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Gervase de Peyer, master of the clarinet – obituary
Gervase de Peyer, who has died aged 90, was one of the great postwar clarinet players, whose distinctive tone, breathtaking phrasing and delicate shaping of the music made him a favourite with conductors, audiences and critics alike. He enjoyed a distinguished career as a soloist, co-founded the Melos Ensemble and was principal clarinet of the London Symphony Orchestra for 17 years before moving to New York in the 1970s.
De Peyer was involved in early performances of many significant works, including concertos by Aaron Copland, Paul Hindemith and Francis Poulenc. In 1954, after his performance of Mátyás Seiber’s Concertino for clarinet and strings with Raymond Leppard’s chamber orchestra at the Wigmore Hall, one critic wrote that “much of the immediate success of the work must be attributed to Mr Gervase de Peyer’s brilliant and pliably phrased playing”.
Gervase Alan de Peyer was born in London on April 11 1926, the son of Everard de Peyer, who was of Swiss descent, and his wife Edith (née Bartlett). He grew up in an artistic milieu: both his parents were professional singers and the painter Laura Knight (whose house in St John’s Wood he later lived in) was a family friend.
He was educated at the King Alfred School, Hampstead, and at Bedales, where he excelled at tennis and showed promise at the keyboard. But the school needed wind players and he was asked to choose between flute, oboe, clarinet or bassoon. By this time he had already appeared at the Wigmore Hall in the annual concert given by pupils of Mabel Floyd, his piano teacher.
De Peyer was 16 when he gave his first BBC broadcast of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, probably the most popular work in the repertoire. Although he performed it countless times, he worked hard to keep it fresh.
He won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where he studied clarinet with Frederick Thurston, piano with Arthur Alexander and harmony with Ralph Vaughan Williams. He joined the Royal Marines’ Band Service and was based at Scarborough. In 1945 he was sent in a troop ship to Japan, but when it reached Ceylon news was waiting that the war in the Far East was over. He was called upon to provide entertainment for the ensuing celebrations in the officers’ mess. “There I was with an upright piano, and three musicians who had no music,” he recalled. “I drank myself out of the Japanese war… I think I was carried back to the barracks.”
Back in London de Peyer was offered work with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Sir Thomas Beecham, and soon he was immersed in the freelance world from which emerged in 1950 the Melos Ensemble, a group of London’s finest chamber musicians. He played with the London Mozart Players and joined the London Symphony Orchestra under Josef Krips in 1956, about the same time as Neville Marriner on violin. He made his Proms debut the same year, one of 12 appearances.
On one occasion in 1967 Jacqueline du Pré was due to record Brahms cello sonatas at Abbey Road studios with Daniel Barenboim, but she was unwell and cancelled. Anxious not to lose the studio space the producers called de Peyer, who promptly recorded the composer’s clarinet sonatas instead with Barenboim, the disc receiving enthusiastic reviews. Later de Peyer, Barenboim and du Pré filmed a television cycle of Brahms’s music.
De Peyer was soon invited to play with the newly formed Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Centre, New York, and after several years of commuting between London and the US he left the LSO in 1972 and settled in New York. He returned to Britain in 1989, becoming a popular teacher. When the internet age dawned de Peyer set up his first website, declaring himself to be “the world’s most recorded clarinettist”.
He recalled playing in the orchestra for a BBC studio recording and noticing that Poulenc, who was the soloist in his own piano concerto, was wearing slippers. The ageing pianist-composer explained that he practised at home in slippers and “so when I come to sit for the concert it is so very different without my slippers, so I decided I will still play in my slippers”.
He was a good friend of Benny Goodman’s, who had introduced himself backstage after de Peyer had taken part in a performance of Stanley Silverman’s Homage to Django Reinhardt in New York. They became regular patrons of Oscar’s Salt of the Sea, a restaurant on the Upper East Side.
De Peyer married, first, Sylvia Southcombe, a pianist, in 1950 and, secondly, Susan Daniel, a mezzo-soprano, in 1971. Both marriages were dissolved and in 1980 he married Katia Aubry, who survives him with a son and two daughters from his first marriage.
Gervase de Peyer, born April 11 1926, died February 3 2017