ALBERT SAMMONS

The career of Albert Sammons (1886-1957) centred largely on his native country, a limitation due in good part to his distinct reluctance to travel. Born in London, the son of a shoemaker, he was first taught the violin by his father and elder brother, with later lessons, briefly, from two pupils of Eugène Ysaÿe. His early career, from the age of fifteen, was spent playing in theatre orchestras, with summer hotel seasons, until discovered by Sir Thomas Beecham, who employed him before long as leader of his new orchestra. In a long career he was closely associated with chamber music and with the performance of English music by his contemporaries, and made a memorable recording of Elgar’s Violin Concerto in 1929. Delius dedicated to him his own Violin Concerto, which had its première in 1919, and he led the first performances of Elgar’s String Quartet and Piano Quintet. The same composer’s Violin Sonata also became a part of his repertoire and he recorded the work with the pianist William Murdoch in 1935.

Despite the onset of Parkinson’s disease, Sammons gave many concerts up and down the United Kingdom during World War II, helping to keep up morale. He gave the first performance of George Dyson’s Violin Concerto in 1942 and his last performance with orchestra, of E.J. Moeran’s Concerto, was given in Norwich on 28th April 1946, with Sir Adrian Boult conducting, a performance of which a recording survives. In March 1948 he retired from concert performance but continued teaching in London in his later years.

Sammons had a wide repertoire which took in the standard concertos as well as Bloch’s and Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No.1. His own compositions included a Phantasy Quartet, a Cobbett prize-winner, as well as solos and studies for the violin. He began his career on a fiddle he had made himself; he then used a variety of violins, many of them new English instruments, but in 1927 bought the 1696 Matteo Gofriller he plays on these recordings. His later years were made difficult by illness but from 1939 to 1954 he taught at the Royal College, his best-known pupils being Alan Loveday and Hugh Bean. He died on 24th August 1957. Sammons left many records, those with his friend Tertis including an idiosyncratic but memorable Mozart Sinfonia concertante and a Handel/Halvorsen Passacaglia which excels even that of Heifetz and Primrose.

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