Andrew Porter, music critic, 1928-2015

Recruited in 1953 as the Financial Times' first music critic, Andrew Porter laid the cornerstone for the arts coverage of a newspaper that was becoming ever more curious about the world beyond business.

Porter, who has died aged 86, became in the words of FT historian David Kynaston the "pivotal figure of the five arts writers" who formed the team he soon built. The organist and recent Oxford university graduate, Mr Kynaston noted, "combined the qualities of high enthusiasm with immense erudition".

As scholarly as he was prolific, Porter found his reach extended well beyond penning reviews. He directed productions, held visiting professorships and translated a number of operatic works, including Wagner's entire Ring cycle (Porter's version was first sung by the English National Opera).

As a Festschrift assembled by admirers to mark his 75th birthday proclaimed: "Andrew's translations, carefully and sensitively fitted to their originals' diction and register [in all of those words' many meanings] are a major part of his achievement."

Still, Porter's defining triumph came in his discovery, in the library of the Paris Opera, of pages tacked shut in a set of manuscripts on file: almost an hour's worth of lost Verdi passages for Don Carlo. From individual parts cut just before the opera's 1867 opening, he painstakingly reconstructed a full conductor's score.

His findings became a 1970 scoop for the FT, where he served for 19 years before joining The New Yorker. That involved a second move of continent for Porter, a dentist's son raised in the village of Hout Bay in South Africa, now a suburb of Cape Town. Born on August 26 1928 to a mother from a whisky and sherry producing family and schooled at that city's elite Diocesan College, he is survived by his sister Sheila.

Porter could be petulant, waging a number of artistic feuds. Once, on the FT's old production floor after a subeditor had hacked at his latest review, he also upended a galley of type. At the time, for a journalist even to touch the metal was cause for a near-automatic walkout by the print unions.

Yet his knowledge was seldom in dispute and his judgments were fiercely independent. Porter was known for deriding the occasional Covent Garden performance even though the Royal Opera House was chaired by Lord Drogheda, then the FT's chief executive.

Though exercised most of all during his early career, his abilities extended to critiquing ballet too. To dance reviews he brought a musical authority and an appreciation of movement overlaid by a studied understanding of the original choreographer's intentions.

This use of yardsticks against which subsequent productions could be assessed imbued his writing in general with a discursive style. The rendition Porter had just sat through was in constant peril of being relegated to the end. It was a wandering route that tended to please neither players nor editors. Though his prose was spare and precise, he seemed most at ease with the languidly long-form New Yorker.

On return to London in 1992 he reviewed for journals such as the Times Literary Supplement along with further forays into his own stagings.

From the outset Porter was a champion of new composers, yet also of some less frequently mounted offerings by their forebears. Rather than report on Arthur Rubinstein "playing the Brahms Second Concerto for the umpteenth time", his preference might be for the FT that night to attend another work put on as "an amateur performance [ . . .] in a suburban church hall", the paper's centenary history records him as saying.

In a 2011 interview with Opera News, a US monthly, he was asked about the breadth of his musical interests. Some pieces would not bother him if he never heard them again, he said. As for jazz or pop: "A simple no." Still, for works with a closer attunement to the tradition he loved, more telling was the broader preface to Porter's answers: "I'm curious about everything that turns up."

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