Geoffrey Winzer Gilbert (28 May 1914 – 1989) was an English flautist, who was a leading influence on British flute-playing, introducing a more flexible style, based on French techniques, with metal instruments replacing the traditional wood.
After the Second World War Gilbert combined his playing career with teaching, holding appointments at music colleges in London, Manchester, and finally in Florida.
[4] In 1933 Gilbert joined Sir Thomas Beecham's London Philharmonic Orchestra; he was its principal flautist at the age of nineteen.
Gilbert recognised that French players such as Marcel Moyse, who played on metal flutes, could produce a far wider range of tone-colour.
With le Roy's encouragement he bought a Louis Lot silver flute, altered his embouchure and articulation, and mastered the use of vibrato to play in what the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians calls "the flexible and expressive French style".
[4] His students included William Bennett, James Galway, Michael Graubart, Susan Milan, Stephen Preston and Trevor Wye.
[4] In 1948 Gilbert founded the Wigmore Ensemble which brought together leading wind players of that generation including Jack Brymer, Terence MacDonagh and Gwydion Brooke.
[12] Among the recordings on which Gilbert plays are pre-war LPO sets under Beecham, including a series of Mozart symphonies, recorded across several years beginning in 1934,[13] and, with Beecham and the Royal Philharmonic, symphonies by Haydn and Schubert, Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben, works by Delius, and many French pieces, including Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune with its prominent opening flute solo.