BARRY DOUGLAS CBE

Citation:

“Our Lifetime Achievement recipient grew up in south Belfast in the 1960s, not far from Queen’s University. I’m sure as a schoolboy, as he walked past the Lanyon Building or attended school Prize Distributions in the Queen’s Whitla Hall, that he never imagined that, not too many years later, he would be awarded an honorary Doctor of Music degree by Queen’s. And, although we think of him as a pianist and conductor, when he was at the City of Belfast School of Music he was highly regarded as a clarinettist and for a while, again as a schoolboy, he was the organist in a local church.

Having had his initial piano lessons in Belfast and in Dublin, after school he moved to London, and later to Paris and Moscow, for conservatoire training. Conspicuous success in prestigious piano competitions and strong reviews for his earliest recordings launched him on a stellar career which has taken him to play with most of the world’s leading conductors and orchestras. The calibre of his playing, and his breadth of repertoire, have kept him in constant demand and it’s no wonder that he was appointed OBE in 2002, and CBE twenty years later, for his services to music and to community relations in Northern Ireland. The Royal College of Music in London awarded him a Fellowship and a Visiting Professorship, and the National University of Ireland conferred on him an Honorary Doctorate in Music in 2007.

I joined the staff of the Music Department of BBC Northern Ireland as a Radio Producer in 1985, the year in which he won the Bronze Medal at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Texas.

This brought his name to an international audience. Indeed, in the following year, in 1986, he was the first non-Russian pianist to win the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow since Van Cliburn achieved the same distinction in 1958. At that time, the BBC in Belfast presented a series of Invitation Concerts in the Ulster Hall.

These were effectively recording sessions for BBC Radio 3 and, as such, we were able to offer free tickets, the only catch being that you had to order your free ticket in advance. Given that these concerts were at the height of summer, on Friday evenings, and they were free, the practice was (as the airlines do) to issue more tickets than there were seats, because experience showed that a percentage of the audience, especially if there was very good weather, simply failed to show up.

That year, however, one of the guest soloists was a young local pianist who had recently won the Tchaikovsky Competition, as I’ve just mentioned.

Not only did everyone who had booked a ticket turn up, there was also a biblical multitude who simply took a wee chance and turned up at the front door. They were lined down Bedford Street, round the corner into Franklin Street, right down to Linenhall Street. Behind the locked front doors of the Ulster Hall there was an atmosphere bordering on sheer panic!!

Around the same time, I heard our recipient give a solo recital at a Music at Ten slot in the Harty Room. I think it was the Festival Director Michael Barnes, who had come up with the tongue-in-cheek rhyming slang pairing of Brahms & Liszt for this showcase, bravura recital, but I remember continuously during that performance thinking that here was a pianist who could take some of the most technically challenging repertoire ever written for the piano and deal with it with apparent ease and total command, as well as giving the Steinway piano in the hall a real seeing-to!

I recently sat on an audition panel with a senior officer from the Ulster Orchestra and, given the recent worries since the pandemic about financial concerns in the arts and in the entertainment sector, I asked who can still sell out the Ulster Hall or the Waterfront to a classical audience, and the reply came back … without hesitation … only one man!

He has always been both a high-profile role model for up-and-coming young Irish musicians and an active champion to do all he can to raise standards and to provide top level opportunities for young players. In 1998 he established Camerata Ireland to give a platform for our best orchestral players and, as their conductor, to lead tours to international venues. His vision of an all-island orchestra also led him to invite both Her Majesty The Queen, and the then President of Ireland, Mary McAleese to be joint patrons of the Orchestra. Another manifestation of his passion for highlighting both Irish and international soloists has been the annual Clandeboye Festival, held outside Bangor in the month of August, which focuses on another facet of his remarkable career, that as a chamber musician.

To date he has released over 30 albums and has performed at some of the worlds most prestigious venues alongside renouned orchestras such as the London Symphony Orchestra.

I have no doubt that this award will give tremendous satisfaction and justifiable pride to him and his family, wife Deirdre and their three grown-up children, Saoirse, Fergus and Liam, all of whom have always been so important to him, not least when he’s been touring, often on the other side of the world.”

Dr. Joe McKee OBE

See page 86 for an interview with Barry Douglas.