Nigel Brown, financial services entrepreneur who enabled Nigel Kennedy to acquire his first Stradivarius violin – obituary

Nigel Brown, who has died aged 77, was a successful investment manager who in 1985 arranged for the violinist Nigel Kennedy to purchase his first Stradivarius violin; this led to the creation of the Stradivari Trust, which has since helped to provide high-value instruments for many of the country’s leading classical musicians including the cellist Steven Isserlis, the violinist Jennifer Pike and the viola player Lawrence Power.

Brown first met Kennedy when the violinist was seeking a mortgage and asked why he was using a borrowed instrument and why no one had bought him a Strad. “Nobody’s offered, mate,” came the reply. “So I said, ‘Oh, I’ll find somebody’,” Brown recalled. It took a couple of years, but eventually he found a sponsor to buy a golden-period Stradivarius known as “La Cathédrale” from 1707 at a cost of £370,000.

“I knew that Jacqueline du Pré had been given the ‘Davidov’ Strad, that Anne-Sophie Mutter had received the ‘Emiliani’, that Pinchas Zukerman had got the ‘Dushkin’ Guarneri, and so on,” Brown told The Strad magazine in 2009. “I thought that’s how it must operate: a promising talent came along and a benign patron duly appeared.”

The deal was structured in the form of 100 shares in the instrument, similar to that of a racehorse syndicate – though unlike racehorses, violins tend to last hundreds of years and musicians take great care of them. The instrument was revalued each year and Kennedy agreed to buy back the shares gradually at their latest value, rewarding the backers with both a return on their capital and the satisfaction of having launched an important career.

At first the one-time enfant terrible of classical music was hesitant, fearing that it would take him 100 years to become the outright owner of the violin. Eventually he bought into the scheme and within three years owned 10 per cent. By the 1990s he had full ownership.

Before long, Brown had “a queue of musicians knocking on my door” clamouring for a similar arrangement and the Stradivari Trust was born. Its first deal was to provide a Carlo Bergonzi 1744 violin for the Scottish violinist Lorraine McAslan with the help of 10 investors, though Brown preferred the term contributors. “This is not a charitable exercise,” he told them. “You will get to own a bit of the instrument and what’s more the musician will do their best to buy you out. But they will have to buy you out at the going price.”

To date the trust has organised more than 60 instrument-buying schemes for musicians including the cellist Natalie Clein, the violinist Christopher Warren-Green and members of the Endellion String Quartet. The average syndicate lasts about 20 years and several musicians have successfully bought out their backers. “I believe that the musician should own their own instrument,” Brown told the Tarisio website. “It’s also eventually their pension scheme. It’s an old-fashioned idea, but hey, you know this is a good thing.”

Nigel Wooldridge Brown was born in Warwick on October 1 1945, the younger of two children of Oliver Brown and his wife Reina (née Kimberlin). He started to play the violin aged six, a hobby he retained throughout his life.

He was educated at Warwick School, read Medieval History at St Andrews University and worked for four years as a trainee jobber with the City of London stockbrokers Akroyd & Smithers before joining the insurance broker JD Ward & Co.

He told how in 1971 his “eyes nearly popped out” when Sotheby’s sold the “Lady Blunt” Stradivarius, once owned by and named after Lord Byron’s granddaughter, for a record £84,000 (it sold again in 2011 for a new record of £9.8 million). Soon he was attending auctions, examining instruments and collecting catalogues and books on the subject.

In 1974 he founded the NW Brown Group in Cambridge, providing financial services including investment management, stockbroking, pensions, financial planning, insurance and corporate investment. One day a client introduced him to Kennedy, whom he later helped a second time by arranging for the violinist to acquire the “del Gesu” Guarneri (c. 1785).

Meanwhile, Brown became involved in other aspects of artistic life, including helping to create the agent Hazard Chase in 1990, providing musicians with management and financial services. He founded the arts-funding organisation ArtShare, chaired Cambridge Arts Theatre, was involved in setting up the Britten Sinfonia and was a supporter of Cambridge Music Festival.

He retired from financial services in 2007 but his philanthropy continued, in music and elsewhere. He created a motorcycle endurance team that competed across Europe, was a worldwide representative of the Cambridge real tennis team and served as chairman of Cambridge Citizens Advice Bureau. He also had interests in wine and photography.

In 2004 Brown received an honorary doctorate from Anglia Ruskin University, where he was deputy chairman of the board of governors. He won an individual Queen’s Award for Enterprise Support in 2007 and was appointed OBE in 2008.

Nigel Brown’s wife, Fiona, died in 2001 and he is survived by a son.

Nigel Brown, born October 1 1945, died January 19 2023