Peter Avis

After teaching maths for ten years during the 1960s and ’70s, Peter Avis moved into music administration, first as General Secretary of the Ernest Read Music Association and then as a House Manager at the Fairfield Halls in Croydon where he also ran the Lunchtime Concerts. Since 1988 he has worked as a freelance writer of countless programme and CD booklet notes (to date, some four hundred of these) and the giver of pre-concert talks. During the course of these talks, he has also interviewed many conductors and soloists notably Andrew Litton, Tasmin Little, Julian Lloyd Webber, Emma Johnson, Dame Gillian Weir, Natalie Clein, Pavel Kolesnikov and Sir Stephen Hough. He also acts as speaker at Gramophone Societies and has given talks to several branches of the Elgar Society about the English composer Dame Ethel Smyth, the writer and musicologist Rosa Newmarch and the music associated with Bredon Hill, which he himself has climbed over one hundred and sixty times since buying a house in Pershore in 2003. For many years he also sang with various London choirs, notably the London Symphony Chorus, both in this country and on tour abroad. 

In 2003 he gained an MA in Visual and Performing Arts (The Promenade Concerts) from King’s College, London and, in October 2010, made his debut on Radio 4 as the presenter of a programme entitled Rosa and Leoš which was based on one of his King’s College essays and dealt with the visit to London in 1926 of Leoš Janáček, a visit which had been arranged for him by Rosa Newmarch. His second appearance on Radio 4 resulted from an invitation from its arts programme, Front Row, to talk about Arthur Wood, the composer of the signature tune used by The Archers. For several years he also workedas a volunteer on various archive projects at the Royal Festival Hall and during the summer of 2011 helped curate one of the exhibitions which formed part of the South Bank’s celebration of the 1951 Festival of Britain.