THE great conductor, teacher and musicologist Harry Newstone glanced at the violins and pointed his baton at them. “And if someone beside you comes in too soon, do this,” he said, giving the air a brisk nudge with his elbow.

In September 1962, Newstone was rehearsing the Glasgow Schools Concert for a concert at the St Andrews Hall. It was the second year in which the in-demand Newstone had found time to conduct the schools concert.

Canadian by birth, Newstone had been studying at London’s Guildhall School of Music where he had founded the Haydn Orchestra, after the composer whose works he loved. He was still its conductor, and in recent years he had conducted Haydn and other programmes all over Europe. He was shortly due to begin a season’s conducting in Nashville, Tennessee. He told the Glasgow Herald that he found youthful musicians a refreshing change, agreeably free from preconceived notions. He admitted to being fascinated with the way in which younger orchestras often reached a higher standard than the individual musicians in it - “sometimes the standard is almost embarrassingly high.”

READ MORE:

Herald Diary: Mrs Thatcher: the movie

Newstone died in 2006, aged 84. One obituary described him as “one of the first and best of the scholar conductors who, since the second world war, have made us so aware of musical style”; another said he “enjoyed the professional respect of some of the world’s finest musicians.”