Sir Donald Francis Tovey was a British musical analyst, musicologist, writer on music, composer and pianist. He is best known for his Essays in Musical Analysis. Tovey began to study the piano and compose at an early age. He eventually studied music under Hubert Parry and became a close friend of Joseph Joachim, and played piano with the Joachim Quartet in a 1905 performance of Johannes Brahms’ Piano Quintet. He gained some moderate fame as a composer, having his works performed in Berlin and Vienna as well as London.

He performed his own piano concerto under the conductorship of Henry Wood in 1903 and under Hans Richter in 1906. During this period he also contributed heavily to the music articles in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, writing a large portion of the content on music of the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1914 he began to teach music at the University of Edinburgh and there he founded the Reid Orchestra. For their concerts he wrote a series of programme notes, many of which were eventually collected into the books for which he is now best known, the Essays in Musical Analysis.

Tovey’s most productive period as a composer was from his time as an undergraduate at Balliol College through his career as a concert pianist until he became Reid professor of Music at Edinburgh University in 1914. The majority of his compositions were for chamber music, of which this CD of string quartets by the Tippett Quartet is the first in a series of Tovey’s music on Guild Music.

Tovey was knighted in 1935. He died in 1940 in Edinburgh.

Tippett Quartet:
- John Mills (violin)
- Jeremy Isaac (violin)
- Julia O’Riordan (viola)
- Bozidar Vukotic (cello)