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About this archive
This is a digitised collection of concert programme notes written by the British music critic Gerald Larner (1936–2018). Over a career of more than fifty years he wrote about classical music for The Guardian and The Times, and produced programme notes for orchestras, concert halls and festivals across Britain.
Gerald Larner (1936–2018)
Born in Leeds, Gerald Larner studied modern languages at Oxford. He joined The Guardian as assistant music critic in 1962 and was its chief Northern music critic from 1965 to 1993 — a post once held by Neville Cardus. From his Manchester base he formed a long association with the Hallé Orchestra as a prolific programme-note writer, and with Lynne Walker ran the arts consultancy Edgewise, supplying notes to venues including the Barbican, the Wigmore Hall and the Edinburgh Festival.
His scholarship found its fullest expression in Maurice Ravel, published in 1996 — the first monograph to grapple seriously with the troubled and complex mind of the French composer. It was a source of lasting pride to him that the French government afterwards made him an Officier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. A modern-languages graduate, he kept his French fluent throughout his life by reading Simenon’s Maigret novels in the original.
How the archive is organised
Each composer page gathers three kinds of writing: programme notes on individual works, often in several versions of differing length; essays & context; and source material — the working research files Gerald Larner kept while preparing his notes. Writing not tied to a single composer — concert programmes, pre-concert talks and wider essays — is gathered under Concerts & Essays.
Using the notes
The notes are offered for performers, students and listeners to read and use. They remain the work of Gerald Larner; please credit him when you quote or reproduce a note.
The archive is free to use, and always will be. If one of Gerald Larner’s notes has found a home in a concert programme of yours, a contribution towards the cost of keeping the site online is warmly appreciated — you can support the archive on Ko-fi.
About this site
Gerald Larner hoped that his programme notes might one day be gathered together and made freely available to anyone who wanted them. After his death in 2018 his family set out to preserve his work, imaging the hard drives on which a lifetime of writing was stored so that nothing would be lost.
Turning those drives into a public archive was a daunting prospect. There were thousands of articles, written across more than fifty years and saved in a tangle of word-processor formats, many of them long obsolete. In 2026 his grandson, Dr Matt Dennis (drmatt.dev), used Anthropic’s Claude — a large language model — to read, sort and structure the whole collection, completing in under 48 hours a task that had seemed impractical to do by hand. It is a small but heartening example of artificial intelligence put to thoroughly good use: rescuing a body of writing that might otherwise have stayed unread.
That speed comes with a caveat. The archive has been assembled quickly and at scale, and its cataloguing is still relatively shallow. Some notes survive in several versions, some repeat material, and the original concert, date or commissioning body behind a given note is frequently unknown. Work is ongoing to improve the cross-referencing and to lift passages from larger concert programmes back onto the pages of the individual composers they discuss.
If you recognise one of these notes — perhaps from a concert you played in, programmed or attended — and can tell us anything about where or when it was first used, we would be very glad to hear from you. Please write to matt[at]mattdennis[dot]net.