Barry Tuckwell

Professor Barry Tuckwell, AC, OBE, (born 1931) is an Australian French horn player who spent much of his working life in the UK.

He was born in Melbourne and joined the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra at 15, only a year after starting on the horn. He became a horn player because of a chance conversation he overheard at the age of 13 between his elder sister, Sir Charles Mackerras and a horn-playing colleague in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. His sister was wondering out loud what to do with him. He was obviously musical; he must be able to play something. The horn player suggested the horn, and so he tried it. "A piece of cake! Only one note at a time!" - drawing a wry smile from players of the notoriously fickle French Horn.

Tuckwell attended St Andrew's Cathedral School, Sydney, where he was a chorister in the cathedral choir, and Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

While playing in Sydney he was encouraged to travel to take advantage of the greater opportunities available outside his native Australia and settled on England as a convenient location, being in Europe but also English-speaking. He arrived on a cold January day and wondered what he had let himself in for.

His rise through the British orchestras was meteoric, moving in rapid succession from the Scottish Symphony to the Halle and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestras before settling as principal horn player with the London Symphony for 13 years, a position originally vacated as a result of an artistic dispute between players and management. Tuckwell served as musicians representative on the board of the LSO. Any horn player of the time was inevitably compared to the legendary Dennis Brain, and Tuckwell was close to both Dennis and his father Aubrey, but although his style was influenced by Brain, Tuckwell's own self-criticism led him to develop a different and distinct sound.

He resigned that position with some regrets to pursue a solo career; although he never intended to give up orchestral playing he was so much in demand that few opportunities subsequently arose. He has become the most recorded of all horn players and has won three Grammy awards. He has been president of the International Horn Society and is currently honorary president of the British Horn Society.

A number of composers have written works for him, including Oliver Knussen and Richard Rodney Bennett.

After retirement in 1996 he settled in the United States and founded the Maryland Symphony Orchestra. He now lives in Australia. A friend has said he wanted to hear Tuckwell's last note as a professional player, but the ever-mischievous Tuckwell decided on the spur of the moment to omit it. He now sums up his career as having "missed my first note, and omitted the last".

He wrote a book, The French Horn in the Yehudi Menuhin series, and has also written horn studies and a guide to playing the horn (out of print but much in demand).

In his first appearances since his 1997 Baltimore farewell performance, Barry Tuckwell returned to the stage to perform Schumann's Konzertstuck for Four Horns in Melbourne at the Methodist Ladies' College and Daylesford, Victoria, Australia in April 2006. (The performances, with Melbourne's longest running amateur orchestra, the Zelman Symphony conducted by Mark Shiell, also featured three of Australia's finest French Horn players: Geoff Collinson, Roman Ponamariov and Lin Jiang.)

Trivia

Tuckwell's sister is Patricia Lascelles, Countess of Harewood.

Honours

Tuckwell was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1965 and a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1992.

He was made an honorary Doctor of Music by the University of Sydney and has been awarded distinctions by the Royal Academy of Music, the Royal College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.