The Music of John Lambert

John Lambert, who celebrated his 60th birthday in 1986, is known better as a teacher than as a composer, and despite a formidable list of past pupils, which includes the likes of Javier Alvarez, Simon Bainbridge, Gary Carpenter, Oliver Knussen, Jonathan Lloyd, Ian McQueen, and Mark-Anthony Turnage, that is a situation he and many others view as slightly unfair. His output is not especially prodigious—excluding the chamber opera, A Family Affair, to be performed at the Brighton Festival this year the numbered oeuvres run to 26 in all—yet the quality and frequently the bold originality of his music, readily acknowledged by colleagues like Ligeti and Dutilleux, surely merits wider acknowledgement than it has as yet received.