Leonard Salzedo conducting the recording of Spanish Fiesta, which included his own Divertimento Espagñol. Photo: Courtesy of Caroline Salzedo

HE was a prolific composer of ballet and orchestral scores evoking the rhythms of his Sephardic roots but best known for a 10-second trumpet fanfare that once announced BBC broadcasts for the Open University.

Yet Leonard Salzedo remains the forgotten man of English 20th-century classical music, seldom performed and little recorded, with an hour-long requiem that he considered one of his finest works still to be premiered 22 years after his death.

All this could be about to change with an upcoming concert at Conway Hall in Holborn to celebrate his diverse musical legacy featuring former friends and colleagues, including viola player Richard Crabtree, conductor and pianist Leslie Howard as well as up and coming mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean.

It is being organised by the Leonard Salzedo Society which his daughters, Caroline and Sue, set up in 2018. “We want to really raise Leonard’s profile and get his work out there, performed and recorded,” explains Caroline. “He was very well respected and wrote a great many pieces but somehow he has got left behind.”

Although a rising star in the 1950s, Salzedo found himself up against the BBC’s controversial music reading panel, a kind of musical star chamber that until 1967 decided which scores could be broadcast on the Third Programme. At the time, it was the only radio outlet for classical music and musical tastes were generally conservative.

“The panel accepted very few of his pieces,” she says. “It was almost like a closed shop. You had to be on their list to get any radio play so as a result my father hardly got on the radar. It didn’t help that he wasn’t a great networker or good at promoting himself.”

The concert will begin with the jaunty Divertimento for Three Trumpets and Three Trombones whose opening notes the Open University took up as its theme in the 1970s for 20 years. Instantly recognisable, it was one of the more than 180 works he wrote in a long career that began as a virtuoso violinist.

Born in Stamford Hill in 1921, he likely inherited his talent from his father, an amateur player whose ancestors were Jews who fled persecution in 15th century Spain. Salzedo started learning to play the violin from the age of six and was already composing by the time he was 13.

“There was a lot of tension between his parents when he was growing up and for my father music was a companion, a sanctuary and a calling,” says Caroline, a shiatsu practitioner.

He went on to be a star student at the Royal College of Music, where he won top prize for composition followed by the Tagore Gold Medal for outstanding student of the year, which was presented to him by Princess Elizabeth in 1943.

In the 1950s, he was a violinist for the London Philharmonic Orchestra, then the Royal Philharmonic, working with such luminaries as Matthew Arnold and Thomas Beecham, but freelanced as a composer, providing the film score for Hammer’s 1957 horror flick The Revenge of Frankenstein.

His gift for composition was spotted by Marie Rambert who commissioned him to write for her company, Ballet Rambert, starting off with The Fugitive in 1944. It was a collaboration that lasted 30 years, including five as musical director.

His ease for expressing drama, energy and emotion was also evident in his piano scores for Ballets Nègres, formed in London by two Jamaican dancers to become Britain’s first black ballet company, which he joined in 1946 with his new wife Pat Clover.

The move reflected an adventurous spirit and willingness to take his work in fresh directions.

“My father was very proud of his Sephardic heritage and interested in the Kabbalah and other Jewish traditions. You can hear this in the melodies and rhythms of his work. But he also enjoyed learning new things,” adds Caroline. “He loved folk music and adored jazz, especially Duke Ellington who was a great influence.”

Salzedo, who died in 2000 aged 78, also drew on his background as an orchestral player, enabling him to embrace wind, percussion, brass and piano with brilliant inventiveness.

“He wrote very well for strings but became interested in so many other instruments as a result of playing in orchestras,” she continues. “You can tell from his pieces that he had an insider’s knowledge.”

He wrote 17 ballet scores, the most successful being the 1955 The Witch Boy, which went on to be performed all over the world. He later became principal conductor with the Scottish Ballet, and from 1982 until 1986 he was music director of London City Ballet.

Thereafter, he devoted himself to composing, producing 10 string quartets, the Stabat Mater for soprano, alto, chorus and orchestra, a violin concerto, a piano concerto and, in 1989, Requiem Sine Voxibus that Salzedo regarded as one of his finest achievements but which has never been performed.

Caroline remembers the days when her father had a full-time job but still found time to write music, sitting at the desk he built for himself in his house in Wembley looking as though he were in another world.

“He would often write early in the morning and even when he went on tour would take manuscripts with him to work on. He was often away and we missed him a lot. But he was great fun and loved to take me and my sister to the cinema to watch cartoons all day.”

Since its launch, the Leonard Salzedo Society has been in the process of digitising his scores, which are archived at the Royal College of Music, and getting more of his work recorded. Last year, a 20-minute documentary, Leonard Salzedo A Life Composed in Music, was made to mark his centenary and is available on YouTube.

“It has been fabulous doing all this,” says Caroline. “My father’s work deserves to be better known and we hope the concert will help raise his profile even more.”

• The Leonard Salzedo Celebration Concert takes place at Conway Hall, WC1R 4RL, on September 24 at 6pm. Tickets £12.50-£17.50. www.conwayhall.org.uk/whats-on/event/leonard-salzedo-celebration-concert/