Stuart Knussen, Founding Music Director     December 7,1923 - January 1,1990

Stuart Knussen devoted his years in Victoria to young musicians, encouraging, challenging, and counseling them in their musical development. He shared with them his own profound and passionate love of music, and his conviction of the whole-hearted commitment which music demands from those who would pursue the art. His vision will continue to guide them.

Born in Manchester, UK., Stuart Knussen received his musical training in England, Hamburg, and Chicago. His career took him to every corner of the globe, as an orchestral player, solo performer, recording artist, conductor, and broadcaster. Mr. Knussen was a founding member of the Academy of St. Martin's-in-the-Field, and was Principal Bass with the London Symphony Orchestra for nineteen years, including five years as Chairman of its Board of Directors. Following associations with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony and the Canadian Association of Youth Orchestras at Banff, he moved to Victoria in 1983 where he established the GVYO and taught at the Victoria Conservatory of Music.

The following obituary, written by distinguished critic Edward Greenfield, appeared in the Manchester Guardian in January, 1990.

Player or composer: the bass line counts

Stuart Knussen was one of the characters among orchestral players, a laconic, sharp-spoken northerner who behind a rugged exterior was an original and sensitive musician. As principal double-bass and later chairman of the London Symphony Orchestra at a key period, he helped to consolidate - along with his friend, the horn-player, Barry Tuckwell, and others - a new generation of players in London.

Tall and upstanding, with wavy red hair, he was a notable backrow forward of string players on an concert platform. In 1965 a television film illustrated his life as an orchestral player. That encouraged his son, Oliver, then a precocious 13, now celebrated both as composer and conductor, to write his First Symphony, and memorably at the age of 15 to conduct the LSO in its first performance.

Stuart Knussen was born in Manchester in December I923. His father- also called Stuart - was principal cello in the Halle, his mother a professional singer. From an early age the boy was able to attend Halle rehearsals under Sir Hamilton Harty, and that nurtured his passion for Berlioz.

Knussen's parents did not want him to become a musician, but he insisted on teaching himself the double-bass. He developed his own system of fingering based on that of the cello, a technique that has influenced many players since. Latterly, rejecting orchestral routine, he turned to teaching, mainly working in the United States and Canada.

He first joined the Halle as a player in 1945 under Sir John Barbirolli. But then, never one to settle for long, Knussen went off to America to study further, and to gain more playing experience - and find his wife, Jane. He joined the LSO in 1958, but also worked with the English Chamber Orchestra for Benjamin Britten at the Aldeburgh Festival. It was Knussen who first played the double-bass part in Britten's church-parable, Curlew River. Oliver Knussen remembers how through the 1950s and 1960s the family was in regular contact both with Britten and with another hero of his father's, Leopold Stokowski. Knussen's period with the LSO spanned the end of Pierre Monteux's conductorship, the brief reign of Istvan Kertesz and the first years of Andre Previn as principal conductor. But then in 1972, with his son an established composer, Knussen decided to go to America.

For a season he managed the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, but then concentrated on teaching and encouraging what became a great enthusiasm with him, the development of community orchestras. In this capacity he worked at the Conservatory in Victoria, British Columbia, where he died.

Vladimir Ashkenazy, in a recent letter to Oliver Knussen after conducting his Third Symphony in Moscow, asked to be remembered to "the greatest double-bass player in the world".