The old Open University fanfare was long a familiar sound in any household where a television was switched on at a strange time of day or night.
Few people knew, however, that the signature motif had been lifted from a larger piece: the Divertimento for three trumpets and three trombones by the composer Leonard Salzedo (1921-2000).
Now there’s a rare chance to hear more of it and its composer. Marking Salzedo’s centenary this month, his daughter Caroline Salzedo and the Leonard Salzedo Society have organised a concert at London’s Conway Hall devoted to this long-neglected composer’s works.
Leonard Salzedo's 75th birthday concert
Ironically, when the fanfare was taken up for the Open University, Salzedo himself had no idea it was in the offing. “His mother heard it and rang him up,” Caroline says. “They’d obviously found this piece, liked it and decided to use it, but never told him.”
Salzedo, who was born in London, enjoyed a vivid and varied musical career. After studying at the Royal College of Music in the 1940s, where his composition teachers included Herbert Howells and Gordon Jacob, he worked for many years as a violinist in first the London Philharmonic and later the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, also assisting Sir Thomas Beecham in the latter.
As conductor and composer, he was long associated with ballet and the Ballet Rambert in particular. After his String Quartet No. 1 won the Cobbett Prize in 1942, his second work in the genre convinced Marie Rambert to commission a ballet, The Fugitive, which her company then performed hundreds of times.
“He used to say that if you want to hear your work played more than once, write a ballet,” Caroline comments. He wrote 17 of them, the best known being The Witch Boy, premiered in Amsterdam in 1956.
Such was its success that Salzedo made a concert suite from it which also clocked up hundreds of performances. He worked over the years as music director of the Ballet Rambert, then for further companies including Scottish Ballet, Ballets Nègre (established after the Second World War to draw upon the talents of Caribbean immigrants) and finally London City Ballet.
Salzedo’s Sephardi roots proved a crucial influence. The Salzedo family can trace its origins back to Sephardi Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition in 1492. They settled in Amsterdam, until in the 1850s when Leonard’s grandfather left for London and set up home in Whitechapel.
Leonard Salzedo as a child with mother Edna
Here Leonard’s father, Sam, was born. With a penchant for languages, he became a translator and interpreter, working in Russia and during the First World War in Rome. Aged 48, he married a woman more than 25 years his junior, and here the plot thickens.
“After his barmitzvah Sam told his family he thought religion was superstitious nonsense,” says Caroline.
“But he could never quite let it go. He married Edna, who was not Jewish; Sam’s sisters, when they met her, liked her and asked if she would convert. She was happy to, but Sam wouldn’t hear of it.
"On the wedding day, she went to Hackney Register Office, but Sam never showed up. His sisters had locked him in his room! He was 48 years old!” Sam, with foresight, had cleverly booked a wedding slot for the next day as well. Soon the happy couple were on their way to their Paris honeymoon, if 24 hours late.
The only child of Sam and Edna, Salzedo appears to have inherited some of his father’s spiritual and religious inner conflicts.
“That Sephardic inheritance was very important to him,” Caroline confirms. Salzedo taught himself Spanish, owned many books of Spanish poetry and enjoyed researching the Spanish and Jewish elements of his heritage, his interests extending to the Kabbalah.
Leonard Salzedo composing at the desk he built for himself
“He wasn’t brought up with religion, yet he had a spiritual side. Many of his pieces reflect those Spanish and Jewish influences, that modal musical language,” says Caroline.
The critic Guy Rickards has written: “Salzedo’s music was well crafted, expertly orchestrated and bore an innate Iberian sense of colour and rhythm that — with his love of dance — became the cornerstones of his art from the very start.’
Nevertheless, he was of a generation of composers who had to battle for recognition in an era when new “tonal” music was largely frowned upon (though notably not by audiences).
His output was gigantic: over 140 opus numbers plus 18 film scores, incidental music for theatre productions, numerous arrangements for ballet.
There were two symphonies, a Stabat Mater, 10 string quartets and concertos for instruments ranging from the violin to more unusual presences such as the oboe d’amore.
And in 1989 Salzedo wrote a huge orchestral piece entitled Requiem Sine Voxibus (Requiem without Voices) — “He considered it his masterpiece,” Caroline says. Tragically, he never heard it played.
Indeed, despite many commissions, Caroline estimates that around half of her father’s works have never been performed. “In the 1950s he felt he’d fallen foul of the Radio 3 ‘reading panel’,” she relates.
“Once Sir Thomas Beecham tried to get a piece of Leonard’s played, but the reading panel hadn’t accepted it. Beecham thought his own musical judgment ought to be enough, but it wasn’t. This happened to quite a few other composers as well.”
Salzedo, she says, often seemed a reserved and self-critical person. “He spoke through his music; he wasn’t a great communicator with words.
"My mum, Patricia, was incredibly gregarious, so when they went to parties Mum would be chatting, while Dad would be sitting quietly somewhere, thinking about a piece he was going to compose.
"But he also had a fabulous sense of humour and he was a marvellous raconteur. After dinner he’d talk away happily about music and all the musicians he’d met. He was lovely,” she adds. “I miss him.”
The Conway Hall concert falls on Salzedo’s centenary, September 24, and begins — as it had to, really — with the Divertimento, with the Fine Arts Brass Ensemble.
The pianist Viv McLean performs extracts from The Fugitive and Ladinos; mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean and baritone Geoff Williams present examples of Salzedo’s solo songs; and violist Richard Crabtree performs the Viola Concerto which Salzedo wrote for him, accompanied by an ensemble from Trinity Laban conducted by family friend Leslie Howard.
It promises to be an emotive evening. And if it kick-starts a revival of interest in Salzedo’s music, so much the better.
Leonard Salzedo Celebration Concert, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL, September 24, 6pm. eventbrite.co.uk/e/leonard-salzedo-celebration-concert-tickets-312186908447
