Barrie Gavin, filmmaker who brought the stars of 20th-century classical music to the small screen

He worked with Simon Rattle, Aaron Copland and Peter Maxwell Davies, but upset Holst’s daughter with his animation for the planet Mercury

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Barrie Gavin, who has died aged 89, was a prolific filmmaker whose virtuosic videos translated the aural experience of music into sparkling television; he documented leading figures of 20th-century music including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez, and enjoyed a long association with Simon Rattle, coaxing the best out of a conductor who initially showed little interest in the medium.
In Mr Copland Comes to Town (1964) he filmed the American composer Aaron Copland rehearsing the London Symphony Orchestra while coping diplomatically with anodyne questions from television journalists. The New Rhythm of Music (1969) featured the BBC Symphony Orchestra playing Bartok and Stravinsky with Tim Souster interviewing Boulez, with whom Gavin made a dozen programmes.
Peter Maxwell Davies was reluctant to speak on One Foot in Eden (1978), filmed on Orkney where the composer made his home. Instead, Gavin enabled him to recede into the background by evoking images of Orkney. Stockhausen’s musical world was the subject of Tuning In (1980), while a documentary about Schoenberg was entitled Bogeyman-Prophet-Guardian (1974).
Gavin, whose enthusiasm and energy made up for his inability to read a score, used television in an imaginative and creative way. Instead of attempting to illustrate music literally, he found visual equivalents with a beauty of their own. In the late 1960s he experimented with video technology, sometimes chopping the screen up into dozens of little pieces. On other occasions he used paintings as a visual departure point.
For Vive a Venezia (1978) Gavin presented the music of the Marxist composer Luigi Nono in the context of world events, an opportunity that came about when the director realised the BBC already had an Omnibus crew in Italy. He called Nono, who agreed to be interviewed, but by the time he arrived the composer had decided that he did not speak English and his interview had to be dubbed.
He ran into difficulties with a 1966 programme about Gustav Holst featuring The Planets. Wanting something more original than images of planets he put together a sequence of things moving quickly, including birds, fish and animals, for the fast-paced Mercury movement. That upset the composer’s daughter, Imogen, who told him: “But my dear, it’s not about that.”
On another occasion Gavin was at the centre of a dust-up at the BBC. He had enterprisingly made a successful bid for the cover illustration of Radio Times to promote a new Omnibus season on Japanese art narrated by David Attenborough. Alasdair Milne, controller of BBC Television, was furious, claiming that Gavin had failed to recognise the country’s anti-Japanese sentiment – no matter that the war was 40 years in the past.
His relationship with Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra began in 1984 with 1911: A Year in Musical History, a series of four films featuring Rattle not only conducting Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony but also Alexander’s Ragtime Band, an Irving Berlin song released in 1911. From East to West was “dreamt up in a Chinese restaurant” to examine how the music of Asia has influenced that of Europe and showed Rattle conducting music by the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu.
Rattle adopted a hands-off approach to filming. “He never wanted to look at the films,” Gavin told the Journal of Popular Television. “There was no sense of collaboration in the sense that, well, I’ll come and see it, and then maybe we’ll change it. No, just do it. And then he would disappear. Which sounds wonderful. Except sometimes you just want someone to say, ‘lovely’.”
Although Humphrey Burton, the BBC director who first employed Gavin, described his protégé as “a bit of a barrack-room lawyer”, he conceded that the younger man had “taste, knowledge and enthusiasm”. Moreover, Gavin had almost total freedom to make the programmes he wanted, though at times he wondered if “nobody actually cared very much what we did anyway, so they just let me get on with it”.
Barrie Gavin was born in London on June 10 1935, the son of John Gavin and Margaret, née Elder. He was educated at St Paul’s School and read history at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. A friend gave him a copy of Amateur Cine World which contained adverts for BBC trainees. “I loved film and I was deeply involved in both film and music. But only as a spectator and a listener,” he said.
Joining the corporation in 1961, he worked at first with Burton on the arts programme Monitor. One rainy day three years later Burton came bowling past in his car, leant out of the window and enquired if he would be interested in making music programmes: “I said, ‘I’m not a musician’. He said, ‘Well, I’m surrounded by musicians who can’t make programmes, so maybe it will work the other way round’.” He shared an office with John Drummond, the future director of the Edinburgh Festival, Radio 3 and the Proms.
His first film was In Search of Constant Lambert (1965), exploring the career of the Royal Ballet’s co-founder for the Workshop strand. Then came The Rise and Fall of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (also 1965) dealing with the composer’s last 10 years and narrated by HC Robbins Landon. Before long there were films on everyone from Hildegard of Bingen and Beethoven to Havergal Brian and Alban Berg.
In 1972 Gavin worked briefly for London Weekend Television and by 1974 was head of production at the British Film Institute with a brief to support new filmmakers. He ended up in hot water over Juvenile Liaison, a BFI-funded documentary that showed a seven-year-old boy being questioned in a police cell.
Returning to the BBC, he was appointed series editor for Omnibus and in 1978 established the BBC’s Bristol Arts Unit with Dennis Marks and Tony Staveacre. Their aim was to give the arts a more political slant in programmes such as Neighbours, a study of the St Paul’s area and its largely West Indian community. Meanwhile, an invitation to Germany in 1977 to make a film about Kurt Weill led to a long association with that country’s television networks.
Support for the Bristol unit evaporated in 1981 and Gavin joined a group of BBC refugees who formed Third Eye Productions, making programmes for the new Channel 4 which had an emphasis on contemporary arts. These included Leaving Home (1996), a seven-part series featuring Rattle on the music of the 20th century. He marked the millennium with the BBC Two series Masterworks: Six Pieces of Britain (1999) that included Harrison Birtwistle’s nerve-rackingly spiky The Triumph of Time.
As the BBC became more corporate, Gavin’s Left-wing inclinations aroused suspicions. The accusation from a personnel officer that he chose subjects and collaborators because of their political alignment was, to his mind, a triumph. “I said, yes, of course I do. Why would I do otherwise?”
In May 2017 he was awarded honorary membership of the Royal Philharmonic Society, the first time the society had honoured a filmmaker in this way.
In 1971 Barrie Gavin married the Indian-born Jamila Patten, who went on to become famous as the children’s writer Jamila Gavin; they had a son and a daughter. Latterly they lived in Powys, where he was a longstanding friend of the Presteigne Festival.
Barrie Gavin, born June 10 1935, died November 12 2024
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