Anthony Payne

Anthony Edward Payne was an English composer, music critic and musicologist. He is best known for his acclaimed completion of Edward Elgar's third symphony, which subsequently gained wide acceptance into Elgar's oeuvre. Besides opera, his own works include representatives of most traditional genres, and although he made significant contributions to orchestral and choral repertoire, he is particularly noted for his chamber music. Many of these chamber works were written for his wife, the soprano Jane Manning, and the new music ensemble Jane's Minstrels, which he founded with Manning in 1988. Initially an unrelenting proponent of modernist music, by the 1980s his compositions had embraced aspects of the late romanticism of England, described by his colleague Susan Bradshaw as "modernized nostalgia". His mature style is thus characterized by a highly individualized combination of modernism and English romanticism, as well as numerology, wide spaced harmonies, specific intervallic characterizations, and restrained melodies.