Denis Wick (1931 - 2025)
The name Denis Wick may not be known to you unless you are a brass player, but if you are familiar with the opening titles of Star Wars, then you will have heard his dazzlingly brilliant playing. For more than thirty years, (1957-1988), Denis was the London Symphony Orchestra’s principal trombonist. Alongside the legendary trumpeter Maurice Murphy, Denis was responsible for the gloriously distinctive sound of the LSO brass which had a reputation for power and virtuosity.
Denis was born in Braintree in 1931. His father worked for local building merchants but the outbreak of the Second World War meant a rapid decline in the building of new houses. Forced to seek alternative employment, Mr Wick started to sell insurance for the Salvation Army and soon the whole family became Salvationists. The nine-year-old Denis was lent a trombone and joined the Chelmsford Salvation Army band alongside his father. He was clearly very talented and he made very rapid progress on the instrument. When Denis was sixteen, he heard Malcolm Arnold playing the trumpet and this inspired him to pursue a career in music.
Denis left school and went to the Royal Academy of Music where he briefly studied with the famous player Sid Langston. He did not enjoy music college and felt that he learnt very little. Through a chance encounter, he was invited to audition for the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in 1950. At the age of just nineteen, he left the Royal Academy and joined the orchestra as a full-time professional. A few years later, he was invited to audition for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, where he played under the baton of Rudolf Schwarz. Schwarz had lost all of his family during the Holocaust and had survived both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. As a young man in Vienna, Schwarz had studied with none other than Richard Strauss (186401949).
Denis was a supremely virtuosic player and, in 1955, he premiered Gordon Jacob’s wonderful trombone concerto. Technically, this represented something of a new departure in terms of the demands upon the player. From very early on in his career, Denis was a champion of an expansive sound and keen to push the boundaries of what was possible on the instrument.
The name Denis Wick was, and still is, synonymous with outstanding musicianship. He wrote the much celebrated ‘Trombone Technique’ and was a real pioneer in terms of the technical aspects of brass playing. Later on in his career, Denis dedicated a huge amount of time to designing innovative mouthpieces to meet the needs of both himself and colleagues. He designed mutes and gave a good deal of thought to the tonal qualities required by the acoustic setting of venues such as the Royal Festival Hall. The composer Benjamin Britten helped evaluate the performance of various of his prototypes. The distinctive qualities of Denis Wick’s mouthpieces and mutes revolutionised brass playing and the brass sections of our leading orchestras would sound very different were it not for his creative genius. The accessories that bear his name are manufactured at a factory in Dorset.
Despite his brilliance, Denis was absolutely committed to helping young musicians and, for many years, he taught at both the Guildhall School of Music Drama and the Royal Academy of Music.
For a number of years, he conducted the Second Essex Youth Orchestra and I was fortunate enough to encounter him in this context. I was just fourteen years old when I started playing in the orchestra. It was my first experience of playing in a full symphony orchestra and I was utterly blown away by the experience. However, it quickly became apparent that I needed to up my game very considerably in order to be able to play the very ambitious repertoire that we performed. I was one of the youngest players in the orchestra and the jump from school wind band to full county orchestra seemed enormous. Suddenly, I was being tutored by some of the top bassoonists in the country. Our proximity to London was enormously beneficial in terms of attracting first-class tutors.
The learning curve was unbelievably steep and yet I was transformed by the opportunity of playing works like Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony, Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole and Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances. I remember feeling absolutely terrified by the lengthy homophonic wind section at the beginning of the second movement of the Dvorak and feeling terrified, uncomfortably exposed but tremendously excited. This was music-making on another level and I knew that I had found something that I really wanted to do and that, on some level, I had found my tribe. The opportunity to play with people much older (and much more talented) than me was totally formative. I remember the hairs on the back of my neck standing up at the sweeping lush sound of the strings. The power of the brass directly behind me was beyond exciting.
Denis had extremely high standards and I think we were in absolute awe of him. He told remarkable anecdotes from his long and illustrious career with the London Symphony Orchestra. He knew many of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century and I loved hearing his stories about composers like Malcolm Arnold, for whom he retained a particular admiration. I remember his frustration when I missed my entry during a rehearsal in which we were putting the finishing touches to Brahms’ Third Symphony. The contrabassoon does not have much to do in the first movement, but the few notes that it does have are rather important. To my eternal shame, I was looking down and reading a book propped on my knees at the critical moment. The orchestra stopped and I was suddenly aware of Denis’ rich baritone voice filling the hall. ‘You had one job to do….that was all’. We respected Denis so much that a gentle rebuke such as this carried enormous weight. On another occasion, I remember that he stopped us midflow and with a wry smile announced, ‘Ladies and gentleman, do not worry, the doors do not open for at least another twenty minutes!’. A master of understatement, Denis instinctively knew how to get the best from us.
I attribute my enduring love of orchestral music to my time with the Second Essex Youth Orchestra. That was one of the places where I felt most inspired and most alive. There is a whole generation of people my age who grew up in Essex and had the good fortune of working with Denis. On a personal level, he was incredibly kind and when he gave you praise or encouragement, you felt lifted up. He inspired me to want to be the very best version of myself. I was not especially talented and, unlike many of my contemporaries, I did not end up pursuing a career in music. That did not matter for Denis taught us so much about dedication, hard work and the importance of never ‘settling’. He treated us like young professionals and if he did make allowances for our age then he never patronised us or set a cap on our ambition.
I left the Second Essex Youth Orchestra in about 1994 and I never saw Denis again. I wish I had taken the time to tell him what an enormously positive impact he had had upon me. Sometimes, we only appreciate the full impact of such individuals after the passing of a good many years. Denis Wick conducted the London Wind Orchestra and he was an enormous fan of the composer Percy Grainger. Over the past few days, I have listened a couple of times to his beautiful recording of Grainger’s arrangement of the Derry Air.
