70 Saturday January 1 2022 | the times
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Christopher Hunt was said to have
“the artistic spirit of a madman”While on National Service in Malaya,
Christopher Hunt passed the time
between jungle forays by practising his
oboe. One day the occupant of a neigh-
bouring tent found on his pillow a
cobra, mesmerised by the music. “We
shot it,” Hunt recorded, adding “snake
charmer” to his CV.
Hunt spent a lifetime weaving similar
spells before pulling the trigger, often
shooting himself in the foot. Calling
himself an “embrysario”, an impresario
in an embryonic phase, he pro-
grammed arts festivals and ran opera
houses, hopping from one project to the
next. “Ruffling feathers was his modus
operandi,” said one associate. An early
coup was presenting Pink Floyd’s
Games for May show at the South Bank
in 1967 for Peter Jenner, the band’s
manager. On other occasions he played
chess with the pianist Stephen Bishop
(Kovacevich), arranged Alfred Bren-
del’s Beethoven piano series and
carried Andrés Segovia’s guitar case.
Tall with bushy eyebrows and a dan-
dyish style, Hunt revelled in being an
Englishman abroad, notably in Austra-
lia. Annabel Crabb, now chief political
writer at the ABC, was seven when
Hunt directed the 1980 Adelaide Festi-
val. She recalled that alongside high-
brow theatre he “conceived the brilliant
idea of placing a giant inflatable tube on
the River Torrens, through which the
children of Two Wells Primary were
permitted to rampage”.
Bernard Levin visited. “He warns me
that Adelaide is a city of a million
inhabitants with the outlook of a town
of 25,000; a somewhat daunting intro-
duction,” Levin observed of his host’s
outspoken greeting. Afterwards, Hunt
wrote to Peter Diamand, former direct-
or of the Edinburgh Festival, proudly
declaring that the festival had made
money. “You should be ashamed of
yourself,” Diamand retorted. “No self-
respecting festival ever makes a profit.”
Hunt left Australia acrimoniously,
objecting to its “middle-class compla-
cency” and complaining that the local
musicians played out of tune. It was not
all bad. He enjoyed a “wonderful affair
with Luciana Arrighi, designer of our
Death in Venice”. Later a friend “report-
ed gratifyingly back to me that she said
I was her best lover”.
He returned in 1994 and this time
Crabb was his driver. “He was a real-life
moody genius and had recently, irasci-
bly, given up smoking, but I adored
him,” she wrote. “Everything about his
festival was controversial, from his fall-
ings-out with key colleagues, to the
poster (‘Looks like someone’s left an
iron on and had a schooner without a
beer coaster’) to the programme, which
contained a lot of Asian theatre and had
the RSC-loving luvvies in a bit of a flap.”
After his first Antipodean adventure
Hunt enjoyed one of “the occasional
successes of my life” running PepsiCo
Summerfare, an arts festival in New
York state. The sponsor largely left him
alone, only intervening to object to the
title of Tom Stoppard’s play The Real
Thing, which is Coca-Cola’s slogan, and
to remove nudity from the publicity for
Peter Sellars’s staging of Don Giovanni.
Christopher Ben MacMichael Hunt
(he was proud to be Ben, not Benjamin)
was born in London in 1938, the middle
child of Thomas Hunt, a gastroenterolo-
gist who once refused to attend Winston
Churchill because he had another ap-
pointment, and his wife Barbara (née
Todd), who read stories on the wireless.
His sisters, Sarah and Marigold, survive.
He spent his early years in Bucking-
hamshire, waiting for the school bus
outside Arthur “Bomber” Harris’s
driveway and “watching big black cars
coming and going”. His father brought
him exotic stamps from far-flung coun-
tries and cricketers’ autographs from
Lord’s, including that of Donald Brad-
man. Once he found an illicit copy of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover in his father’s
consulting rooms and “I lapped it up.”
Theirs was a well-to-do family, with a
car, horses, shooting and visits to the
theatre. After the war there were over-
seas holidays, a house in Hampstead
and a country cottage. He was expect-
ing to go to Eton College but a last-min-
ute switch took him to Westminster
School, where entertainment was onthe doorstep. In search of “the full expe-
rience” he visited Soho where “event-
ually a kindly young and pretty semi-
blonde did the whole deal”.
At 14 he took up the oboe, playing
with the Edinburgh Rehearsal Orches-
tra conducted by Harry Legge. During
National Service with The Rifle Bri-
gade a fellow conscript kept a Stradivar-
ius violin under the bed, playing Bach
on it in the evenings. Later, on a 19th-
century style “grand tour” of Italy, he
was picked up in Rome by a rich En-
glishman “who treated us to spaghetti
alla puttanesca, what else, in a louche
courtyard in Trastevere”.
He took Anglo-Saxon studies at
Trinity College, Cambridge, and did the
London social season. While boarding
a train at Euston station to a country
ball a friend approached with a com-
panion, explaining: “I’m not invited but
Ghilly is and I wonder if you’d look after
her.” Her full name was Ingrid Hoyle-
Geach, a model. They married in 1961
and had a daughter, Francesca, who is
an actress, and Crispin, a singer-
songwriter, who both survive him.
