John Linton Gardner, CBE (2 March 1917 – 12 December 2011) was an English composer of classical music.
His father Alfred Linton Gardner (born 1882, Ilfracombe died 10 April 1918, France) was a local physician and amateur composer who was killed in action in the First World War.
[1][2] An important figure in his early life was Hubert J. Foss of Oxford University Press, who published the Intermezzo for Organ in 1936 and introduced him to the composer Arthur Benjamin, to whom Gardner dedicated his Rhapsody for Oboe and String Quartet (1935).
1 (1938) was broadcast from Paris by the Blech Quartet in 1939, and the anthem The Holy Son of God most High (1938) was also published by OUP.
Demobilisation, therefore, came as a blessed chance to write at length, which is what I did during the bitter Winter of 1946–7 on those evenings when I did not have to be in attendance at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where I earned my living as a repetiteur.
In June 1947 I reached the end of the fair full score, put it aside and began to write an opera that never got performed.
([4])Gardner regarded the end of the War as a new start, set aside his juvenile works (of which nearly 100 have survived in manuscript) and began again from Opus 1.
He re-wrote A Scots Overture, previously a military band piece, for the 1954 season of Promenade Concerts in 1954.
In May 1957 Sadler's Wells put on the opera The Moon and Sixpence, which they had commissioned, and two other major works were premiered that year, the Piano Concerto No.
In 1956 he was invited by Thomas Armstrong to join the staff of the Royal Academy of Music, where he would teach for the best part of thirty years.
Among the major works are two more symphonies, two more operas – The Visitors (1972) and Tobermory (1976), concertos for Trumpet, Flute, Oboe and Recorder and Bassoon, many cantatas, including The Ballad of the White Horse, Op.
RAM) in 1959; a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1976; and an Honorary Member of the Royal Philharmonic Society in 1997, the year of his eightieth birthday.
David Lloyd-Jones conducted the Royal Scottish National Orchestra with Peter Donohoe as the solo pianist.