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In 1967 the cellist Bruno Schrecker, who has died aged 97, was invited to join the Allegri String Quartet when William Pleeth left it. He was delighted to take up a place that he had declined in 1953, when it was founded with Eli Goren as leader; membership continued to change, and the ensemble remains active today.
Bruno, above all a chamber musician and recitalist, remained with the quartet for the next three decades, until 1998. His convivial personality, irrepressible humour and determination always to get right to the truth of any piece enabled him to remain friends with his Allegri colleagues.
He had a particularly close rapport with Hugh Maguire, the second of the three leaders he worked with. When Bruno joined, Goren was still the first violin, and Maguire was succeeded in 1976 by Peter Carter.
As a friend and neighbour following the quartet, my own best memory was of a Beethoven series they gave at the Holywell Music Room, Oxford, in 1980. The many fine recordings from Bruno’s time include most of the Schubert quartets, the Elgar Piano Quintet with John Ogdon (1970), Britten’s Quartets Nos 1 and 2 (1972), prepared with the composer, and the Brahms Clarinet Quintet with James Campbell (1992).
Born into a Jewish family in Frankfurt, Bruno was the youngest of three sons of Lisl (nee Bischitsky) and Robert Schrecker. The opera composer Franz Shreker was a cousin of Bruno’s grandfather, and the C missing from his name a registrar’s error.
In 1933, the collapse of the family business making buttons from casein, a milk-based material, and the growing threat from Hitler prompted Robert to emigrate to Britain, where he had contacts. Lisl took the three boys to live temporarily in her home city of Prague, before joining him in 1935. Her own parents followed to Britain in 1938.
The German language was forbidden in the Schreckers’ new home in Wimbledon, south London, and, aged seven, Bruno quickly learned English, later winning a speaking prize at Raynes Park high school. During the blitz he was evacuated to Kelly House, in west Devon, where he enjoyed living with “impoverished gentry”.
The servicemen billeted at the Palladian mansion included a cellist, and Bruno – whose father had encouraged him to seek a securer profession – started on the instrument only as a teenager and in secret. However, he won a place at the Royal College of Music in London, and for his graduating concerto with the college orchestra he chose Ernest Bloch’s Schelomo.
He then played with the Peter Gibbs Quartet, but set aside the offer to join the new Allegri Quartet because of a French government scholarship to study twice a week with Pablo Casals in Prades, France, near the border with Spain. He admired not only the Catalan master’s playing, but also his “understanding of the world and deep feeling for people”.
For some years Bruno worked with the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra under the violinist Szymon Goldberg, sharing a desk with the idiosyncratic Dutch cellist Anner Bylsma, later a leading light of period instrument performance. A particular memory was of playing Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos on the Acropolis in Athens, and their recording of the works was released in 1959.
Back in London from the late 1950s, Bruno gave duo recitals with piano, often on the BBC Third Programme, did session work with the London Symphony Orchestra and appeared with his own chamber group. The violinist in the trio was Perry Hart, a student of Goldberg: stuck for a name, Bruno took up his father’s suggestion of Italianising Goldberg into Oromonte. The trio functioned both as a string trio with Margaret Major on viola, and as a piano trio with Nina Milkina, and was joined by other artists, such as the oboist Janet Craxton.
In 1953 Bruno married the artist Doris Wilkinson, and they lived in the same house in Wimbledon that his parents had. That marriage ended in divorce, and in 1988 he married a fellow cellist, Shena Power. They moved to the village of Larkhall on the edge of Bath, where he spent his last four decades. After leaving the Allegri, he took on a few pupils, returned occasionally to play at the festival he had founded at Llanfyllin, Powys, in 1971, and was a guest coach at Chetham’s School of Music, Manchester.
A keen photographer, he took portrait shots of several musicians. One of Marisa Robles looking through the strings of her harp is held at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
He is survived by Shena and three sons: Marius and Jeremy from his first marriage, and Leo from his second.
