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Kenneth Alwyn

Conductor Kenneth Alwyn had distinguished careers in traditional orchestral repertory, film music, and musical theater. He appeared for 30 years on the BBC 2 radio network's Friday Night is Music Night program. Alwyn was born Kenneth Alwyn Wetherell on July 28, 1925, in Croydon, near London, England. Alwyn attended the John Ruskin Boys' Central School (now John Ruskin College) and then served in the Royal Air Force during World War II. In 1947, he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Music, where he studied voice, viola, and organ but then switched to conducting, winning the school's Manns Memorial Prize. He coached organists and opera singers and founded a madrigal choir while at the RAM. Alwyn graduated in 1951 and spent time working for Radio Malaya and conducting a choir in New Zealand before returning to England and taking a conducting post at the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet (now the Birmingham Royal Ballet). He moved to the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden in 1958. The following year, Alwyn conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in a recording of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture that used gunshots to simulate the effect of cannon fire; the recording has been perenially popular, was reissued in 2012 by the Decca label, and remains widely distributed. He conducted all the BBC orchestras at one time or another, and in 1958, he began a 30-year stretch as a presenter on Friday Night is Music Night; he also hosted several other BBC programs and projects. Alwyn toured widely as a guest conductor in four continents and served as conductor of the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra in the 1960s, leading the first Japanese performances of Holst's The Planets. In 1969, he became conductor of the BBC Northern Ireland Orchestra (now the Ulster Orchestra). He was especially visible as a conductor of musical theater productions in London and made numerous original cast recordings, mostly in the 1960s but extending as late as Carousel in 2007. Alwyn made several popular recordings of music by Gilbert & Sullivan. He was also an expert conductor of film music, often in the form of anthologies on recordings, and his The Ladykillers: Music from Those Glorious Ealing Films won a Gramophone Award in 1998. Alwyn conducted all kinds of orchestral music, but he often favored music by Gershwin and Richard Addinsell; he also often championed the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who, he learned, lived on the same street where Alwyn grew up. He recorded a trio of Coleridge-Taylor operas with the Welsh National Opera in 1991. Alwyn was also a composer who wrote music and text for BBC touring productions commemorating the Battle of Britain and the D-Day invasion in World War II. Remaining active well into old age, he issued two volumes of memoirs, A Baton in the Ballet and Other Places (2015) and Is Anyone Watching? (2017). Alwyn died at his home in West Chiltington, Sussex, on December 10 or 11, 2020.
© James Manheim /TiVo
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