Richard Campbell; Versatile founder member of Fretwork, the group that gave English music for viols an international appeal
Hyfler/Rosner
Versatile founder member of Fretwork, the group that gave English music
for viols an international appeal
Ardal Powell
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 13 March 2011 18.33 GMT
Article history
Richard Campbell, who has died unexpectedly aged 55, was a multifaceted
musician best known as a founder member of the viol consort Fretwork.
From their London debut in 1986, they shook the dust off the English
consort repertoire and gave it international appeal as concert music.
Richard played the treble viol, and later the tenor, in the group, which
quickly established a global reputation for fastidiously crafted
interpretations of consort music from the Elizabethan and Jacobean
periods through to Henry Purcell, combined with a creative drive to
commission new works that exploited the ensemble's exotic sound-palette.
He featured in 31 recorded albums, on Virgin Classics and Harmonia
Mundi, as well as on film soundtracks including Coffee and Cigarettes
(2003) – Richard's constant companions – and The Da Vinci Code (2006).
The group won two major recording prizes: a French grand prix du disque
for their recording Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares, of music by John
Dowland, in 1979, and a Gramophone award in 2009 for Purcell: Complete
Fantazias. Their tours, including several to Japan and one, in 1989, to
Russia when it was still part of the Soviet Union, helped spread
Fretwork's reputation all over the globe.
Fretwork brought Richard to prominence as the musician he really wanted
to be, despite coming from a line of educators. His maternal grandfather
was the Cambridge professor of physiology and Nobel laureate Lord
(Edgar) Adrian, and his parents were schoolteachers.
Richard was born in Hammersmith, west London. From Marlborough college,
Wiltshire, where he overlapped with Bill Hunt, later to be a Fretwork
colleague, he went to Peterhouse, Cambridge, graduated in classics in
1976 and remained at the university for a further year of teacher
training. But he decided to reject what he saw as his "dubious
prospects" as a Latin teacher, and chose instead the perhaps even more
uncertain path of devotion to a broad range of early music activities.
He began in 1980 by studying the viol for a year at the Royal
Conservatory in The Hague.
In the three decades that followed his return to Britain, he appeared as
a viol soloist in all the prominent period-instrument ensembles, was
ubiquitous as a continuo cellist, and was appointed professor of viol at
the Royal Academy of Music. He loved music of all kinds and served it in
many ways. His grounding in classics had equipped him for a critical
study of historical texts, so that he was able to research and prepare
repertoire and programme notes for many of the ensembles in which he
played the cello, viol or bandora; he became an adept and elegant
interpreter and an enthusiastic teacher of French baroque court dance;
and demonstrated as much ease and sensitivity playing or dancing the
blues as baroque repertoire.
With his father as business manager, he convened and organised the
Tregye Festival Players near Truro, Cornwall, in the 1980s and 90s,
providing a relaxed summer-camp setting for freelance musicians, and a
rare opportunity for Cornwall to hear some of London's best baroque
players. In 1987 he married Henrietta Wayne, a freelance baroque and
classical violinist. The couple inspired with their love of music both
their daughter, Chloe, and son, Joss, who have themselves embarked on
promising careers as musicians.
Hunt noted that Richard's approach to music was characterised by a
rigorous rationality. Often uncompromising in his unwillingness to
follow what he saw as superficial effect, he was not an obvious "team
player". But his single-mindedness was never less than sincere and
cogently argued, finding a perfect outlet in playing the great English
polyphony for which Fretwork was founded, and in his beloved Bach, where
the clarity of individual voices gives the music its life.
In later years he formed a close bond, encompassing both music and
poker, with the flautist Martin Feinstein, in whose regular concert
series at St Martin-in-the-Fields church, Trafalgar Square, he became a
mainstay.
With an intelligence directed by an intense curiosity rather than the
mandates of formal study, Richard could maintain an inexhaustibly
argumentative interest in any aspect of musical meaning or performance,
particularly when sustained by good company, food and wine. But his
vigour and sense of fun were checked by a lifelong struggle with
depression, and he was found dead at his family home in Cornwall.
He had been separated from his wife since 2005. He is survived by his
children, his sisters, Emma and Sally, and his mother, Jennet. His
father, Peter, predeceased him.
• Richard John Campbell, musician, born 21 February 1956; died 8 March 2011