Leonard Salzedo (by Martin Anderson)

Look in the current CD catalogues and you'll find almost nothing by Leonard Salzedo. But the attention of the record companies isn't the only yardstick, and Leonard Salzedo's music has always enjoyed a hallmark of success that brooks no argument: frequent performance. His best-known work - the ballet The Witch Boy, one of no fewer than seventeen ballet scores - has had well over 1,000 performances, in some 30 different countries.

Salzedo was born in London, in 1921, descended from Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in the systematic anti-Semitic drive of 1492. His musical inclinations were soon apparent: he was studying the violin from the age of six and composing by the time he was twelve. He became a student at the Royal College of Music in 1940, where his composition teacher was Herbert Howells; he also took lessons in orchestration with Gordon Jacob, violin with Isolde Menges, conducting with Sir George Dyson and chamber music with Ivor James. It was at the Royal College that Salzedo scored his first successes: in 1942 a string quartet - the first of what became a series of ten - won the Cobbett Prize.

Salzedo enjoyed almost instant recognition. Marie Rambert, founder of the Ballet Rambert, heard his Second String Quartet in concert and guessed - with remarkable foresight - that he would make a good ballet composer. And so in 1944, still a student, Salzedo received a commission for The Fugitive, the first of his long string of dance scores; the Ballet Rambert went on to give it over 400 performances.

Salzedo and his wife Pat were both deeply involved in the Ballets Nègres, a group set up to give an opportunity for the talent in the first post-war wave of West-Indian immigration to come to Britain. In 1946 alone he wrote four ballets for them, De Prophet, They Came, Market Day and Aggrey, which he performed on the piano, accompanied by timpani; indeed, for the length of the Ballet Negre's engagement in Rouen during a tour of France, he also played the timpani part himself, after the drummers had been seduced by a better offer. But then Salzedo was always at home with percussion: his later scores use the colours and rhythmic edge of percussion with a master's touch.

The association with the Ballet Rambert deepened: in 1945 Salzedo re-orchestrated the second act of Adam's Giselle for the Rambert's reduced orchestral forces, tackling the rest of the score the next year. The Life and Death of Lola Montez, orchestrations of Verdi for Rambert's "Ballet Workshop" in the Mercury Theatre in Notting Hill Gate, followed in 1954. And a series of later Rambert collaborations with the choreographer Norman Morrice and designer Nadine Baylis brought three further scores into being: The Travellers in 1963, Realms of Choice in 1965 and Hazard in 1967.

By far the most successful of Salzedo's ballets was The Witch Boy, premiered by the Ballet der Lage Landen in Amsterdam in 1956 and then brought to Britain by the London Festival Ballet, where it proved as important a landmark in the careers of John Gilpin, who danced the title role, the choreographer Jack Carter and designer Norman McDowell (both of whom also danced leading parts) as it did in Salzedo's.

In 1966 he was appointed Music Director at the Ballet Rambert, a position he held until 1972. It meant that he was finally able to put his violin aside: until then he had also been earning his living also as an orchestral musician, playing in the London Philharmonic from 1947 to 1950, and from then until 1966 in the Royal Philharmonic. The founder of both orchestras, Sir Thomas Beecham (whose musical assistant Salzedo became for part of his time with the RPO), premiered his First Symphony at the Royal Festival Hall in 1956 and the concert suite from The Witch Boy three years later. And in 1967 the RPO commissioned Salzedo's Toccata for orchestra as part of its 21st birthday celebrations.

Later appointments included the principal conductorship of the Scottish Ballet (1972-74); and he was Music Director of the London City Ballet from 1982 until 1986, at which point he retired from the podium to devote himself to composition.

Dance was always a vital element of Salzedo's music, even when it was not written explicitly for the stage. Nor did he ever forget his Spanish roots, for all that they were centuries old. The two elements combined to infuse his music with a rhythmic charge that made it fizz with rare excitement. But Salzedo's Spanishness also extended to Iberian duende: he explained that his Cantiga Mozárabe, written in 1970 for the oboe d'amore soloist Jennifer Paull, "tells the story of a Sephardic musician in exile in mediaeval Spain, whose soul is crying out in anguish for his origins". Salzedo's music occasionally suggests the same thing of its composer.

His catalogue extends well beyond the ballet scores: there is a considerable quantity of orchestral music, including concertos for double-bass, trumpet, harpsichord, viola da gamba and for percussion ensemble; several works for brass groups; songs; chamber music; eighteen film scores; organ music. But for all that activity, the one piece of Salzedo that almost everyone will know is the brief fanfare that for years introduced the programmes of the Open University.

Salzedo's attitude to composition was that of the craftsman: he understood the nature of every instrument he wrote for. Jennifer Paull (whose specialised 'Amoris International' label of music for double-reed instruments has released the only Salzedo currently available on CD) found his attitude refreshingly direct:

He told me once that he had played in Glyndebourne every summer with the LPO for years. To find the fastest, easiest way to the performances, he simply drew a straight line from his home to Glyndebourne on the map. He followed whichever roads took him along that straight line even if they were lanes, and he saved hours in travel. This has always struck me as being the way he went about his composition. He didn't mess about with affectations and fashionable gimmicks. His talent simply flowed out of him in the most logical and unpretentious way.

© MARTIN ANDERSON

Leonard Lopès Salzedo, composer, born London, 24 September 1921; married 1945 Patricia Clover, two daughters, died Leighton Buzzard, 6 May 2000.