This is the first study of the life and music of Balfour Gardiner (1877 1950), a composer of some distinction and a generous patron of British music. But it is necessarily more than the story of just one man: it is an account of many friendships (chiefly musical) during that exciting period of British music's struggle out of mediocrity to prominence. It was Balfour Gardiner who, before the First World War, launched in Queen's Hall a remarkable series of concerts that did much to establish the reputations of several young composers. It was he, too, who made possible in a war-torn England the...

To the economist and ballet enthusiast John Maynard Keynes he was potentially the most brilliant man he'd ever met; to Dame Ninette de Valois he was the greatest ballet conductor and advisor this country has ever had; to the composer Denis ApIvor he was the greatest, most lovable, and most entertaining personality of the musical world; whilst to the dance critic Clement Crisp he was quite simply a musician of genius. Yet sixty years after his tragic early death Constant Lambert is little known today. As a composer he is remembered for his jazz-inspired The Rio Grande but little more, and for...