My friend and mentor Gerald Larner, who has died aged 82, was a music critic for the Guardian and the Times as well as being a mover and shaker in the world of classical music, including as a festival director, a librettist and a writer of many album sleeve notes.
Born in Leeds to Clifford, a local government official, and his wife, Minnie (nee Barraclough), he was educated at Leeds Modern school and then won a scholarship to study modern languages at New College, Oxford, which he did after first undertaking national service with the Royal Air Force.
Having met Celia White at Oxford, in 1959 he married her. Twelve months later, moving to the north-west, Gerald took up an appointment as an assistant lecturer in German at the University of Manchester, where he also began his lengthy period writing for the Guardian, leaving academia to become its northern music critic in 1965.
While performing that role he was commissioned by the Manchester Cathedral festival to create a libretto for the composer John McCabe’s first stage venture, a setting of CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. First performed by the pupils of Chetham’s school in 1969, everyone had high hopes for its future. However, following the acquisition of the rights to Lewis’s book by Walt Disney, the work could no longer be performed.
In 1979 he and Celia, who were avid collectors of anything to do with the Glasgow school of design, jointly wrote a book on the subject, entitled The Glasgow Style.
Alongside his Guardian work, Gerald served as artistic director of the Bowdon festival from 1980 until 1984, and also regularly contributed a wealth of finely written critiques to the Listener, Gramophone and the Musical Times.
Similarly his sleeve notes graced the catalogues of all the major record labels. He translated Hugo Wolf’s comic opera Der Corregidor into English and wrote a book on the French composer, Maurice Ravel (1996). His final period as a critic was with the Times (1993-2001).
Divorced in 1987, two years later Gerald married Lynne Walker, then the marketing manager for the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester. Together, based in Cheshire, they ran a successful arts consultancy that provided programme notes for concert halls and festivals.
Lynne died in 2011. He is survived by the two daughters from his first marriage, Alice and Melissa.
