The mighty MacDonalds

The first of the musical Malcolm MacDonalds to win my attention was born in Bedford in 1916, taught at the Royal College of Music in London, specialised in wind instruments (for which he composed many works) and was the wittiest of contributos to The Gramophone magazine. The second Malcolm MacDonald, born in Nairn in 1948 and educated at Edinburgh’s Royal High School, was for much of his life a copious, greatly gifted musical biographer, with a broadcasting and journalistic equivalent called Calum MacDonald, contributor to the BBC’s Music Magazine and other programmes. 

The second Malcolm MacDonald died at the age of 66 this week in Gloucestershire, where he had lived after studying at Downing College, Cambridge, and working in London.   Death came on the same day to Calum MacDonald, for they were one and the same person. The nom de plume had been adopted to spread his huge load of musical activities and, it is said, to help to avoid confusion with the first Malcolm MacDonald, also a frequent broadcaster.

I never met either of the Malcolms, though both wrote programme notes for the Edinburgh Festival and overlapped in other ways. But the second felt like a friend because of his outstanding, grippingly written, 500-page biography of Brahms, one of the best in the long-established Master Musician series, which I consulted frequently and relied upon for much of my Btahmsian information. 

He wrote other books as well, of course, including a fine biography of Schoenberg, sadly shorter than his biography of Brahms, and a study of the Scottish composer Ronald Stevenson - someone else upon whom the word copious could be bestowed - as well as scrpulously assembled catalogues of the works of Shostakovich and Dallapiccola. On the other hand, the Ian MacDonald who wrote the admirable 1990 biography of Shostakovich was, so far as I know, someone else (though both of them were born in the same year) and the same can certainly be said for the existence pf my old friend Hugh Macdonald, who was professor of music at Glasgow University in the 1980s, specialised in French composers and edited Berlioz’s letters and the invaluable New Berlioz Edition.

Not all the second Malcom MacDonald’s books were up my street.  His mighty three-volume study of Havergal Brian’s 32 symphonies (21 of which were written after the composer reached the age of 80 and occupied him until he was 92). Though Brian’s vast, and vastly orchestrated, Gothic Symphony (No 1) - a sort of English Mahler  8 - achieved notoriety, I must confess that it was not for me, any more than is the music of the Scottish composer and microtonalist John Foulds (1880-1939), the subject of another MacDonald biography and the composer of a World Requiem performed annually under the auspices of the British Legion at the Royal Albert Hall during the aftermath of the First World War.  

MacDonald’s musical energy - amid much else he edited Tempo, the famous modern-music magazine  - was nevertheless amazing. I am sorry our paths never crossed.

31 May 2014