Obituary of Andrew Clements | classical music

Andrew Clements, who has died aged 75 after a period of ill health, was for more than three decades the Guardian’s chief classical music critic. His style was a model of critical integrity – authoritative and intelligent, sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes a little angry, dry with good humor but never showy.

Music may say things that words cannot, but he has mastered the rare art of turning music into words, always using language with precision; When I read it, I knew what the performance was like. Known for supporting new music with tireless dedication, Andrew had much broader musical interests than many imagined.

However, music was just one of his passions. Natural history and Latin American literature were high on his list of other interests, and these threads came together when he reviewed the world premiere of Peter Eötvös’s opera Love and Other Demons – inspired by Gabriel García Márquez – at Glyndebourne in the summer of 2008. In welcoming the work, Andrew concluded his review by saying that the production alone was disappointing ‘for failing to evoke any real sense of place, despite the lavish use of video projections’. Full of writhing bodies and insects and reptiles that someone might have pointed out [the director] “There are no chameleons in South America.”

With such broad interests, Andrew could have taken many career paths, but he has worked in music journalism – at times as an editor and writer – for almost his entire life. But his first job after graduating was in the editorial department at the Open University, where he met Kate (Catherine) Coltman. They married and had two daughters, Lara and Holly. They divorced in the 1990s.

Andrew worked as music critic for the New Statesman for 11 years from 1977, and also contributed to Time Out. He had a short spell (1987-1988) as editor of the Musical Times, and wrote for many years (1979-1993) for the Financial Times, not only about classical music but also as the newspaper’s rock and pop critic. Later, in a classic review for The Guardian, he said that Brian Wilson’s “God Only Knows” was still the most perfect pop song.

Overlapping with his writing, Andrew was commissioning editor of music-related books at Faber & Faber (never losing the publisher’s connection with poets and poetry), and authored several important titles. He first wrote for Oprah magazine in 1983 and joined its editorial board in 1990. When he succeeded Edward Greenfield at The Guardian in August 1993, the appointment was decided at least partly on the recommendation of the pianist Alfred Brendel.

Andrew endlessly admired some of the most challenging composers – among them Harrison Birtwistle, Luigi Nono, Elliot Carter, Luciano Berio, Helmut Lachenmann, Pierre Boulez and Iannis Xenakis – and also provided critical support to many lesser-known names in contemporary music.

He was also fond of the English pastoral composers of the early and mid-twentieth century, and had actually grown up in Hocclecote, a village that became a suburb of Gloucester. His mother, Linda, a home science teacher before her marriage, is from Forest of Dean; His father, Joseph, who grew up on a small family farm in Down Hatherley, north of Gloucester, made aircraft parts for Dowty Aviation.

An only child, Andrew attended The Crypt, a grammar school in Gloucester, and was the first in his family to go to university. He studied theoretical physics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and played the flute in the university orchestra. Contemporaries remember him as a mysterious and somewhat antisocial person, qualities that later allowed him to maintain a professional distance and write without fear or favour.

With this background, Andrew was well placed to attend the Cheltenham Music Festival during his senior years, as well as the Three Choirs Festival; This was his first musical spectacle, and Elgar’s dream of Gerontius held particular appeal. He will remain more committed than most critics to covering the regional scene.

In 1992, he became director of the Holst Foundation, a tribute to the Cheltenham-born composer to whom the poetry of Ivor Gurney meant so much. Reading the Guardian’s country diaries was a daily ritual (as were the newspaper’s cryptic crosswords).

Music did not run in the family, but his parents were avid gardeners and country lovers. Andrew began collecting plants as a boy and was soon ordering Alpine seeds in Bhutan and cataloging specimens. Birds, amphibians and reptiles were of particular interest, and he kept many of the creatures as pets – on one occasion, some thieves were said to have been frightened by his poison frogs.

A holiday to Crete in 1979 – his first trip abroad – made a huge impression on him, and Greece remained one of his favorite countries for the rest of his life. Bird watching has taken him across South America, from Costa Rica to Ecuador and from the Amazon to Patagonia. He often did this with his partner, Amanda Holden, an opera writer and translator with whom he lived in London for several years. She died in 2021.

Andrew, whom I have been fortunate to consider a colleague and friend for three decades, has contributed to the New Grove Dictionary of Music, the New Grove Dictionary of Opera, and the New Penguin Opera Guide. He wrote a compact account of composer Mark Anthony Turnage (2000). In opera, he not only responded musically, but had a strong sense of theatricality.

Pianists and piano literature were close to his heart, and in his penultimate review for The Guardian, of previously unpublished recordings by Radu Lupu, he had a farewell sentiment: “Of the hundreds of pianists I must have heard in more than 50 years of playing, a great number that included many of the greatest names of the 20th century, none have given me a more consistent enjoyment or a greater sense of wonder.”

An illness that began in early 2025 meant that Andrew’s last concert review (for Dunedin consort) appeared in early March. Despite these difficulties, he retained a sense of humor that countered his often tough exterior. From his home in Oxfordshire he continued to review the recordings. His last essay, on Nadia Boulanger’s opera La Ville Morte, was written just before Christmas and published at the beginning of January, at which time he contracted the influenza that led to his death.

Kate survives him, along with Lara, Holly and two grandchildren.