The Australian composer David Lumsdaine is 70 this year and, as part of celebrations both in Britain and Australia, Durham University is paying tribute both to a former lecturer and distinguished composer in a concert performed by Alison Wells, John Turner and Peter Lawson.

Lumsdaine was born in 1931 and studied at both Sydney University and the Sydney Conservatorium. Increasingly bleak compositional circumstances in Australia led him to immigrate to Britain in 1953 - there he studied with Matyas Sieber and Lennox Berkeley. Following this move, with pieces such as Mandala 1, Kelly Ground, Mandala 2, and Flights, he soon established a reputation as a formidable composer in complete command of his musical intellect.

During the 1960s Lumsdaine’s reputation as a teacher grew leading to appointments at the Royal Academy of Music, where he founded the Manson Contemporary Music Room; then at Durham University from 1971 to 1981, where he founded both the Electronic Music Studio and the PhD in composition - putting composition firmly on the map whilst attracting a wide community of undergraduate and postgraduate composers. Latterly, he taught at King's College London and shared a post with his wife, the composer Nicola LeFanu until his retirement in 1993.

Lumsdaine is represented, in this concert, by two chamber pieces both of which hail from the early nineties and display the composer’s preoccupation with form, line and tightly-woven structures which express themselves on more than one level - they are also part of a general move towards a more transparent, modal harmonic language - as seen such pieces as Bagatelles, Mandala 5, Garden of Earthly Delights and Kali Dances.

In A Norfolk Songbook (1992) for soprano and recorders, Lumsdaine sets his own poetry - written in 1986 whilst America made use of its Norfolk airbase to bomb Libya - in a cycle of ten witty, poignant, and intense songs. Each movement makes use of birdsong - a notable feature of Lumsdaine’s music - though not as direct quotes, but rather as an organic music integral to the piece as a whole.

Six Postcard Pieces (1994) is a set of bagatelles - haiku-like in their brevity - designed to be printed on the backs of postcards. Each movement is archetypal - Overture, March, Rhapsody, Nocturne, Sonata and Toccata - and is explored wittily in an elastic and highly imaginative manner, typical of the composer’s later works.

The rest of this concert will be given over to pieces dedicated to Lumsdaine – from a friend and contemporary, in the composer Anthony Gilbert; and a former pupil as well as Durham graduate, in the composer Robin Walker. Nicola LeFanu, Lumsdaine’s wife, is represented by a performance of her piece A Travelling Spirit for soprano and recorder. Other pieces by the current Head of the Music Department, Professor Max Paddison, and the composer Michael Finnissy are to be heard also.

Douglas Bertram