My friend Robert Layton, who has died aged 90, was a musicologist and Radio 3 producer for more than 30 years. He specialised in Scandinavian music and wrote biographies of Sibelius and the Swedish composer Franz Berwald.
Bob was born in Chadwell Heath, east London, the younger child of Edward Layton, a stockbroker, and his wife, Rhoda (nee Aaron), a homemaker. He learned the piano from the age of nine, and excelled at it by the time he was 11. When he was 17 he gave a broadcast performance of Ravel’s Jeux d’Eau on the BBC Third Programme.
I first met Bob at Barking Abbey grammar school when I was 13 and he 16. We became firm friends. While at school, through a course in music appreciation given by the composer Robert Simpson, Bob became interested in the works of the Danish composer Carl Nielsen. This led to his lifelong specialism in Scandinavian music.
Bob studied music at Worcester College, Oxford, under the composers Edmund Rubbra and Egon Wellesz, graduating in 1953. He then went to Sweden, where he learned the language and studied further at the universities of Uppsala and Stockholm.
His Swedish was impressive. I was with him in his flat one day when he was phoned by Swedish radio and asked to talk about Sir Thomas Beecham, who had died. He spoke off the cuff for several minutes fluently in Swedish.
After three years as a music teacher at schools in Hackney, east London, in 1959 he joined the BBC as a producer, at first on music presentation and from 1961 on music talks. He became a senior producer in 1982, oversaw the lunchtime concerts from St John’s Smith Square and served as general editor of the BBC Music Guides series (1974–90).
After retiring from the BBC in 1990, Bob wrote for the Gramophone magazine and co-authored the Penguin Guide to Compact Discs. He translated the 3rd volume of Erik Tawaststjerna’s study of Sibelius’s life and music (1997) and co-edited A Guide to the Symphony (1996).
Bob had a mischievous sense of humour. In one of his articles on Scandinavian composers for the 1980 edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians he included a fictitious composer, “Esrum-Hellerup”. He was found out, he later explained, by a Danish musicologist who tried to look up Esrum-Hellerup’s birth certificate. “I did it purely out of a sense of fun, a spoof of scholarship,” he later told the New York Times. Esrum and Hellerup are actually two small towns near Copenhagen.
He was made a Knight of the Order of the White Rose of Finland in 1988 and was awarded the Royal Order of the Polar Star by Sweden in 2001.
Bob is survived by his long-term partner, Chuan Chiam.
