Robert Burch

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 801, 26 November 1954, Page 29

Robert Burch

NE of the youngest composers in the series of programmes now being heard from YZ stations is Robert Burch, of Wellington. He was born in Lyttelton in 1929 and studied music at Victoria University College under’ Frederick Page and Douglas Lilburn, and at Lower Hutt under Claude Haydon. He was awarded a Government bursary to London, where he studied composition with Benjamin Frankel at the Guildhall School of Music, and horn with Raymond Bryant, of the BBC Symphony. Recent compositions by Robert Burch include a piano sonatina and a Sinfonietta for String Orchestra. In the 15th programme of Music by New Zealand Composers John Taylor plays his Four Bagatelles for Piano, He wrote these in Paris, and they received their first performance at a concert of the New Zealand Music Society in London. Robert Burch says he can’t trace any musical background in his family, though he doesn’t consider this unusual. His late father was, in fact, shipping manager for a well-known travel agency in the South Island. He himself works as a programme officer at Station 2YA, and devotes all his spare time to com-

position. But he also has another interest at the present time, for at Christmas he plans to marry Leah Tozer, a New Plymouth girl who was studying singing at the Guildhall in London at the time he was therg. So now, like many another young prospective bridegroom, he is busy hunting through the suburbs of Wellington and Lower Hutt for a suitable flat or house to start married life in.