Star clarinettist and scholar;
Born: September 30, 1938; Died: April 16, 2012.
Alan Hacker, who has died aged 73, was a clarinettist of exceptional ability who joined the London Philharmonic Orchestra while still in his 20s but suffered a spinal thrombosis which confined him to a wheelchair for the rest of his career.
Describing his disability as "not a handicap but just a nuisance" he proved that he could surmount it by founding several chamber ensembles – one of them famously named Matrix, with which he appeared at the Edinburgh Festival – and by establishing himself as a conductor as well as performer.
After winning, as a student, a travelling scholarship which took him to Paris, Bayreuth and Vienna, Hacker employed his wheelchair to keep himself almost constantly on the move.
Not only did he become a professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London but he held lectureships in Leeds and York (where he settled).
But it was as a brilliant player that he was most renowned, inspiring leading British composers, including Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle, to produce major works for him.
His enthusiasm for modern music led to his appointment as chairman of the British section of the International Society for Contemporary Music, though side by side with this he devoted himself assiduously to the world of the classical clarinet and basset horn. On one celebrated Edinburgh occasion he performed his own edition of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto on a deep-toned basset clarinet, bringing out the music's shadows as never before in modern times.
Among the groups he founded were the Music Party, specialising in the authentic performance of 18th-century works, and the Pierrot Players, members of whom took part in the Aldeburgh Festival production of Harrison Birtwistle's querulous opera, Punch and Judy, later brought to Edinburgh and described by one critic as a "bruising, bloodthirsty pantomime".
Before long the Pierrot Players, who built their reputation on performances of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, transformed themselves into the Fires of London, who appeared regularly, under Peter Maxwell Davies's aegis, at the St Magnus Festival in Orkney.
Abroad, he celebrated the Bach/Handel tricentenary with acclaimed stagings of Bach's St John Passion at the Fenice Theatre in Venice and he conducted Mozart's early opera La Finta Giardiniera at the Stuttgart Opera.
His reconstructed edition of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto was published in 1973.
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