David Diamond, 89; composed symphonies of intensity
The American composer David Diamond died of congestive heart failure on Monday in his birthplace, Rochester, N.Y. He was 89.
Mr. Diamond was one of the most gifted, colorful, and cantankerous creative figures in the world of music. He always went his own way, composing in a highly personal, lyrical, intense, and driven style that had nothing to do with the winds of fashion. Consequently, his music repeatedly went through cycles of neglect and rediscovery.
During a period when atonal and 12-tone music were dominant, he remained devoted to traditional expressive goals.
As a young man in his 20s, Mr. Diamond was championed by many of the prominent musical figures of the 1940s. He was encouraged by the composer Maurice Ravel, and the violinist Joseph Szigeti played his music.
Among the conductors who presented his works were Leopold Stokowski, Pierre Monteux, Dimitri Mitropoulos, and especially Serge Koussevitzky, music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra who gave the world premiere of Mr. Diamond's Second Symphony in 1944. In 1946 and 1949, Koussevitzky led performances of ''Rounds," a work for string orchestra that became one of the composer's most popular pieces.
Koussevitzky's BSO successor, Charles Munch, premiered Mr. Diamond's Third Symphony in 1954 and his Sixth in 1957. The most recent BSO performance of his work was ''Rounds," conducted by Aaron Copland in 1960.
One of Mr. Diamond's strongest advocates for many years was Leonard Bernstein, who led the premieres of his Fourth Symphony in Boston and his Fifth and Eighth in New York.
Mr. Diamond was born July 9, 1915. He studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music, at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, with Roger Sessions in New York, and with Nadia Boulanger in France.
For many years he supported himself with a variety of odd jobs, ranging from mopping floors to soda jerking to playing in the orchestra for the radio show ''Your Hit Parade." He spent 14 years living in Italy, and after his return to America in 1965, he became a prominent teacher at the Manhattan School of Music and at the Juilliard School.
His career was launched by a ''Sinfonietta" that won a contest sponsored by bandleader Paul Whitman; one of the judges was George Gershwin.
Over the years Mr. Diamond composed 11 symphonies; 10 string quartets; concertos for violin, piano, cello, and string quartet; and a vast amount of other work, including chamber and vocal music.
In addition to the struggles every serious composer faces, Mr. Diamond fought anti-Semitism and homophobia throughout his life; he was openly gay long before that became socially acceptable. His personal battles sometimes led to a prickly defensiveness that left broken friendships; even Bernstein deserted him after the composer contributed details to a tell-all biography.
It must have been gratifying for Mr. Diamond in old age to find an advocate as committed as conductor Gerard Schwarz of the Seattle Symphony, who made a number of recordings of Mr. Diamond's music that have recently found a new home on the Naxos label, and a wider public.
At the time of his death, Mr. Diamond was completing his autobiography. But everything anyone needs to know is already there in his music, where he could and did say anything he wanted to, regardless of what anyone might think.
