Michael Lester-Cribb

Born: 23 June, 1928, in Wiltshire.

Died: 26 October, 2006, in Edinburgh, aged 78.

MICHAEL Lester-Cribb is warmly remembered by many pupils at Fettes and a host of musicians in Edinburgh for his infectious love of music. He was not only a fine pianist and a prolific composer, but a man of much energy who added a touch of academic gaiety to the music-playing and making in Edinburgh. He performed regularly at Fringe concerts and was associated with many music groups in the capital. When Lord Harewood, as Festival director, decided to programme Mahler's mammoth 8th Symphony in 1965, the newly formed Scottish Festival Chorus scored a resounding success. Much of that success was due to Lester-Cribb's careful and detailed rehearsals as assistant chorus master.

Michael Lester-Cribb studied at the Royal College of Music in London and in 1949 came to Fettes as a classics master but with a position on the music staff. Lester-Cribb was to give unstinting service to the school for 40 years. He taught maths as well as classics and from the Sixties was housemaster of College East and head of the music department.

Apart from official duties, Lester-Cribb set up joint concerts with St George's Girls School and expanded the music appreciation and introduced scholarships to bring talented young musicians to the school.

Another of his responsibilities was the annual school play. In his time, a Twelfth Night is well remembered as was Jean Anouilh's Becket, in which Lester-Cribb cast a young Tony Blair as the Little Monk.

Breaking a silence of half a century, Lester-Cribb recently wrote a letter to Prospect Magazine which began: "I suppose I was nominally responsible for the musical education of the Prime Minister, Tony Blair."

Lester-Cribb accepted for "understandable political reasons" Mr Blair now stresses that he ran a pop group at Fettes, but Lester-Cribb recalled Mr Blair as "a voluntary member of the chapel choir, who showed every sign of enjoying singing music from Palestrina to Stravinsky".

The musical commitments that Lester-Cribb took on away from Fettes were prodigious. He became a much-respected examiner in schools throughout the United Kingdom and in Hong Kong. He conducted or played at numerous Fringe events - especially St Mark's Artspace in the West End: playing in a concert of his own music there with Lucy Carteledge two months ago. Included was the world premiere of Lester-Cribb's Andante March-April 2006, which one reviewer considered "bizarre but enjoyable".

His connections with music in Edinburgh ranged far and wide. Many contemporary groups owed much to his dedication and scholarship as did the Edinburgh Savoy Opera Group. He conducted numerous school orchestras (at St Mary's Cathedral and St Giles') and visited St Andrews only last month (October) for a lunchtime concert. In June, he was in charge of a concert by the Really Terrible Orchestra for a performance of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.

Lester-Cribb had an extraordinary capacity for getting musicians to play better than they thought they could. Similarly, when the Festival Chorus was born, under the direction of Arthur Oldham, in 1964, there were many sceptics who believed such a complex (and, then, unknown) piece as Mahler's Symphony No 8 was, frankly, over ambitious.

Under the inspired conducting of Alexander Gibson and the choral training of Oldham, the Festival Chorus set a standard from which they have seldom deviated. The strength of their technique from that first concert was in many ways due to the training by both Oldham and Lester-Cribb. Throughout the previous year they had visited various Scottish cities training the members meticulously.

Such was his renown and popularity with the Festival Chorus that, in September, they presented him with a DVD of his music and then broke into a very personal version of On Ilkley Moor Baht 'At.

I know on good authority that when the Berlin Philharmonic came to the Festival in 1967, the usually abrasive maestro, Herbert von Karajan, raised doubts as to whether he would include the Bach Magnificat in a concert with this new chorus. Lester-Cribb accompanied the choir at a rehearsal and the maestro remained buried in the score following every note. At the end, von Karajan got up and thanked everyone. As he walked out he was heard to mutter: "We will have a good concert." From von Karajan, that was a compliment.

Lester-Cribb's contribution to musical life in Scotland was considerable. These ranged from recitals at the National Gallery of Scotland in the Fifties to concerts; memorably Bartok's complex Third Concerto with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Andrew Davis. But he was also on hand to play on the restored organ at Auchtertool Kirk, in Fife, in 2004 and conduct numerous concerts with the Meadows Chamber Orchestra.

But it was his inspiration as a teacher and enthusiast that many remember him with a very special pleasure. He had a delightfully quirky and challenging personality that fired up many students. The author Ross Leckie wrote of his time at Fettes recently and concluded: "Lester-Cribb showed me how music explores the hidden human heart."

Lester-Cribb retired from Fettes in 1988, but continued to live close by. He is survived by his wife, Susan, who also taught music at the school, and their daughter, Martha.