Franz Reizenstein

As a composer, he successfully blended the equally strong but very different influences of his primary teachers, Hindemith and Vaughan Williams.

The family was Jewish and counted many professionals, scientists, bankers, and musically inclined people among its members.

Eventually he was sent to study composition under Paul Hindemith and piano under Leonid Kreutzer at the Berliner Hochschule für Musik.

[3] During the 1930s Reizenstein performed as a pianist, making his first public appearance in the UK in April 1935 at the Grotrian Hall.

[6] Its South American rhythms (in the finale) were inspired by an extended tour which he took to Chile and Argentina in 1937, undertaken with another legendary violinist, Roman Totenberg.

At the start of World War II, Reizenstein, as a German, was interned in Central Camp in Douglas, Isle of Man.

[2] He married his wife Margaret Lawson, an English music critic, in 1942, and they had a son, John Reizenstein.

[9] That year he gave the first public performance of his Piano Concerto No 1 with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult.

Like fellow émigré composer Hans Gál, Reizenstein rejected the serial procedures followed by many of his contemporaries and adopted a tonal, expressive style influenced by Vaughan Williams and the English lyrical tradition, tempered with the objectivity and contrapuntal complexity of Hindemith.

23 (1949) of which the critic Lionel Salter wrote in Gramophone in July 1975: It "stands alongside Shostakovich's as the most noteworthy of this century's piano quintets.

A pitched musical battle ensues, dragging in other themes (notably from Rhapsody in Blue, the Warsaw Concerto and the song "Roll Out the Barrel").

The soloist at the premiere was Yvonne Arnaud (otherwise a renowned actress), who had been chosen after Hoffnung's first choice, Eileen Joyce, declined.