My mother, Kay Hurwitz, who has died aged 94, was a viola player whose gift for sight-reading made her indispensable to the Hallé, Martha Graham's dance company, London Festival Ballet and many other orchestras. She also encouraged generations of new musicians.
During the second world war, stationed with the Royal Army Medical Corps at Church Crookham, Hampshire, at the weekly concerts there Kay especially enjoyed the exceptional playing of the distinguished violinist Emanuel Hurwitz. Meeting again later by chance, they married in 1948 and set up home in Maida Vale, north London, where a happy and busy musical life ensued.
Moving to Golders Green, they gave a home to other musicians, among them the cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a Holocaust survivor who remembers fondly a carefree domesticity: "Kay had a unique and enormous enthusiasm for life and radiated warmth and friendship, enhanced by her own beauty and calm."
In 1959 they moved again to Temple Fortune, north-west London, and it was here that Kay and a couple of friends established their Saturday morning music group, which blossomed into the Youth Music Centre that still flourishes in Hampstead Garden Suburb today. Kay was a central figure, teaching and encouraging little children to play the violin, and, latterly, the viola, and arranging YMC summer schools and chamber music courses on the beautiful Ligurian coast of Italy.
With another venture, Music Aid, Kay charmed musicians into giving concerts that raised thousands of pounds for Save the Children.
In 1966 Kay and Manny bought a huge house in Finchley, north London, which was always welcoming and which continually echoed with music – string quartet rehearsals, private practice, lessons, end-of-term children's concerts and intimate charity concerts.
Kay was born in Lowestoft to Reginald Crome, a bookkeeper, and his wife Helen (nee Darling), one of six children. Family evenings were spent making music round the piano. In 1927 the family moved to Twickenham, west London, where Kay attended Trafalgar school until the age of 14. On leaving, she worked in Richmond, sewing silk lingerie, and in 1934 went to Berlei's Slough factory, which soon exchanged its underwear lines for gas masks. She played the violin in amateur orchestras and was advised, because of her larger handspan, to switch to the viola.
Joining the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) in 1939, she met Major John Bartlett, and they married. I was born in 1942 and he disappeared from our lives, whereupon, at the invitation of a friend, she joined other artists in a bohemian household in Holborn. Encouraged to go to the Royal Academy of Music, she embarked on her 70-year career as a professional musician. In 2007 she was appointed MBE.
Emanuel died in 2006. Kay is survived by her sister, Jose, by my brother, Michael, and me, by her grandchildren, Miraphora, Alexander and Raphael, and by her great-grandson, Luca.
