The story goes that if Ian Stoutzker was unable to sleep at night, or if he awoke early, he would reach under his bed, pull out his violin and start playing. If the tale was apocryphal, his violin was genuine and it was not just any violin but the “Mona Lisa of violins”, one of the finest of all, having been made in 1741 by the Italian luthier Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesu. During the 19th century it was played by Henri Vieuxtemps, the Belgian virtuoso, and on his death in 1881 passed to Eugène Ysaÿe, an equally celebrated soloist.
Stoutzker, a man with many strings to his bow, had a passion for supporting musical organisations, something made possible by his position as joint managing director of the merchant bank Keyser Ullmann. His first significant musical involvement came when he rescued the New Philharmonia Orchestra, which was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Founded as the Philharmonia in 1945 by Walter Legge, the orchestra had established its reputation under conductors such as Herbert von Karajan, Wilhelm Furtwängler and Arturo Toscanini. Before long the Philharmonia was displaying all the financial traumas commonly associated with a big London orchestra and Legge was forced to disband it in 1964. The players refused to go quietly, instead re-emerging as a co-operative using the title New Philharmonia for legal reasons. Yet their finances remained precarious.
In 1972 the New Philharmonia had ambitious plans to present the British premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No 15 and approached Stoutzker to sponsor the extra rehearsal costs, unaware that he was familiar with their predicament. According to Stephen Pettitt’s 1985 history of the orchestra, he dropped a bombshell: “He not only would be interested in backing the project financially but would like to buy an orchestra outright.” Money was no object, but there was one condition: “Overall control would be exercised by Stoutzker himself, together with the principal conductors and general manager.”
Some players were wary of this knight in shining armour, and one or two were “utterly opposed to the idea”. Yet they had little alternative if the New Philharmonia were to survive. In April 1973 Stoutzker was elected chairman, making him the only non-playing chairman of a London orchestra. Although his preferred choice of principal conductor was his friend Daniel Barenboim, he settled instead for Riccardo Muti, the young Italian maestro, with Andrew Davis, an even younger Briton, as his assistant.
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From the outset Stoutzker insisted that money alone was not the solution to the orchestra’s problems. “Patronage can buy glory. It cannot buy sound,” he told The Times. Nevertheless, he brought financial stability to the orchestra, which in 1976 even posted a rare surplus, of £56,000. Meanwhile, much of his energy was devoted to removing the word “New” from the title and reclaiming the original Philharmonia name.
When Stoutzker’s term expired in 1976, the orchestra’s council chose not to renew the agreement, feeling that the players no longer had control over their affairs. “He also referred to the Philharmonia as ‘my orchestra’, which the players resented as unjustifiably possessive,” Pettitt wrote. Many wanted rid of him completely, but others thought it would be wrong to throw out the man who had been so generous with his time and money, and instead he was offered the “presidency” of the orchestra. “There was some bitterness, quite understandably, but Stoutzker remained on the trust until 1984.” Pettitt noted.
Stoutzker, an accomplished enough violinist to make music for pleasure with the cellist Jacqueline du Pré, had bought his Guarneri in 1966 for a then-record price of $36,400. According to The Economist, he sold the instrument in 2012 for more than $16 million and it is now on lifetime loan to the violinist Anne Akiko Meyers. She told how Stoutzker sometimes lent the violin to his friend Yehudi Menuhin, who wrote that if he had to choose between rescuing the Guarneri or his own instrument (a 1714 Stradivari) from a fire, he would run after this one.
In 1977 the pair jointly founded Live Music Now (LMN), which evolved from Menuhin’s experiences of playing to people in care homes and hospitals, including his “scones and songs” project. “Yehudi had this belief that music could help distressed people overcome their sufferings and introduce beauty into their lives again,” Stoutzker told Richard Morrison in The Times. “So he conceived a project that would give young musicians the chance to earn money at the start of their careers, and at the same time bring music into the lives of the disadvantaged.”
Stoutzker, a handsome man with a warm smile, supported many areas of British musical life, endowing awards, taking LMN overseas, chairing the London Symphony Orchestra’s advisory council and co-chairing with Sir John Tusa the European Union Youth Orchestra. In 2008 he was awarded an honorary fellowship by the Royal Academy of Music, the citation reading: “With the possible exception of George Frideric Handel, no individual has done more to bring music to children and the disadvantaged in the history of this country than Ian Stoutzker.”
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Ian Isaac Stoutzker was born in London in 1929, the son of the Rev Aaron Stoutzker, who had been cantor at an Amsterdam synagogue before moving to the Central London Synagogue, and his wife Dora (née Cohen), a piano and singing teacher from the Welsh valleys; his siblings were Nina and Stephen, who predeceased him, and Evelyn, who survives. The family’s home was bombed during the Second World War and he was evacuated to his mother’s birthplace, where he was a pupil at Tredegar County School.
Returning to London, he showed musical promise at Berkhamsted School, Hertfordshire, taking up the violin. By 1949 he was offering expert violin tuition in the West End of London and before long he was studying at the London School of Economics while working in “a comparatively menial role” at Samuel Montagu, the merchant bank. “I did a degree as a night student,” he explained.
In 1958 he married Mercedes Cohen, who was from Tangier in Morocco and whom he had met in Paris. After arriving in Britain she began collecting works by little-known British artists of the time including Lucian Freud, David Hockney and Jacob Epstein. “As music is his passion, art is mine,” she told Apollo magazine in 2012 when the couple donated part of their remarkable collection to the Tate after “spotting some gaps in the gallery’s collection”. Mercedes survives him with their daughter, Rica, and their son, Robert.
Around the time of their marriage Stoutzker joined Keysers, a small merchant bank run by Roland Franklin, his sister’s husband. In 1962 they acquired the Ullmann bank, changing their name to Keyser Ullmann. From 1970 to 1975 the bank was chaired by Sir Edward du Cann, the Conservative MP and chairman of the party’s 1922 Committee.
Stoutzker and Franklin, who had a close business relationship with the tycoon Sir James Goldsmith, were involved in countless deals, leading to a vast growth in Keyser Ullmann’s capital reserves from £3.9 million in 1971 to £100 million in 1974. Unfortunately, much of that expansion related to an ill-fated plunge into property, leaving the company heavily exposed when the market collapsed. He resigned in July 1975, later re-emerging as chairman of Dawnay Day International, the financial services group.
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Despite no longer having access to corporate funds, Stoutzker continued to be a generous philanthropist, supporting art galleries, musical organisations and individuals. During the last years of du Pré’s life he and Mercedes were part of the faithful circle of friends who visited her frequently, always offering the cellist something positive in terms of comfort. He had a passion for hiking, regularly walking over the Seven Sisters in Sussex.
In 2008 Stoutzker and his wife moved to Salzburg in Austria, drawn by the city’s music. However, he remained inspired by his mother’s background in south Wales and was a generous benefactor of Tredegar Brass Band. In 2013 he donated £500,000 to the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama to fund the 400-seat Dora Stoutzker Hall, part of a project that included a 160-seat theatre named after Richard Burton, the Welsh actor. “My mother represents all the mothers of Wales who scraped and saved to give their children a music education,” he said.
Sir Ian Stoutzker, philanthropist, was born on January 21, 1929. He died on April 6, 2024, aged 95