Sir – The multi-gifted Lina Lalandi died on June 8, aged 92 and deserves to be memorialised here in Oxford. A harpsichordist, clavichordist and singer of distinction, in 1962 La Lalandi founded with Jack Westrop, then Oxford's Heather Professor of Music, the Oxford English Bach Festival, which ranged over centuries of music, as often as possible performed by the likes of Frans Bruggen on authentic instruments for the early music and full cycle to the latest and best of 20th-century composers in Messiaen, Xenakis, Skalkottas, Berio, Varese and so the list ran on. For those who remember the extraordinary programmes Lalandi and Westrup created here in Oxford, it was a matter of deep loss when in the late 1960s the festival had to move its locus from Oxford to London, primarily because then (as now) Oxford lacked a suitable performance space for large-scale orchestral works, not favoured acoustically by Oxford Town Hall, the Sheldonian or the New Theatre . On June 28, 1967, Charles Bruck conducted Messiaen's Turangalila-Symphonie in Oxford Town Hall, with the composer in attendance. At the concert's end I tentatively approached Messiaen for my programme to be autographed by him and nervously remarked that the Town Hall acoustics had not done his great work justice, to which he nodded and smiled. For me, this was truly a Bach or Mozart encounter, yet within a few years Messiaen's music at La Lalandi's festivals (Jack Westrup stood down as co-director in 1971) was performed exclusively in London. In these difficult times a concert hall for Oxford, preferably named for Lina Lalandi, cannot be a priority, any more than it was in 1944-45 when the then Oxford-based Rudolf Bing approached the university and its colleges, as well as Oxford City Council , about the possibility of establishing post-war an “arts festival of European unity”. The university, which at that time didn't recognise music as a subject fit for an honours school, was disdainful, the colleges preoccupied and the city council busy with housing problems (etc.). In 1946 Rudolf Bing went north to Scotland and a year later directed his first Edinburgh Festival.

 

Bruce Ross-Smith Headington