John Amis

Died: August 1, 2013

John Amis, who has died aged 91, was the wittiest - and one of the wiliest - of music critics, who for a time operated a secret syndicate whereby he wrote under his own name as London music critic of the Scotsman but regularly traded places with Malcolm Rayment, who held the equivalent post on The Herald and whose identity John sometimes assumed.

Swapping duties enabled each of them to reduce his quantity of assignments, but the deception ended when Malcolm moved to Glasgow to become The Herald's first staff music critic, in which role he served as Michael Tumelty's predecessor.

That the ruse - presumably a sackable offence - was never discovered showed how adeptly each of them concealed the truth.

But John Amis's career, founded on an exceptional knowledge of music and a limitless range of contacts, could be said always to have had the air of a conjuror about it.

Born in Dulwich, he was the son of a merchant banker and a Harrods model, as well as being a cousin of the often prankish novelist and poet Kingsley Amis.

Side-stepping war service because he was found to be totally deaf in one ear, he was engaged by EMG Handmade Gramophones to sell records in their London shop and numbered Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell, TS Eliot, Peter Ustinov, Vivien Leigh and Felix Aprahamian of the Sunday Times among his friends and customers. When EMG decided to dispense with his services, Aprahamian arranged for him to become secretary of the London Philharmonic Arts Club, through which he met the composer Michael Tippett and the BBC's director of music William Glock.

By 1947, he was working for Sir Thomas Beecham's new-minted Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (having helped Dame Myra Hess to organise her famous wartime piano recitals at the National Gallery) and by 1959, at the age of 37, he was receiving fortnightly singing lessons in Germany and Switzerland in the hope of becoming a Wagnerian heldentenor.

Since he was an enormous man the idea did not seem entirely implausible, and when, as a junior critic, I first arranged to meet him after the premiere of Britten's War Requiem in Coventry, he said I would identify him in the hotel bar through his sheer size.

However, his singing career, to his disappointment, quickly shrank. Invited to give an audition at the Graz Opera House in Austria, he was interrupted in mid-song by the director of the company with the words: "Do I understand that you have done music criticism? Why don't you stick to it?"

Having by then worked as a pianist and lecturer at the Bryanston and Dartington summer music schools in England, he was never more than a part-time critic, though I did once hear him sing (very cautiously) the role of the Emperor in a production of Puccini's Turandot at Haddo House in Aberdeenshire.

Partnering Donald Swann in the Flanders-and-Swann stage duo, following the death of Michael Flanders, suited him better, as did his work as a panellist on the BBC programme My Music, with Frank Muir, Denis Norden and Ian Wallace as other members of the team.

As a contributor to the Sunday morning radio series Music Magazine, he proved himself a wise and natural broadcaster.

He made many television documentaries, one of them a celebration of Sir William Walton's 70th birthday. His racy radio and TV slot, entitled Music Now - a special Scottish edition of which he called Music the Noo - was a marvel of confidently improvised interviewing.

Invited once to join him on the Orient Express, which had begun to incorporate almost inaudible piano recitals (on this occasion by Jan Latham Koenig) in its cocktail bar as the train rattled through the Austrian Tyrol, I found him sitting in a corner intently scribbling a long list of works by Francis Poulenc, whose centenary was approaching.

"I'm planning a little festival of his music," he said, showing me his notes. "Can you think of anything I've omitted?"

Instantly recognisable in his striped jacket, gaudy waistcoat and owlish glasses, he was a nonpareil writer and speaker.

Decked out in this gear on a trip to the Italian Dolomites - and by then well into his seventies - he hailed me imperturbably from a dizzying mountain ledge at the other end of which I was struggling to find my way down. A timid fellow critic, elsewhere on the same ledge, had already dissolved in tears but Big John, as we called him, was undeterred.

As an established visitor to Aldeburgh, where the only deterrent was bad weather, John prided himself in having been in Benjamin Britten's presence when the composer jotted down the last note of Peter Grimes.

It was not a role John Amis himself would ever have tackled, though its original exponent, Peter Pears, once tactfully described John's as a useful voice.

He was married from 1948 until 1955 to the violinist Olive Zorian, and in the 1980s befriended Isla Baring, Australian chairman of the Tait Memorial Trust, a relationship which endured until his death.