The conductor and composer Alexander Faris who has died aged 94, was on a rostrum in an orchestra pit somewhere in London theatreland almost constantly from the late 1940s to the 1980s. He composed music for film and TV, a musical, and plenty of anonymous library music used here and there for commercial purposes.
In 2009 he was belatedly but briefly propelled into the limelight by The Edwardians, the signature tune he had written for the 1970s television series Upstairs Downstairs. He was uncredited for the first series. As he said, “If they’d known it was going to be so successful they would never have asked me to write the music.” But successful it was, and the theme gradually became familiar to worldwide audiences, winning Sandy an Ivor Novello award in 1975.
Then, in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, BBC Radio 4’s PM programme introduced the Upshares Downshares item, accompanied by Sandy’s tune. Listeners sent in their own versions of the theme which, along with a new symphonic version of Sandy’s music, were made into a CD that contributed a considerable sum to Children in Need.
As Sandy pointed out, he was conceived in a united Ireland but born, in 1921, into a divided country, in Caledon, County Tyrone. He was third of the four children of Grace (nee Acheson), a schoolteacher (later head of Victoria college, Belfast), and George Faris, a Presbyterian minister. After a happy childhood and education at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution (known locally as the Inst), a Kitchener scholarship took him to read music at Christ Church, Oxford.
Coming from Northern Ireland, “it was more than my life was worth not to join up” for second world war service, and so in 1943 he found a happy home in the Micks (the Irish Guards), who seemed to take anyone who did not fit in anywhere else, including Prince Jean, the future Grand Duke of Luxembourg. As a junior officer, Sandy had a good war, which included the excitement of the liberation of Brussels. After VE day he found himself in Hamburg helping to get the opera house up and running again, as well as writin g and composing scurrilous ditties for officers’ mess high jinks.
After demobilisation and a short time at the Royal College of Music in London, in 1948 he joined the Carl Rosa Opera Company, touring the provinces as chorus master and eventually being allowed to conduct Madam Butterfly in Lewisham later in the year. He took over conducting Song of Norway at the Palace theatre, London, in 1949. Then it was a return to the Carl Rosa, followed by conducting or doing orchestrations for now long-forgotten shows. He spent 1956-57 as a fellow of the Commonwealth Fund of New York (a year’s funding for tuition and travel), and his burgeoning reputation led to him being appointed musical director for the first European production – in Oxford, Manchester and London – of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide in 1959.
From the following year he was Sadler’s Wells (the forerunner of English National Opera). Sandy conducted La Bohème there but, realising where his true talents lay, concentrated on the operetta side of the repertoire, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Offenbach. His biography of Offenbach was published in 1980.
He wrote the soundtracks for the films The Quare Fellow (1962), He Who Rides a Tiger (1965) and Georgy Girl (1966), and among his conducting credits were Robert and Elizabeth (1964), The Great Waltz (1970), Bar Mitzvah Boy (1978) and The Yeomen of the Guard (1982). His own musical, R Loves J, featured in the 1973 Chichester festival theatre season. He orchestrated Italian songs for Luciano Pavarotti (1976), recorded the soundtracks (with the LSO) for the Brent Walker Gilbert and Sullivan video series (1982) and Sullivan’s overtures with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (1986).
After an unhappy period of feeling surplus to requirements, Sandy picked himself up once more in his mid-80s by collecting some of his occasional journalism that, with the addition of newly written material, was collated into Da Capo al Fine (2009), a quirky look back at his life and times, made all the more piquant by his laconic and droll delivery. Almost as soon as it appeared, a second edition had to be published to include his sudden 15 minutes of fame with Upshares Downshares. There was an interview with Eddie Mair on PM and, to Sandy’s delight, a broadcast of him conducting the BBC Philharmonic in the full version of his celebrated piece.
Sandy is survived by four nephews and a niece.
• Samuel Alexander Faris, composer and conductor, born 11 June 1921; died 28 September 2015
