Straddling the disparate worlds of brass band music and contemporary repertory, to both of which he brought discerning expertise, the conductor Elgar Howarth, who has died aged 89, made a noteworthy contribution to both genres.
His education in Manchester, at the university and at the Royal Manchester College of Music (where he studied composition and trumpet), brought him into close proximity with pioneering composers such as Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr. Together with the pianist John Ogdon, they formed the New Music Manchester group in 1953, giving concerts of 12-note or serial pieces unheard elsewhere.
Howarth began his career as a trumpeter at the Royal Opera House, subsequently becoming principal trumpet of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (of which he also became chairman) and appearing regularly with the London Sinfonietta.
He was already making arrangements of works for brass and was one of four trumpeters who performed (in Howarth’s own arrangement) the fanfares for the Beatles’ song Magical Mystery Tour in 1967. He was also, from 1965 to 1976, a key member of the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble, composing and arranging for it as well as playing. In the early 1970s he conducted the RPO in the soundtrack and album of Frank Zappa’s film 200 Motels.
Brass bands with which he worked at this time included the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, of which he was conductor and musical director. The invitation to appear at the BBC Proms, alongside the Black Dyke Mills Band, in 1974, engineered by Howarth, was hailed as a landmark in brass band (and indeed Proms) history, being the first time a brass band had performed at the festival. It was this event perhaps more than any other that established him as a trailblazing force in the tradition-bound world of brass band music.
An unscheduled conducting debut with the London Sinfonietta in Italy in 1969, together with further concert work, led to Howarth’s engagement by György Ligeti to conduct Le Grand Macabre at its premiere at the Royal Stockholm Opera in 1978. He then conducted the same work in Hamburg and Paris and in the ENO production (1982).
He made his Covent Garden debut with Tippett’s King Priam in 1985 and was principal guest conductor (1985–88) and later music adviser (2002–04) to Opera North, where he conducted the first British production of Carl Nielsen’s Maskarade (1990).
He went on to conduct a succession of operas by Birtwistle: The Mask of Orpheus for ENO (1986), Gawain (1991) for the Royal Opera and The Second Mrs Kong (1994) for Glyndebourne Touring Opera. He also brought Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten to ENO in its first British professional production (1996).
His international conducting career additionally embraced classical and Romantic repertoire from Mozart and Rossini to Strauss and Janáček.
Elgar – widely known as Gary – was born in Cannock, Staffordshire, the son of Emma (nee Wall) and Oliver Howarth; he grew up in Eccles in Salford, Greater Manchester, and attended Eccles grammar school. His father, an engineer by profession, was also a brass band conductor who taught Gary the cornet and trumpet. At the age of 10 he joined his father’s ensemble, graduating to principal cornet at the age of 14.
In the early days of the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble, Howarth was a close associate of the eponymous founder. The two were the intrepid soloists in Iain Hamilton’s virtuosic Circus, premiered by the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1969. Howarth played a central role in the development of Jones’s ensemble, making an arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition that received acclaim as worthy to stand beside Ravel’s orchestral version.
Bringing to the task a practitioner’s knowledge and an imaginative grasp of the potential of such a grouping, he produced a score widely viewed as a masterpiece in its own right. The ensemble recorded it in 1978 and its success paved the way for commissions from, or offers of scores by, such major composers as Hans Werner Henze, Toru Takemitsu, Birtwistle, Witold Lutosławski and Richard Rodney Bennett, among others.
Birtwistle’s Grimethorpe Aria, commissioned by the colliery band in 1973, was first performed under the composer’s direction at the Harrogate festival of that year.
Howarth conducted the recording made for Decca three years later. Part of Birtwistle’s series of processionals, Grimethorpe Aria is “pessimistic and bleak in feeling”, in Howarth’s own words, but with magnificently plangent outbursts.
Deploying individual voices rather than the conventional cornet and horn choruses, as well as a characteristically dissonant tonal language, it was not a piece that endeared itself to traditional brass band audiences and Howarth restricted its outings to venues such as the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London.
His own compositions for brass band, many appearing under the anagrammatic pseudonym W Hogarth Lear, were generally more conservative, indeed popular, in their harmonic idiom. Pieces such as Legends, American Dream and Mosaic, for example, won audiences with their combination of virtuosity and affability; many, too, were engagingly jazzy in style.
Fireworks, written as the test piece for the British Open Brass Band Championship at Belle Vue, Manchester, in 1975, was conceived also as “a guide to the brass band for general audiences”, as Howarth put it, after the manner of Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.
Other compositions included a cornet concerto, a scintillating arrangement for brass band of Harry James’s dazzling Trumpet Concerto and a trombone concerto for soloist and orchestra.
In 2002 he became artistic director of the National Youth Brass Band of Great Britain, assuming the presidency from 2006 until his retirement in 2020. His six-volume recording project The History of Brass Band Music surveyed the development of the genre from its beginnings to the present day. His book What a Performance! The Brass Band Plays (1988), co-authored with his son Patrick, is a wide-ranging, entertaining conspectus of the world of brass band music and its quintessential contests.
He married Mary Neary in 1958; she died in 2024. He is survived by their three children, Theresa, Patrick and Maria, and four grandchildren.
• Elgar Howarth, trumpeter, conductor, composer and arranger, born 4 November 1935; died 13 January 2025
