Felix Aprahamian
[2] In 1931, at the age of seventeen, Aprahamian became assistant secretary to the Organ Music Society, and he developed into a proficient keyboard player.
He began an extensive correspondence with musicians in Britain, France and elsewhere, which he preserved (along with diaries and notebooks) in a continually expanding archive in his family home.
[2] He was soon in correspondence with leading French musicians of the day such as André Marchal, Charles Tournemire, Maurice Durufle and the young Olivier Messiaen, and made arrangements for their visits to London.
[2] In 1933 he and two friends visited Frederick Delius at Grez-sur-Loing, and on the same trip he sat in an organ loft alongside Charles-Marie Widor, the doyen of French organists, incumbent at Saint-Sulpice, Paris, for 63 years.
Among the artists whom he successfully invited to appear at these concerts were Benjamin Britten, Reginald Goodall, Peter Pears, Maggie Teyte and Michael Tippett; after the liberation of Paris in 1944 many French musicians also performed in the series, including – as well as Poulenc and Messiaen – Pierre Bernac, Henri Dutilleux, Pierre Fournier, Maurice Gendron, Yvonne Loriod, Ginette Neveu, Gérard Souzay and Jacques Thibaud.
[4] As Beecham's informal assistant, Aprahamian employed a comprehensive knowledge of the French musical scene when the conductor was preparing to record Gounod's Faust in 1947.
Beecham would not accept the British recording company's choice of soloists, and he sent Aprahamian to Paris to assemble an ideal French cast.
When he joined the paper its long-standing chief music critic was Ernest Newman, of whose essays Aprahamian edited two volumes, published in 1956 and 1958.
[1] He was commemorated by his friend and colleague John Amis: In 1994 Aprahamian was made an honorary member of the Royal Philharmonic Society, the first music critic to receive that accolade.
Aprahamian never wrote his planned autobiography, but in 2023 Lewis Foreman and his wife Susan produced an annotated volume of his diaries and essays.
