Elgar Howarth (1935 – 2025)
Biography and cause of death of Elgar Howarth
Elgar Howarth (4 November 1935 – January 2025) was an English conductor, composer and trumpeter.
Elgar Howarth Life and career
Elgar Howarth was born in Cannock, Staffordshire, on 4 November 1935. He was educated in the 1950s at University of Manchester and the Royal Manchester College of Music (the predecessor of the Royal Northern College of Music), where his fellow classmates included the composers Harrison Birtwistle, David Ellis, Alexander Goehr, Peter Maxwell Davies and the pianist John Ogdon. Together they formed New Music Manchester, a group dedicated to the performance of new music.
He worked with all leading British orchestras,[like whom?] as well as many orchestras worldwide. He played the opening bars of Tippett’s King Priam at its Coventry premiere in 1962, conducting the whole work years later for English National Opera. He conducted many operas, and premiered György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre at the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm in 1978 and four operas by Harrison Birtwistle:
The Mask of Orpheus at English National Opera (1986), Yan Tan Tethera for Opera Factory (1986), Gawain at the Royal Ballet and Opera in London (1991) and The Second Mrs Kong at Glyndebourne (1994). He was Principal Guest Conductor of Opera North from 1985 to 1988, and Music Advisor to the company from 2002 to 2004.
Elgar Howarth (centered) conducting the London Symphony Orchestra at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano in 2008
As a composer and former trumpet player, he wrote mainly for brass instruments. Swedish trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger premiered several of his works on cornet, including his Cornet Concerto, Canto, and Capriccio.
He wrote arrangements such as The Carnival of Venice Variations for brass ensemble and Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition arranged for Philip Jones Brass Ensemble (Howarth himself participated in this group as a player and conductor). Composer Roy Newsome remarked that “Howarth’s masterly rendition of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (1979) dwarfed all previous transcriptions.”
He was brought up in a brass band family and maintained his interest in the art form. Howarth made a huge contribution to the modern repertoire of brass band music. Many of his works are recorded, most notably by the Grimethorpe Colliery Band and the Eikanger-Bjørsvik band. He also was one of the trumpeters who performed with The Beatles on the song “Magical Mystery Tour”.
A number of personal copies of works he conducted (some including annotations) are catalogued at the University of East Anglia’s School of Music.
In December 2003, he was revealed to have rejected a CBE. In January 2025, Howarth died at the age of 89.
Source: Wikipedia