Tribute to John Byrt, 1940 - 2021

The University Opera Club was very active at that time, and each week an undergraduate would mount a concert performance of their chosen opera, in the Holywell Music Room. As you can imagine, some of these were noticeably more successful than others, but it was huge fun and excellent training; I remember John and me playing a piano duet accompaniment to Bartók's opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle in the summer of '61. In 1963 the  Club put on, as its annual production for the public in the Town Hall, Verdi's Sicilian Vespers. At some quite late point in rehearsals the conductor had to be replaced and we were searching for one rather desperately. John's name came up very soon, he agreed, and we were hugely relieved. But he soon found that orchestral preparations had not been up to scratch. Sarah Edwards, now my wife, was 'volunteered' to take down rehearsal numbers during John's first orchestral  run-through and retains vivid memories of it: 'It was for me (a non-musician) a remarkable experience to sit at the elbow of this brilliant man, in the midst of a shattering wall of orchestral sound, as he conducted with such brio and panache, intermittently shouting numbers; '83!, 157!' and muttering 'late!', 'early!', sharp!' in a furious undertone, while I scribbled.' Needless to say, the final performances were wonderful.John and I were part of a group of singers from Oxford who went out to Passau for a splendid choral week or more  based on 16th- and early 17th-century music, most memorably Giovanni Gabrieli's In ecclesiis.

Around this time Steuart Bedford, also a music student at Worcester College, put on two Britten operas at the Playhouse. For The Turn of the Screw one of the clarinets fell ill during rehearsals and John again stepped in, while for Albert Herring he was from the start one of the bassoonists. Meanwhile his 'day job' was as St Johns' organ scholar and I remember Steuart's astonishment, he being himself a supreme organist, when I told him that one of John's party pieces was the Duruflé Toccata... not for the faint-hearted! RN