Philip Sainton

Phillip Sainton was an English composer and viola player. The grandson of celebrated 19th-century musicians, he studied at the Royal Academy of Music with Corder and Tertis. During World War I he worked as a chemist, primarily in the Middle East. After the war he became principal viola in the Queen's Hall Orchestra, a member of the London String Quartet (from 1929) and principal viola of the BBC SO (1930–44). He established his reputation as a composer with two orchestral Sea Pictures, which he conducted at the Proms in 1923. He is particularly remembered, however, for his impressionistic orchestral tone poem The Island (1939); first heard during World War II, it enjoyed a brief popularity in the late 1940s and was recorded in 1993. His success with sea music led to a score for John Huston's film Moby Dick (1956), which, reconstructed by John W. Morgan and William T. Stromberg, was recorded in 1997. He also orchestrated a number of scores by the South African composer J. S. Gerber. His surviving output is small (several of the earlier works appear to have been destroyed).

[Copied from here, which itself is said to be lifted from “Biography from Oxford Muisc [sic] Online” (which is actually the online version of the New Groves).

Oddly, Philip Sainton does not warrant a mention in my 1980 edition of the New Groves, though his grandfather Prosper Sainton does. His grandfather was French and moved to London in 1845. His grandson was also born in France but was soon brought to be raised in Surrey. Wikipedia, unlike the above extract, claims he worked during the first World War as a 'cipher clerk', not as a chemist: and since there is no evidence I can find that he ever went near a test tube, I think we can discount the story promulgated above by the British Music Collection (and, allegedly, the Oxford Music Online). Anyway: his dates were 1891 to 1967 and I think it fair to say that his music is almost entirely unmemorable. Even his score for Moby Dick leaves me unmoved, unfortunately. More interesting (to me) is that his first wife (Gwendolen Mason) was a harpist who went on to teach Osian Ellis, Benjamin Britten's favourite harpist.

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