My father, Keith Anderson, who has died aged 93 from pneumonia, was a writer, editor, performer, educator and broadcaster, working in the UK, Turkey and Hong Kong.
Born in Wallasey, to Bessie Anderson (nee Day) and Victor Anderson, an accountant and educator, Keith was a keen violinist from an early age. He attended Mostyn House school in Parkgate, Cheshire, from where he won a scholarship to Lancing College in West Sussex. He graduated in classics from Wadham College, Oxford, under the tutelage of Maurice Bowra.
Keith took on a variety of roles, teaching English privately in Madrid and at Ankara University, with additional work as a broadcaster and translator. In Ankara he became tutor to the children of the then prime minister of Turkey, Adnan Menderes, an arrangement that abruptly came to an end with the 1960 coup d’etat.
The early 1960s saw Keith teaching English and classics at Fort Augustus Abbey school in the Highlands, and then at Stonyhurst college in Clitheroe, Lancashire, where he moved partly in order to be able to study violin with Alexandre Moskowsky, formerly of the Hungarian Quartet. Lecturing positions in Leeds followed, first at James Graham college (now part of Leeds Beckett University) and then at the city’s college of music (now Leeds Conservatoire), where he taught music education.
In 1973 Keith was appointed to the staff of the music department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, going on to become head of department the following year. He worked in Hong Kong in a number of teaching roles, while also presenting radio programmes about music, playing viola in the Hong Kong philharmonic orchestra and writing about music for magazines.
Meeting Klaus Heymann, the founder of Naxos records, through the Hong Kong music scene, led to collaborations on recording projects and a job as editor of Hi-Fi and Music Review magazine. Later, Keith produced many thousands of sleeve notes as well as key reference works, including The A-Z of Classical Music and The A-Z of Opera. He continued writing and playing, and two months before he died he was awarded an honorary fellowship by the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts.
Keith married Carole Wattie in 1965 in Dundee; they separated in the 1970s and divorced in 1981. In the late 1990s he returned to the UK for the final time, initially living in north Wales before moving to Northumberland. He is survived by his five children, Anthony, Catherine, Clare, Anna and me, nine grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.
