My friend Sarah Gordon, who has died aged 71, got her first job in music as a secretary with the London Symphony Orchestra, rushing soloists around in her bright new Mini and making important friends for the future. She then gained experience with several agencies before joining Yehudi Menuhin’s London operation in the 1980s. Remembering those days, she liked to recall taking one of his priceless violins to Paris for authentication. The delicate instrument could not be left alone for a second; it must have its own seat on the aircraft and accompany her to the loo (a manoeuvre that nowadays would surely trigger a terrorist alert).
Other projects for Menuhin were more mundane. But as her own career in concert management developed, Sarah came to share one of his lifelong concerns – that young musicians should be given practical help to launch themselves into this overcrowded profession. In the early 1990s she was appointed administrator of the Kirckman Concert Society, whose raison d’etre is to give exceptionally talented youngsters their first engagement at a prestigious London concert venue.
The auditions over, Sarah’s job was to reach for her contacts book, deploy her phenomenal charm and produce those much sought-after engagements. As the Kirckman’s director, the oboist Neil Black, readily admitted, “the scope of the society immediately increased, with many more concerts at the South Bank and the Wigmore Hall”.
Sarah’s spiritual home may indeed have been “the Wig”, but if so she had a second home in Bath. As administrator of the annual Bath Mozartfest for almost 20 years she managed countless concerts in the Assembly Rooms, Guildhall and Abbey.
The festival had a difficult birth, gathering strength when Sarah and its chairman, Michael Kaye, invited Amelia Freedman to become artistic director in 1995. Since then it has flourished, to become one of the most important events in the musical calendar. Every November Sarah would establish her forward operating base in a hotel overlooking the Abbey and hurl herself into 10 days of problem-solving.
Sarah was born in Exeter but brought up in Hampstead, north London. Her parents, Beryl and Hugh Park, were both lawyers – her father eventually became a high court judge. She married Dr Bill Gordon, a biochemical pathologist, in 1969, and the couple migrated eastwards, eventually making their home in Maldon, Essex.
Underlying Sarah’s administrative skills was a deep, eclectic love of music. As a concertgoer, one of her favourite venues was Leeds’s great Victorian town hall – for the international piano competition – where she liked to perch high behind the orchestra.
Sarah shared a family cottage in Gorran Haven, Cornwall, where she loved to spend time watching the harbour and walking the cliff path. She never lost her appetite for life, or her curiosity about a world she travelled widely.
She is survived by Bill, their daughters, Claire and Jo, and her sisters, Julia and Ros.
