Charles Groves

Sir Charles Barnard Groves CBE (10 March 1915 – 20 June 1992) was an English conductor. He was known for the breadth of his repertoire and for encouraging contemporary composers and young conductors.

After accompanying positions and conducting various orchestras and studio work for the BBC, Groves spent a decade as conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. His best-known musical directorship was of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, beginning in 1963, with which he made most of his recordings. From 1967 until his death, Groves was associate conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and in the 1970s he was one of the regular conductors of the Last Night of the Proms. He also served as president of the National Youth Orchestra from 1977, and, during the last decade of his life, as guest conductor for orchestras around the world.

Groves was born in London, the only child of Frederick Groves and Annie (née Whitehead). He was a pupil at St Paul's Cathedral School (where a house is now named after him), singing in the Cathedral choir and, from the age of 13, studying the piano and organ. Music was already important to him as a solace, as he was orphaned at the age of ten – his father having died in 1921 from injuries received in World War I and his mother having died four years later. From 1930 until 1932 he was a pupil at Sutton Valence School, in Kent, where Groves Hall is named in honour of him. After leaving Sutton Valence School he attended the Royal College of Music. There, his main studies were in lieder and accompanying, but he became involved in student opera productions as a répétiteur. He was naturally gifted with great fluency and the ability to sight read almost any music, but confessed, years later, to having been lazy about his piano studies, and he abandoned his ambitions to become a concert pianist. He played in the percussion section for Vaughan Williams's Hugh the Drover and Delius's A Village Romeo and Juliet when Sir Thomas Beecham performed as guest conductor at the College. Groves also went into the conducting class, but did not progress beyond the third orchestra. In 1937, while still a student, he accompanied choral rehearsals of Brahms's German Requiem, Verdi's Requiem and Beethoven's Missa Solemnis under Arturo Toscanini.

...
Wikipedia