Desmond Bradley (William Desmond Bradley) was an
Australian violinist, concertmaster, teacher,
and composer, born (in Melbourne) on October 12, 1934. He is known for having enjoyed a very
successful career which encompassed many different activities in the field of
music – orchestral playing, solo performance, composition, recording studio work,
and violin pedagogy. Although his is not
now a household name, he was then widely respected as a serious artist and
violinist by his peers. For someone who
composed almost exclusively in his spare time (his violin concerto took him 10
years to complete), he left a considerable number of compositions. By all accounts, he was a child prodigy. His violin studies began as a child and his
first teacher was probably his father, who was a professional violinist. (His mother was a concert pianist.) Evidently, he learned very quickly and began
performing publicly at age four. At age
7, he gave his first recital at the Albert Conservatory of Music in
Melbourne. After that, he appeared as
soloist with the Melbourne Symphony playing Charles De Beriot’s concerto number
7 (one of his most popular.). At age 8,
he played the (e minor) Mendelssohn concerto with the same orchestra. At age 11 (1945), he played the Beethoven
concerto, again with the Melbourne Symphony, in a venue northeast of Melbourne,
with 11,000 people in attendance. He won
the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Radio Competition at age 12
(1946.) He then toured Australia, giving
close to 100 concerts at just age 15. Money
donated by everyday Australians (what is now known as crowd funding) enabled
Bradley to travel to Paris in 1950 to study with George Enescu at a music
academy there. He studied with Enescu
for approximately three years. In 1951,
he made his Paris debut. On December 1,
1953, he made his London debut at Wigmore Hall.
He was 19 years old. The
following year, he soloed with the London Philharmonic at the Royal Albert
Hall. Periodically, Bradley made solo
appearances with orchestra and in recital but eventually settled into a career
as concertmaster (between 1960 and 1975, approximately) with various
orchestras, including the Tonhalle Orchestra (Switzerland), the Royal
Philharmonic, and the New Philharmonia Orchestra (the debut of his violin
concerto’s final version was with this orchestra in the Royal Festival Hall on
October 4, 1973. Adrian Boult was on the podium.) Some of his major works (such as the violin
concerto with himself as soloist, and the second and third symphonies, which he
conducted) have been recorded but I don’t know if they are currently available
to the general public. It is telling
that just as his studies with Enescu were crowd-funded, his recording of
Paganini’s 24 Caprices was self-funded, although the recording was later
released by EMI Classics. Here is an
audio file from YouTube wherein he plays the famous Chausson Poeme. His violin can also be heard in film scores
and soundtracks for British recording artists.
Bradley published his book on scale studies titled The Art of the Violin
in 1981; however, copies are hard to come by given that it was self-published
and only a limited number were printed. As
far as I know, Bradley didn’t play a famous brand violin, such as a Guadagnini,
Vuillaume, Amati, Stradivarius, or Guarneri.
Besides the violin concerto and three symphonies, his compositional
output included many chamber music works, music for violin and piano, a few
transcriptions, and cadenzas for the Beethoven and Brahms violin
concertos. Bradley died on November 6,
1992, at age 58 – the age at which Leonid Kogan and Nicolo Paganini also died.
