IN THE orchestral world, where experience is often forced to give place to youth and energy, Herbert Downes kept the principal viola’s chair in the Philharmonia from its foundation in 1945 until the day he retired. Lionel Tertis, the man responsible for the instrument’s 20th-century revival, described him as “that splendid soloist”.
Born in Walsall in 1909, one of 11 children of a man whose leather business did not provide much money, Bert Downes began to play the violin at the age of 10. Two years later he went to a local teacher, Alfred Hytch, who not only laid the foundations of a sound technique, but also got him to play the viola in his string quartet. He moved on to study with Paul Beard, then leader of the part-time City of Birmingham Orchestra, and later with Carl Flesch in London. At 18 he was playing for the CBO, and later for the BBC Midland Orchestra. By 1931, he was violist in the Henry Holst Quartet. From 1935, he led his own quartet, while sitting number three in the CBO’s first violins. As best man at the wedding of his violinist colleague, Ernest Element, he met the groom’s sister, whom he married.
Unfit for war service, he worked as an air raid warden, moving in 1940 to the BBC Scottish Orchestra in Glasgow. Then he moved to the Liverpool Philharmonic, drawn by the prospect of working with the LPO’s principal cellist, Antony Pini, on whose sound he modelled his own. With Holst, Element and Pini he formed a quartet, three of whose members went into the Philharmonia Orchestra as principals on its foundation. In 1947 they premiered Walton’s Quartet at the Prague Spring festival. The foursome continued until 1952 and the next year he played at the Coronation.
During his period with the Philharmonia he worked under Toscanini, Adrian Boult, Lorin Maazel and Otto Klemperer, among others. He had a particular friendship with Klemperer, whose string quartet he recorded. Better-known recordings include Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote with Boult and Jacqueline du Pré, two versions of Brahms’s Two Songs, Opus 91 with Kirsten Flagstad and Christa Ludwig. and notable performances of Bax’s Viola Sonata with Cassini and Howells’s Elegy with Boult. He premiered John Ireland’s Piano Trio, gave the first English performance of Hindemith’s 1939 Sonata, and he was the dedicatee of Benjamin Frankel’s 1967 concerto.
Liked and respected by his section, he was also very ambitious. At breaks during recordings at the Kingsway Hall, he would generally be heard practising a viola concerto as the conductor came back up the stairs. Of the 16 in his repertoire, his favourite was the Walton, but he was also an eloquent exponent of Françaix, Rubbra, Hindemith and Peter Racine Fricker.
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He is survived by his wife and their three daughters.
Herbert Downes, viola player, was born on July 15, 1909. He died on December 21, 2004, aged 95.