a clarinet with an extended lower compass." The discovery of Mozart's "Winterthur manuscript" in the early 1960s was soon to prove her right.

Her concert appearances took her all over Britain and Europe and as far afield as Brazil, Japan, Hong Kong and the United States. But she understood the importance of local music-making, by young musicians in particular: she was president of the Letchworth Music Club, which has an active policy of encouraging young talent.

With the ceaseless energy that fuelled her life, she refused to be diverted by age. She continued to play the piano, taking especial pleasure in chamber music. At a centenary concert for her husband in 2001 she played the piano part in John Ireland's Fantasy Sonata - written for him 58 years earlier - and for the BBC she recorded all three parts (clarinet, basset horn and piano) of Mendelssohn's Konzertstück, Op. 114, for broadcast in the Radio 3 series Double Exposure, the title in this instance understating what was on offer. She enjoyed the theatre and confessed a fondness for Sondheim. She edited a number of clarinet works for publication and listed her other enthusiasms as "cows, pillow lace, painting".

Her insatiable curiosity went hand in hand with a natural modesty, so that she served mainstream and minor composers with the same dedication: "There is no need to look far for masterpieces. I'm so lucky to be able to return and get my fingers into superb, but challenging repertoire. The main thing is to live long enough to enjoy it." Making music, she felt, involves "putting ourselves in the shoes of the creator, rather than using the art for our own purposes."

Although her standing was recognised when she was appointed OBE in 1985 and made a Dame in 2001 - she was the first wind-player to earn such distinction - herself she saw merely "as a catalyst, someone who has prompted players to adventure into unusual, though exceptional repertoire."

Martin Anderson

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