Hunt returned from honeymoon ex-
pecting a job with the publisher Boosey
& Hawkes, but it fell through. Instead,
he worked in the Harrods record
department. A chance meeting with
John Dykes Bower, organist of St Paul’s
Cathedral, led him to Emmie Tillett, theyou to make Victoria like C.R.A.Z.Y..”
Yet the Quebecker was unsure. “At
the beginning I said, ‘I don’t care about
period films and, secondly, I don’t care
about the British monarchy’,” he re-
called. “So making a film about the
queen was not appealing to me.” Event-
ually his love of cinema and the desire
for a new challenge won out. “I thought,
‘The train is passing; I gotta jump’. But I
was concerned that I didn’t know any-
thing about this family. So I had to read
and read. I knew Victoria and Albert
were together, but that was it.”
Vallée spent a week in London, going
over the script “line by line” with Fel-
lowes. He also took private tours of
Buckingham Palace, Kensington Pal-
ace, Windsor Castle and Westminster
Abbey. “The film is about the young
Victoria, her rising as a queen,” he
explained. “And how she got the balls,Christopher Hunt
Arts impresario, concert manager and snake charmer who presented
Pink Floyd, played chess with Stephen Bishop and carried Segovia’s guitar
grande dame of London concert life, and
in 1961 he started work at Ibbs & Tillett
organising Wigmore Hall recitals.
Moving on to the English Bach Festi-
val in Oxford he met Richard Gaddes,
who “taught me about gay life in
London”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ghil-
ly “handed me the nisi decree on my
birthday, ten years after our marriage”.
Hunt and Gaddes challenged Ibbs’s
near-monopoly of concert promotion
with a lunchtime series called Music to
Enjoy and soon he started his own
agency managing opera singers.
On business trips to the Netherlands
he discovered “the red light district full
of shops where one could watch as well
as buy” and in New York, 42nd Street
was “the acme of degradation, though
ghastly wonderful in its weird way”.
Hunt eventually tired of his singers’
demands and closed his agency, a move
he came to regret. “I should have just
gone away for a holiday; a lesson not
learnt,” he said. He visited Gaddes, who
was working at Santa Fe Opera, and got
to know many of the best young Amer-
ican singers, “especially the gay ones”.
Back in Britain he joined the Royal Op-
era House, but started on the wrong
note with Colin Davis, the music direct-
or, who accused him of “playing God”.
Between his Adelaide adventures
Hunt was in San Francisco, working at
the local opera company. On one occa-
sion he resurrected his oboe playingand recorded an accompaniment for
the tenor Luciano Pavarotti. He wrote
articles for Opera Quarterly, was con-
sidered as a potential successor to his
friend Andrew Porter, who was retiring
as music critic of The New Yorker maga-
zine, and tried unsuccessfully to write
an opera libretto.
One day during the interval of Stra-
vinsky’s Rake’s Progress he noticed
Dawn Aronson, a fashion designer.
Leaving a colleague mid-sentence he
blocked her way and asked: “I must
know, who are you?” They had lunch the
following day “and thereafter it was pret-
ty fast and straightforward”. He pulled
out of their wedding in 1984 (“cold feet”),
but went through with it two weeks later.
Dawn predeceased him in 1999.
After his second Adelaide stint Hunt
worked with festivals and opera houses
in America and Europe. In 1990, arriv-
ing at Ojai Festival, California, he was
introduced as having “the artistic spirit
of a madman”. Finally, in 2006 he began
teaching arts administration at Indiana
University. He took a dim view of the
students, complaining that most had
chosen the course “for what they
thought would be an easy time, rarely
from any sincere interest in the arts”.
Seven years later he retired to south-
west France, becoming a reclusive
figure, grateful for the “knowledge that
with age, the longing for sex has died”.Christopher Hunt, impresario, was born
on January 22, 1938. He died after a fall
on December 1, 2021, aged 83‘Ruffling feathers was
his modus operandi,’
said one associate
Obituaries
Jean-Marc Vallée
Québécois director of The Young Victoria who
had no taste for period drama or the monarchy
Jean-Marc Vallée was such a perfec-
tionist and budgets were so tight that
C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005), his rock’n’roll-fuelled
French-language drama, was almost
ten years in the making. It tells of a tu-
multuous father-son relationship from
the boy’s birth to his 40th birthday,
while dealing with homophobia and
discrimination. “For me this was a story
about the love between a father and
son,” Vallée said. “I didn’t want it to be
just seen as a gay film. It’s about a boy
refusing to accept that he’s different.”
C.R.A.Z.Y., which won several awards,
caught the eye of Graham King, the
British Hollywood producer, who
offered the Canadian director the op-
portunity to direct The Young Victoria
(2009), produced by Martin Scorsese
and Sarah, Duchess of York, with a
screenplay by Julian Fellowes. Vallée
recalled them telling him: “We want