The prolific film-maker Barrie Gavin, who has died aged 89, played a key role in the representation of music and the arts on British and European television from the start of his career in the 1960s, and was still working on ideas for new projects in the days before he died. Cataloguing his works over more than six decades, he was boyishly proud of the fact that he was the creator of 567 films.
He valued his collaborations with Alexander Goehr on the composers of the Second Viennese School. Gavin adored any music and art that was challenging or tough for those to whom it was unfamiliar, and he saw the TV documentary as an irresistibly fascinating way to invite the public into worlds they might otherwise never have discovered. He had no patience with anyone who lacked the energy and curiosity to find out more about what they did not understand.
At the same time, he was sympathetic to artists who had turned away from the more rebarbative aspects of 20th-century modernism, and whom he warmed to as outsiders even in a world of outsiders. He worked with many, including the composers HK Gruber and John Adams when neither were well-known, and his last and uncompleted project was to have been a portrait of Howard Skempton.
Folk music was an abiding passion. Gavin made some of his greatest films with the folklorist AL Lloyd, on the music of eastern Europe; on the different traditions of the British Isles including the songs and religious music of the Outer Hebrides; and the folk singers and performers of North America including “Doc” Watson, whose work Gavin especially loved. Typically, he turned his affection for Lloyd into a touching film-portrait, Bert (1985).
Born in Stanmore, north-west London, Barrie was the only child of Margaret (nee Elder) and John Gavin, a chief superintendent in the police. During the second world war, John became Winston Churchill’s driver, and Barrie recalled, at the age of nine, being introduced to the prime minister on the terrace of the House of Commons on the evening of VE Day.
While still a teenager at St Paul’s school in London, as well as developing a lifelong appetite for films and literature, Gavin discovered music and began collecting records and attending performances. After studying history at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (1954-57), he did military service in Berlin during the Khrushchev crisis that started in 1958. There he enjoyed listening to Russian while monitoring Soviet air traffic, as well as pursuing musical interests by taking over from an acquaintance a cross-border vinyl record trafficking route, exchanging western desirables for eastern bloc classical recordings, often of obscure repertoire. The composer Julian Anderson came across one such record at the Notting Hill Record Exchange: a Czech recording of Dvořák’s First Symphony, bearing the signature “BV Gavin, April 1959, Berlin”.
In 1961, the year after the opening of Television Centre, Gavin joined the BBC as an assistant film editor. This was the great age of Huw Wheldon and his arts magazine programme Monitor, and Gavin found himself alongside a constellation of young talents including Ken Russell, Melvyn Bragg and Humphrey Burton. The shift from editing to directing was a natural next step and, when BBC Two was launched in 1964 as the home of cultural programming, he was soon making his own films.
From the beginning, he divided his time between documentaries on every subject, and a huge number of live concert films. His range of interests was astounding, from medieval music to modern, from folk and popular music to the most obscure experimentalism. He also made films about literature, photography, painting and other subjects.
Friendship – whether towards the artists whose lives he was recording or towards the cameramen, editors, writers and crew with whom he worked for so many years – was central to Gavin’s life and to his view of the purpose and meaning of film-making. Even when he made films about Hildegard of Bingen or Rachmaninov, one had the feeling they were friends of his. And he forged exuberant relationships with many of the outstanding conductors and performers, making a series of films with Simon Rattle in his Birmingham days, and portraits of Verdi and Donizetti with Mark Elder.
Above all, he was fascinated by anyone who wrote music, embracing composers of every type and background, and making filmed portraits about most of those he came across – an astonishing record of the cultural history of our time, from Boulez (perhaps the most important creative collaboration of his life) to Stockhausen to Gubaidulina to Richard Rodney Bennett and a host of younger figures.
The Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel was among the first to recognise the historical importance of this vast output and it was a joy to Gavin when a number of his films were copied for its world-famous archive.
In later years, like many of his generation, Gavin parted company with the BBC and led a more nomadic life as a freelance director, especially in Germany, where Swantje Ehrentreich at the public broadcasting organisation Hessischer Rundfunk in Frankfurt commissioned many outstanding pieces of work from him. In his old age he continued quietly making his own films, one of the most touching being a personal record of the changing of the seasons around his much-loved house in Wales, the footage – that he shot – cut to a recording of an orchestral piece by Delius of which he was especially fond. It is an exquisite summing up of his gifts as a film-maker.
In 1962 he married Catherine Forrest, with whom he had a daughter, Lisa, and son, James. The marriage ended in divorce, and in 1972 he married Jamila Patten, now well-known as the writer Jamila Gavin, with whom he had another son, Rohan, and daughter, Indi. That marriage also ended in divorce. He is survived by his partner of more than 30 years, Jacqui Scott, and his children.
• Barrie Vincent Gavin, film-maker, born 10 June 1935; died 12 November 2024
