Richard Burnett obituary

In 1976 the fortepianist Richard Burnett, who has died aged 90, opened the Finchcocks Living Museum of Music in Goudhurst, Kent. For the next four decades it was home to more than 100 antique keyboard instruments and their music, realised by established performers – or by anyone who turned up. This was previously unheard of. Other museums disapproved, though some eventually copied the idea, and Melvyn Tan was among the pianists who drew direct inspiration for the course of their careers from Dick’s pioneering philosophy.

He and his wife, the writer Katrina Hendrey, had bought Finchcocks, an early Georgian manor house with 13 acres, in 1970 and ran it together. It was then in a shocking state, but provided workshops for Adlam Burnett, the firm that Dick ran with Derek Adlam, building replicas and restoring instruments with a gifted team of craftsmen until 1980.

When the house was opened as a museum, it provided an ideal setting for instruments to sound in the sort of ambience for which they were intended. There was always a full programme of events throughout the open season, culminating each September in formal concerts involving well-known artists who loved going there.

But it was the open afternoons that originally surprised and delighted visitors, at their peak numbering 20,000 a year, for whom the instruments were a novelty, and the hosts’ informality provided an unparalleled experience. Visitors were captivated by Dick’s enthusiasm and humorous way of imparting information. They were also taken aback by the quality of his performances: he got early pianos, and not just his own, to be sparkling in the treble, nobly thundering in the bass, with every shimmering variation in between and witty usage of pedal and knee-lever devices.

His economy of movement was pronounced: his arms and hands barely moved and there was something fascinating in the way his fingers connected with the keys with dexterous, un-apparent vigour. When demonstrating instruments Dick liked to tell the story of Muzio Clementi, “father of the modern pianoforte”, passed on by Clementi’s grandson, of being shown into his grandfather’s study and finding the great man dramatically playing something of his own composition, on a piano of his own manufacture, while reading from a volume, not of music, but Thucydides. As a performer, Dick was the opposite, holding an audience enraptured, but with a lack of drama that made him seem almost absent from the proceedings. Once I asked him afterwards what he had been thinking of: “jokes” he replied, and indeed his could be very funny and well-crafted.

He tried to match each composer with the right instrument and was careful not to get between the listener and the music. Notable among his many recordings on the Amon Ra label are The Romantic Fortepiano – works by Hummel, Czerny, Schubert, Chopin and Schumann on his 1826 Viennese instrument by Conrad Graf – and pieces by the American Louis Moreau Gottschalk, on pianos by Broadwood and Erard as well as the Graf. With his great friend the violinist Ralph Holmes he recorded Beethoven sonatas, and with another, Alan Hacker, a Clarinet Collection.

An Evening With Queen Victoria was devised by Katrina from letters and diaries for Prunella Scales, who excelled in fleshing out Victoria’s character in a comical way, facing the magnitude of her position as a girl, gathering confidence and eventually reaching problematic old age. Dick’s selection of music for the tenor Ian Partridge and himself included works by Mendelssohn; the queen’s consort, Prince Albert; Gilbert and Sullivan’s account of a republican monarchy from The Gondoliers; and a Fugue in E by JS Bach.

Over three decades, it ran for 400 performances. The show’s original piano was a marquetry Collard & Collard from around 1840, whose scaly aspect gave it an unpromising resemblance to a giant lizard. Typically un-resonant of its period, it blossomed under Dick’s considered coaxing, as Irving Wardle noted in his review of the first performance at the Old Vic in London in 1980, which led to performances all round the world and was shown on BBC TV.

I witnessed the whole Finchcocks museum venture, from acting as a teenage car park assistant when it opened to the sourcing and acquiring many of the instruments, furniture and paintings. Dick was a true collector and loved to buy things he thought the public would like.

Born at Stratton, an early Georgian farmhouse in Godstone, Surrey, he was the fifth child of Joan (nee Humphery) and Sir Leslie Burnett. His parents were wealthy by virtue of being two of the proprietors of Hay’s Wharf, a warehouse on the Thames in London. Nonetheless, the family home had one bathroom and no central heating, because Dick’s father had it removed.

At Cheam school, Hampshire, the matron taught Dick to juggle, a skill later supplanted by tightrope walking and unicycling. From Eton he went to the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music in London (1951-52), and then to take a degree (1957) in economics and modern languages – Danish, Swedish and Norwegian – at King’s College, Cambridge. There, before an expectant audience, having been given the wrong sort of rope, he fell theatrically into the Cam. Later he studied German, Dutch and Japanese.

By nature, Dick was contradictory: kind, energetic, generous and brilliant, but sometimes baffled. He needed space in which to experiment, and cared very much for his home and what could go into it. In 2008 he was appointed MBE.

He married Katrina in 1969, and in 1984 they formed the Finchcocks Charity for musical education. They maintained their long-term commitment to Finchcocks until the flow of visitors diminished and the repairs needed to the collection and the house were too great. In 2016 I helped organise the sale by auction of most of its contents, and and 14 historic instruments, covering the whole repertoire, have found a home at a new centre in Tunbridge Wells.

Katrina survives him.

Richard Leslie Burnett, fortepianist and collector, born 23 June 1932; died 8 July 2022

• Classical music
• Kent
• obituaries

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