Colin Bradbury, who has died aged 90, was the BBC Symphony Orchestra clarinettist whose dazzling cadenza in Sir Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs held audiences breathless at the Last Night of the Proms for many years. He became principal clarinet in the orchestra in 1960, and continued until his retirement in 1993.
During the 1970s, with Pierre Boulez as the principal conductor, the orchestra achieved worldwide prominence. Bradbury described it as “a unique time, musically and orchestrally – a golden age”. Away from the orchestra, he became an outstanding exponent of the clarinet’s lesser-known 19th-century repertory, in recital and on record.
He was born in Blackpool, the younger child of Jim Bradbury, a railway clerk, and his wife, Nellie (nee Cookson), both amateur singers. Encouraged to sing from an early age by his mother (his father died when he was four), Colin began to learn the piano at seven and soon bagged the only B flat clarinet at his primary school. Using his initiative, he worked out the transposition and was soon playing along with the school recorder group.
At Blackpool grammar school he started clarinet lessons with a local semi-professional, Tom Smith, and acquired a pair of simple-system Barret-action Albert clarinets. In 1947 he auditioned for the newly established National Youth Orchestra, becoming a founder member.
His sister Jean went to university, intending to become a teacher, and Colin assumed he would follow. A career in music had not crossed his mind, so when the viola player Bernard Shore came to the second NYO course to talk to young musicians intending to enter the profession, he did not attend. Ruth Railton, director of the NYO, took him for a long walk, four times around the Leys school in Cambridge, where the course was being held, and by the end he was persuaded. She went on to offer him the opportunity to play the Mozart Clarinet Concerto with the NYO at the Edinburgh festival in 1951, on condition that he left school that Easter and began studying with the clarinettist Frederick Thurston.
This he did, missing his A-levels, and started at the Royal College of Music in London in the autumn of 1951, funded by a Blackpool festival scholarship. After a year he left to join the Irish Guards, then returned to the college and completed his national service concurrently with the rest of his music studies. He won the Tagore gold medal for the best male student of his year.
During the summer of 1956 he drove an ice-cream delivery truck to get himself out of debt, having not quite paid for a 22-litre Jaguar with his earnings from a West End run of Summer Song that had folded unexpectedly.
That September, he joined the Sadler’s Wells orchestra as second clarinet, becoming principal in 1957. Playing in the pit was enjoyable, but also “frustrating for an extrovert, conceited character like me, but I learned a great deal”. He married Janet Forbes, the principal flute, in 1959.
During the 1959-60 season he began working with John Carewe and the New Music Ensemble and took part in Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire in the second of the new series of BBC Thursday Invitation Concerts. He was also invited to give some solo recitals for the BBC Home Service; at the first concert he played Seiber’s Andantino Pastorale and the Sonatine by Honegger.
In September 1960 he joined the BBC Symphony Orchestra (BBCSO) as principal clarinet. When the orchestra appointed co-principals in 1963, Bradbury shared the position with Jack Brymer for seven happy years. During that period, with more flexible working hours, he was able to play with other orchestras such as the LSO and the Philharmonia and take part in recordings. He also performed as a soloist, playing the Mozart Concerto, the Nielsen Concerto, the Weber Concertino and the Debussy Première Rhapsodie at the Proms.
During the 70s the structure of the BBCSO was changed and Brymer moved on to the LSO. It was during this period that Bradbury was elected chair of the orchestral committee, representing his fellow players’ interests.
In 1979, Bradbury’s old teacher, Smith, sent him his collection of amusing 19th-century pieces, the sort that the younger Bradbury had been rather snobbish about. Together with the pianist and scholar Oliver Davies, he produced The Victorian Clarinettist – the repertoire of the 19th-century virtuoso Henry Lazarus. This was followed by three more LP records: The Drawing-Room Clarinettist, The Italian Clarinettist and The Edwardian Clarinettist; selections from these LPs were reissued in CD format as The Virtuoso Clarinettist (1990), and The Art of the Clarinettist (1994).
In 1993, Bradbury retired from the BBCSO, and made the CDs The Bel Canto Clarinettist (1996), a sequence of 19th-century opera paraphrases, and The Victorian Clarinet Tradition (1998), linking Bradbury to Lazarus through Lazarus’s pupil Charles Draper, and Draper’s pupil Thurston. An interest in computer music software took Bradbury on to publishing good editions of these 19th-century works under his own imprint, Lazarus Edition.
From 1963 to 2000 he was professor of clarinet at the Royal College of Music, eventually becoming head of woodwind. His greatest joy was the RCM Wind Ensemble. Having no love of wind bands (which add saxophones and brass to woodwinds), he created a Harmonie ensemble – woodwinds and horns, as for the wind music of Mozart – which toured extensively, with visits to Japan and Vienna.
In 1999 he revived an earlier partnership with the pianist Bernard Roberts to record both Brahms sonatas together with the Hindemith Sonata. A review in BBC Music magazine commented: “Bradbury plays in a beautifully natural way without resorting to the forced rubato adopted by some artists in a contrived attempt to be different, and he allows the music to speak for itself.”
Bradbury is survived by Janet and their five children, Keith, Louise, Paul, John and Adrian, and 15 grandchildren.
• Colin Bradbury, clarinettist, born 4 March 1933; died 28 May 2023
