Early life and career
Malcolm Leyland Lipkin [1] was born in Liverpool. While a schoolboy at Liverpool College, he studied the piano privately with Gordon Green from 1944 to 1948, and theory with Dr. Caleb Jarvis. In 1949 he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London, where he continued his piano studies with Kendall Taylor until 1953, as well as harmony and counterpoint with Bernard Stevens. Lipkin began his compositional career writing music for his instrument. He played his Second Piano Sonata to Georges Enesco at the 1950 Bryanston Summer School of Music, where he also took composition lessons from Boris Blacher. [2]
From 1954 to 1957 Lipkin studied composition with Mátyás Seiber and later read music externally at London University for his B.Mus. under the guidance of Dr. Anthony Milner, eventually being awarded the degree of D.Mus.Lond for his published, reviewed, publicly performed works. His first major success was the Violin Sonata No 1 (1957), which received over 100 performances within a year of its composition. [3] This was written for the violinist Yfrah Neaman and premiered by Neaman and Howard Ferguson.
Neaman then commissioned the second Violin Concerto (1960-62). [3] The death of Seiber in 1960 in a car accident, while on a lecture tour in South Africa, had shocked Lipkin, and the middle movement of the concerto was written in his memory. Like much of Lipkin's music in the 1960s, the concerto was composed in his early tonal style. The String Trio, dedicated to Joy Finzi, to whose country home at Ashmansworth he was encouraged to come and compose, followed in 1964, showing the clear influence of Seiber, and through him, Bartók. [3] [4]
In 1966 the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Society commissioned Lipkin's first Symphony, the Sinfonia di Roma. [5] This was a turning point in his developing style, revealing the influence of Seiber in its construction from small melodic and rhythmic cells. However, Lipkin never fully adopted serial technique, so fashionable in the 1960s, and he always remained his own man, becoming something of an outsider in the context of compositional trends of the time, eventually finding an individual identity in his later music.
Later years
During the 1970s, the influence of 17th-century English poetry resulted in Four Departures for Soprano and Violin (settings of Herrick) and The Pursuit (Symphony No. 2), inspired by a quatrain of Andrew Marvell. Herrick was again a starting point for another major work, Sun (Symphony No.3), premiered in 1993. It is structured in arch form, with the three movements representing the morning, noon and evening of human life, and with the central scherzo representing noon, or (in the composer's words) the zenith. [6] It is in such works as the Third Symphony and the Oboe Concerto of 1988 (commissioned by the BBC) that Lipkin found his personal voice. [7] As Meredith Oakes commented on The Pursuit: "Lipkin, who studied with Seiber and Blacher, doesn't exactly sound new but he doesn't sound like anyone else either." [8]
Chamber music was the primary focus of his later years, with works such as the Wind Quintet (1985), Variations on a Theme of Bartok for string quartet (1989), and the Second Violin Sonata (1997). He also returned to composing for the piano, completing his Sixth Sonata in 2002. His eight nocturnes were composed over a 21-year period between 1987 and 2008. [3]
For many years he was a member of the Composers' Guild of Great Britain and for a time served on its executive committee. He was a patron of the Seiber Trust.
Lipkin died on 2 June 2017. [9] His final work was The Journey for recorder solo (2016) written as a tribute to fellow composer (and Liverpudlian) John McCabe. [10]
He died 12 days after his wife, Judith (née Frankel), whom he had married in 1968. [11] They had a son, Jonathan. [12]
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