Lawrance Collingwood

[3] Appointed organist at St Thomas's Hospital and then at All Saints, Gospel Oak,[1] he studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Exeter College (1907–1911), where he was organ scholar.

[1] After graduating Collingwood returned to England in 1918 to begin military service but went back to Russia and worked for some years as assistant conductor to Albert Coates at the Saint Petersburg Opera.

[1] In England, he built his reputation at first as a composer: his Symphonic Poem (1918) was presented by the Royal College of Music; he himself conducted its professional premiere at the Queen's Hall in 1922, and the work was published as the result of a Carnegie Award.

[1] A recording of excerpts from Collingwood conducting Lohengrin during his Sadler's Wells years survives, with Henry Wendon in the title role, plus Joan Cross and Constance Willis, offering an example his work at the time.

[1] In January 1934, Collingwood conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in a recording of the Triumphal March from Caractacus and the Woodland Interlude by Sir Edward Elgar, supervised by the composer himself by telephone from his sickbed before his death a month later.

[4] Although most of his professional life was spent in Britain, Collingwood travelled to Berlin to supervise recordings by Yehudi Menuhin and Wilhelm Furtwängler, and to oversee the 1956 Meistersinger conducted by Rudolf Kempe.

[1] Collingwood's second opera, The Death of Tintagiles, set to Alfred Sutro's translation of Maurice Maeterlinck's drama, was premiered on 16 April 1950.