A Tribute to Roger Bigley

Earlier today I attended a classical music concert in Cheshire.

The string quartet played Haydn, Schubert, Tchaikovsky and Dvořák. The music was exquisite in a way that felt almost disorienting, as though it briefly rearranged time. It took me back, not only to my youth, but to a particular kind of attention I no longer practise as often as I once did.

After the concert, I told the quartet that I played the viola, and that I had been taught by Roger Bigley.

There was a pause. Then one of them looked up and said, with genuine surprise, “Wow. He’s a celebrity in the classical music world.”

I had not thought of him in those terms for a long time. To me, he was simply my teacher.

Roger Bigley died in 2013. I was taught by him from the ages of thirteen to eighteen while I was a student at the Junior Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. I had started on the violin at the age of three, but I came to the viola later, as something of a second language in music. He met me at that point of transition, when I was technically capable but still unsure of myself.

He put me at ease immediately.

There are people who teach by correcting you constantly, and people who teach by making you feel watched. Roger did neither. He seemed to listen first, to the sound you were trying to make rather than the sound you were failing to produce. In that sense, he treated potential as something already present, not something that needed to be forced into existence.

I remember him teaching me vibrato, tempo, and how to play without unnecessary effort. He would demonstrate something once, and then allow me the space to try again, as though repetition itself was a form of trust.

On one occasion, he brought a Stradivarius viola into the lesson and let me play it. I remember the shock of it — the sense that an object so rare could be placed into my hands so casually, as though it were not an object of hierarchy but of sharing.

I never took formal graded examinations on the viola beyond Grade 8, but he helped me prepare for it in a way that made it feel less like an endpoint and more like a threshold. He was not interested in performance as display. He was interested in performance as clarity.

He taught me to love the instrument, and perhaps more importantly, to trust that I was allowed to take it seriously.

I was a teenager. He was already a figure of reputation in the classical music world. I understood, even then, that there was a vast distance between us in experience and recognition. But I never felt diminished by that distance. If anything, he seemed to narrow it simply by the way he spoke to me — directly, without condescension, without performance.

I remember one lesson in particular when he needed to show me a technique that required physical guidance. Before doing so, he asked for permission. It was a small moment, almost easy to miss, but it stayed with me. It was not just politeness. It was recognition that teaching involves trust in both directions.

The string quartet today described him as a legend.

He was that. But what I remember is something less abstract.

I remember kindness that did not announce itself. I remember seriousness that did not intimidate. I remember the sense that music was not something you were judged into, but something you were gradually invited into, until you realised you were already inside it.

There are people who shape your abilities, and people who shape your relationship to those abilities. Roger Bigley did both.

And long after the lessons ended, I realise I am still playing in a way that assumes someone once believed I could.