Anthony Collins (1893-1963)

Anthony Collins
Born	1893
Died	1963

Anthony Collins’s gained his first professional musical experience when aged seventeen, he performed as a violist with the Hastings Municipal Orchestra. Serving in the British army during WW1, with the business of war concluded, Collins entered the Royal College of Music in 1920. Here he studied violin with Serge Rivarde and composition with Gustav Holst and in 1925 he joined the London Symphony Orchestra, for which he was both to lead the violas and to serve as a director of this self-governing body. In 1934 Anthony, was asked to join the fledgeling orchestra for the Glyndebourne Festival Opera.

The LSO also embarked on a program of performing music for films. Deciding to embark on a career of composition and conducting, he made his debut in 1938 when he conducted the LSO performing Elgar's Symphony No. 1. A year later, he formed the London Mozart Orchestra which recorded and participated in the London Music Festival. Collins left England for America in just prior to WW2 settling in California where he both composed and conducted for the RKO film studios for the next six years.

Returning after the war, he continued to compose for films, and conducted the LSO as well as other ensembles such as the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Liverpool, Hallé, and Birmingham orchestras. Collins’s own compositions in addition to his film scores included two symphonies for strings, two violin concertos, four short operas, chamber music, songs and numerous pieces of light music, of which the most well-known is probably Vanity Fair.