John Lanchbery (1923-2003). British-born Australian composer, musical arranger, conductor and musician
John Lanchbery was a British-born Australian composer and conductor who was famous as a conductor, and also for his musical arrangements of ballet music. Born in London, he was conductor of the Metropolitan Ballet (1948 to 1949), The Royal Ballet (1959 to 1972), The Australian Ballet (1972 to 1977) and musical director of American Ballet Theatre (1978 to 1980). Lanchbery composed film scores before joining Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet as an orchestrator. He arranged Stan Kenton’s music for Somnambulism (1953), Kenneth MacMillan’s first ballet, and Frederick Mompou’s music for MacMillan’s House of Birds in 1955. Lanchbery arranged the scores for Frederick Ashton’s La Fille mal gardée, The Two Pigeons, The Dream and A Month in the Country, as well as productions of Marius Petipa’s La Bayadère and Don Quixote for Natalia Makarova and Rudolf Nureyev. He made masterful arrangements for MacMillan’s Mayerling (1978) and Ronald Hynd’s The Merry Widow (1976) for The Australian Ballet. Married to the ballerina Elaine Fifield from 1951 until 1960, John Lanchbery became an Australian citizen in 2002 and died in Melbourne in 2003.