Alan Lumsden, wide-ranging expert on rare musical instruments – obituary
Alan Lumsden, who has died aged 86, was a specialist in early brass and woodwind instruments, including the 8ft-long serpent, a bass instrument so-called because of its three U-shaped turns; he was also an expert on 16th-century musical ornamentation and 20th-century Russian music, a calling that once brought him a suspended sentence of three years’ hard labour in Siberia.
As a young graduate Lumsden translated Russian music catalogues for Musica Rara, a London music shop. With their encouragement he made three visits to the country, on each occasion wearing 15 Marks & Spencer shirts, a valued commodity in the USSR. These would be removed one by one to exchange for rare musical scores; C&A underwear was also popular.
Emboldened, on his third visit Lumsden took a pair of suitcases stuffed with contraband. He recalled laying them out in a little shop with the Closed sign displayed “when the door crashed open, the place filled with police, and they pulled down all the blinds”. The legal process was swift: he was removed from the country and told never to return.
Lumsden had a passion for music in all its forms, the more obscure the better. He was professor of sackbut at the Royal College of Music and the first person to record on the ophicleide, an 18th-century U-shaped brass instrument which supplanted the serpent.
His children recalled his tales of playing the ocarina, an egg-shaped wind instrument with finger holes and a mouthpiece, while hanging from wires wearing a nude body stocking for a Shakespeare staging, and he can be heard playing the serpent on the Ridley Scott film Alien. (1979).
He had hopes of appearing in Guinness World Records for playing the greatest number of brass and wind instruments (115) in the fastest time, but was dismayed to be beaten by another musician who, unfairly in Lumsden’s eyes, did so by playing fewer notes.
Alan Frederick Lumsden was born at Kingston on April 17 1934, the fourth of six children of Archibald and Dorothy “Dolly” Lumsden (née Vincent), licensees of the Bricklayers Arms. He was educated at the Licensed Victuallers School, where one of his teachers had been a trombone player and offered young Alan his instrument; it was his to keep if he completed the tutor book by the end of term.
He moved to Tiffin School, Kingston, embracing its fine brass and wind bands. Soon he was using the proceeds from his paper round to buy old instruments from a junk shop, including a fine 18th-century flute on which he taught himself to play Mozart.
During National Service at the height of the Cold War he learnt Russian and was an interpreter at the Admiralty. He read history at Downing College, Cambridge, playing saxophone in a university dance band, and later gave talks for the BBC Russian service about music in the UK. Once he played Gertrude in a Russian-language Hamlet.
His father died when he was 21 and, because women were not allowed to be sole licensees, he returned to the pub until his mother retired. He discovered the Third Programme while peeling potatoes for 50 lunches on Sunday mornings.
After his first visit to Russia he was asked by Musical Times to translate an article from Sovetskaya Muzyka about the premiere of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No 8 (1960) that shed light on composer’s fragile state of mind at the time. He remained passionate about Russian culture, berating his children for reading War and Peace in English, saying that too much is lost in translation.
After his Russian adventures Lumsden found work as a trombonist with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, where he had his first formal lessons on the instrument. This led to work with other ensembles, including the London Brass Consort, with whom he gave the first London performances of trombone concertos by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Ernest Bloch and Kazimierz Serocki.
He appeared at the Proms with Musica Reservata and the Early Music Consort, and joined the London Serpent Trio with Andrew van der Beck and Christopher Monk, the three of them performing in tailcoats and cravats.
In 1972 he played serpent in the world premiere of Peter Maxwell Davies’s opera Taverner at Covent Garden. He was also heard at the first International Serpent Festival in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1989.
Lumsden enjoyed teaching, giving brass lessons at Ashmole School, Southgate, and later running the school’s music department. In 1978 he was visiting early music specialist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, and in 1981 moved to Beauchamp House at Churcham, Gloucestershire, where his wife Caroline, a violinist, started the Beauchamp Music Group involving hundreds of local children.
Meanwhile, Lumsden was professor of recorder and early music studies at the Birmingham Conservatoire and taught brass at Malvern College. He also adjudicated at competitions around the world and continued his early music research, publishing more than 500 editions of early works under the Beauchamp Press imprint.
Lumsden, who had piercing blue eyes, never understood boredom – or Blind Date. He preferred to watch Ally McBeal and would weep at emotional films, especially “rom-coms”. He always used far too much toothpaste, and to watch him brushing his teeth was like observing a foamy horror show.
Thirty years ago he and Caroline fulfilled a longstanding dream of moving to France, where as well as their publishing they ran a holiday gîtes business in the Charente-Maritime. During the off-season he invited choirs to use the cottages, arranging concerts for them in local churches. He returned to Gloucestershire in 2012 after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.
Alan Lumsden married Caroline Hewitt-Jones in 1973. On their wedding night he performed an ophicleide solo at the Aldeburgh Festival. She survives him with three daughters and a son.
Alan Lumsden, born April 17 1934, died September 30 2020
