Leonard Salzedo

Leonard Salzedo (24 September 1921 – 6 May 2000) was an English composer and conductor of Spanish descent. He composed over 160 works, including 18 film scores, 17 ballets, ten string quartets and two symphonies.

Life Salzedo was born in Stamford Hill, East London, the son of an amateur musician of Spanish Jewish ancestry. He began playing violin aged six and started composing at the age of 13. On leaving the college in 1944 Salzedo immediately became a freelance composer, supplementing his earnings by playing violin with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and (from 1950 until 1966) the Royal Philharmonic.

In 1945 Salzedo married the dancer Pat Clover. He died at his home in Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, aged 78. His daughters Caroline and Sue have set up The Leonard Salzedo Society to promote performances of his music. A centenary celebration concert was held at Conway Hall in London on 24 September 2022.

Ballet music Salzedo worked closely with the Ballet Rambert, which commissioned his first ballet, The Fugitive, in 1944. There were over 400 performances over the following six years. Along with his dancer wife Pat Clover he was closely involved with Les Ballets Nègres, a mostly black dance group founded in 1946 by Berto Pasuka and Richie Riley. He wrote four scores for the group for piano, tom tom and maracas: De Prophet, They Came, Market Day and Aggrey. The Symphony No 2 also has a Spanish flavour. It was composed in 1954 but had to wait until 1977 for its first performance, at the Edinburgh International Festival. And his music became widely used as production music for television and radio. The fanfare which forms the first six bars of Salzedo's Divertimento for three trumpets and three trombones, opus 49 (1959), was used as the theme tune for the Open University's educational programmes on BBC television and radio from the 1970s to the 1990s. Another of his tunes, Guadalajara, was used by the BBC to accompany their "pie chart" schools' presentation during the 1960s and early 1970s, up until 1973.

Orchestrations for Beecham Beecham's widow Shirley claimed that Salzedo orchestrated the 1959 recording of Handel's Messiah for modern full orchestra, usually credited to Sir Eugene Goossens. Beecham had supposedly become impatient with Goossens's slow writing pace and was not happy with the quality of his work. Salzedo did assist Beecham with his re-orchestration of Grétry's Zémire et Azor