Richard Dyer.
In Sunday’s (9/22) Washington Post, Tim Page writes, “Richard Dyer, who became one of the country’s foremost classical music reviewers as chief music critic for the Boston Globe from 1976 to 2006, died Sept. 20 at a hospital in Boston. He was 82. The cause was a series of strokes, his brother Davis Dyer said. During his decades in Boston … Mr. Dyer wielded enormous influence as a cultural tastemaker. As Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ned Rorem once introduced him to a New York friend in the 1980s: ‘This is Richard Dyer. He runs Boston.’ Mr. Dyer, who also wrote about film and literature, was esteemed for the breadth and depth of his musical knowledge, particularly in the fields of opera and piano. He twice received the American Society of Composers and Performers’s Deems Taylor Award for distinguished music criticism…. Richard Morgan Dyer was born in Mineral Wells, Tex., on Dec. 29, 1941, and grew up in Enid, Okla., and Hiram, Ohio. His father and mother were both educators. His grandparents took him as a child to opera performances that made an indelible impression…. After leaving daily journalism, Mr. Dyer taught at the Tanglewood Music Center and led seminars at the New England Conservatory, Boston University and the Aspen Music Festival…. In addition to his brother, survivors include his longtime companion, Philip Sweeney.”
