Nona Liddell obituary

Nona Liddell, who has died aged 89, belonged to a generation of violinists who remembered and were influenced by virtuosi such as Fritz Kreisler and Ginette Neveu. But rather than confining herself to familiar showpiece concertos and chamber music, she aligned herself with contemporary, cutting-edge music, and will be chiefly remembered for her long association with the often experimental London Sinfonietta, of which she was leader from 1970 to 1994.

When Liddell joined the orchestra, its broad-based programmes placed Stravinsky and Roberto Gerhard alongside, for instance, Bach and Schubert. But its audiences did not overlap as readily, and the group went on to specialise in new, and often unusually notated, music, a world in which Liddell became highly skilled. She felt that often the strings were not used to best advantage in contemporary works, and the instruments themselves were treated with insufficient respect. “I don’t mind having a go at anything, providing it doesn’t damage either the instrument or the bow,” she told me in an interview for the Strad in 1993.

Liddell made a point of trying to play as beautifully as possible, even if the sounds requested were harsh and difficult: pizzicato harmonics, uncomfortably high registers, hitting, tapping, excessive demands to play col legno – with the wood of the bow. And she graciously went along with the most outlandish demands. After an Opera Factory performance in 1986 of Nigel Osborne’s Hell’s Angels, which featured nudity and profanity, recalled London Sinfonietta violinist Joan Atherton, Liddell left the theatre saying, “Well, I think I’ll go home now to read some Jane Austen.”

Her open-mindedness informed her playing, her tuition, her interaction with fellow musicians and her musical choices. Teaching at the Royal Academy of Music (1978-94) and later, until retiring in 2006, Trinity College of Music, she used to tell her students always to say yes to opportunities – it made life more interesting.

Liddell played all the Sinfonietta repertory on her old Italian violins, by Michelangelo Bergonzi and Carlo Antonio Testori, doing her best to protect them. Sometimes composers would ask for help in exploring technical possibilities. Benjamin Britten, she said, might write something that appeared not to be the most natural option, but which produced the sound he wanted, and if he wrote a particular, awkward bowing, he would be irritated if it was changed. The English Chamber Orchestra was at the heart of Britten’s Aldeburgh Festival, and in 1960 Liddell played in the premiere of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

She considered her finest recording to be of the string sextet version of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, with a London Sinfonietta ensemble (1974). Her others included the concerto with wind band by Kurt Weill, released in 1976; she gave the first Proms performance of the work in 1983.

An accomplished baroque musician, she led both the Monteverdi Orchestra and the London Bach Orchestra. She was also leader of John Eliot Gardiner’s Orchestra Révolutionnaire et Romantique, and from time to time guest leader of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

As a chamber musician she was the leader of the English String Quartet (1957-73), and was a member of both the Richards Piano Quartet, with the cellist Bernard Richards, viola-player Jean Stewart and pianist Bernard Roberts, and the London Piano Quartet. With the pianist Daphne Ibbott she formed the Liddell-Ibbott Ensemble, bringing in other players as the music demanded. Into her late 70s she led the Mana Chamber Orchestra, created by Musicians Against Nuclear Arms (now Musicians for Peace and Disarmanent).

Liddell’s mother, Dorothy Jones, was born and brought up in India, the daughter of a Welsh railway worker and a Goanese mother, and the youngest of seven children. After studying at the Royal College of Music, Dorothy returned to India, where she taught the violin, and in 1918 married William Liddell, who worked for a timber company and served in the territorial branch of the Indian Army. When her parents moved back to London, Nona studied with Jessie Grimson and then, at the age of 16, won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, where her teachers were Rowsby Woof, Paul Beard, Stefan Krayk and Sascha Lasserson.

Her mother attended all her lessons in the early days, and supervised her practice. Nona was not only an exceptional violinist – her technique featured a wonderfully free bowing arm, resulting in glorious sound – but also a pioneering woman in a world where women rarely featured as soloists or leaders.

She made her Proms debut in 1947 in Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, with Adrian Boult conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra. But her real wish was to play in a chamber orchestra. In the late 1940s she joined the first desk of the English Chamber Orchestra, next to her lifelong friend Emanuel Hurwitz. The second violins were led by Ivor McMahon, whom she married in 1950. She was not made co-leader – women players were not offered such positions at this time.

As a great believer in homeopathy she refused much conventional treatment for the cancer that made her unwell towards the end of her life. She practised tai chi until last year, and insisted her pupils study the Alexander Technique, which she also practised. She was appointed MBE in 1992, and the following year awarded the Cobbett medal by the Worshipful Company of Musicians for her services to chamber music.

Ivor died in 1972. Nona is survived by their daughter, Lindsay, and three granddaughters.