page_title: Jack Brymer
section_title: Teaching, recording, broadcasting and later years
hierarchical_section_title: Jack Brymer / Biography / Teaching, recording, broadcasting and later years
caption_attribution_description: English: The grave of English clarinettist Jack Brymer at St Peter's Church in Limpsfield, Surrey, England.
context_page_description: John "Jack" Alexander Brymer OBE was an English clarinettist. The Times called him "the leading clarinettist of his generation, perhaps of the century". He was largely self-taught as a player, and he performed as an amateur before being invited by Sir Thomas Beecham to join the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 1947. He remained with the orchestra until 1963, two years after Beecham's death.
  Brymer later played in the BBC Symphony and London Symphony Orchestras. He was also associated with several chamber music ensembles, and maintained a lifelong pleasure in playing jazz. He held professorships during most of the period from 1950 to 1993, first at the Royal Academy of Music, then at the Royal Military School of Music, and finally at the Guildhall School of Music. He was a frequent broadcaster, both as a player and a presenter, and made recordings of solo works and with orchestras and smaller ensembles. He published two volumes of memoirs and a book about the clarinet.
context_section_description: As a teacher, Brymer was professor at the Royal Academy of Music (1950–58), the Royal Military School of Music at Kneller Hall (1969–73), and the Guildhall School of Music (1981–93). Among his pupils at the Royal Academy was Alan Hacker, who like many players of the generation after Brymer was less attracted by the rich sound developed by Brymer, favouring instead more radical techniques propounded by Bruno Bartolozzi, and playing styles harking back to an earlier, less mellifluous, style of playing.
  During his career Brymer made gramophone recordings of all Mozart's works for wind solo and ensemble. Several works were written for him, including Three Pieces and a Clarinet Quintet by Cecil Armstrong Gibbs; Roundelay by Alan Richardson; and a Clarinet Concerto by Guy Woolfenden. Brymer was also a well-known broadcaster. His biographer, Raymond Holden, writes, "his easy manner before the microphone meant that the radio programmes that he presented for the BBC, such as 'At Home', were popular favourites".
  The LSO paid Brymer the unusual tribute of mounting a special concert to mark his 70th birthday, and another to mark his 75th. By the time of the latter he had retired from full-time orchestral playing, but he continued to perform, and played at a concert given by the English Chamber Orchestra to mark his 80th birthday, at which he played Mozart's Clarinet Concerto and Clarinet Quintet, and Weber's Clarinet Concerto No 1.
  Brymer's last public concert was on 18 July 1997 at the Wigmore Hall in London where he performed Mozart's Clarinet Quintet with the Gabrieli Quartet. Before the performance, Brymer told the audience that the Quintet held a special importance for him and he thought it appropriate that this music should mark his farewell to the concert platform.
  Brymer died in Redhill, Surrey at the age of 88. His ashes were interred a short distance away in the churchyard of St Peter's, Limpsfield, close to the grave of Beecham.
caption: Jack Brymer's grave at St Peter's Church in Limpsfield, Surrey.
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