Pianist John Barstow has Died, Aged 87

Barstow was a respected and long-serving pedagogue at London's Royal College of Music

The British pianist and pedagogue John Barstow, who taught generations of students over the course of a 40-year career at London's Royal College of Music (RCM), has passed away at the age of 87.

Born in Morley in 1937, Barstow studied locally at the Leeds College of Music, and later received a scholarship to attend the RCM. There, he studied the piano with Cyril Smith and composition with Bernard Stevens. During this time Barstow won prizes at the 1959 Liverpool International Concerto Competition and the 1960 International Liszt Contest in London, as well as the RCM's Chappell Medal.

Following his graduation, Barstow received the inaugural National Federation of Music Societies Young Pianists’ award — which facilitated a number of concert appearances, including a debut at London's Wigmore Hall. He also appeared frequently on British radio. Barstow entered the 1966 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, and received a 10-minute standing ovation — but despite this, he did not proceed to the competition's latter stages.

His concert career continued to unfold over the next decade, and he appeared at the Proms in 1968, where he played Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2. During this time, Barstow began teaching at the RCM, and was made a Fellow in 1981.

Barstow spent the rest of his career at the RCM, where he taught countless students and was an integral part of the piano faculty. He retired in 2007, having been made an MBE in 2006.

Several of Barstow's ex-students provided short tributes to The Telegraph. According to one, Barstow "was responsible not only for teaching me how to really control the instrument but also how to make friends with it." Another said that "he was the first person to awaken a sense of genuine awe at what the piano and 10 fingers could do," and a third added that "his lessons were always witty and even hilarious at times, although he quite rightly didn’t suffer fools if sufficient practice hadn’t been done."