As the music director of the Arts Council of Great Britain (1948-65) and the general manager of the Royal Festival Hall, and then the director of all the South Bank concert halls (1965-76), John Denison played an important role in the development of Britain’s musical life, not only responding to but also informing public tastes.

He arrived at the South Bank at a time of expansion, one of his first tasks being to mastermind the opening of, and devise concert programmes for, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room. By the end of his tenure the South Bank had become the largest operation of its kind in the world.

Denison maintained that people would never lose their appetite for performances of classic works, “whether of Brahms or Beethoven, Mahler or Bruckner, because they have learnt something of these works and want to hear them performed in the best possible conditions and by the great interpreters”.

But, partly because of the cost of the complex as a whole — £240,000 a year — Denison felt a responsibility to broaden its appeal. Confident that “supply creates demand”, he organised concerts of medieval music, jazz, electronic compositions and poetry readings. Audiences were drawn largely from the 40,000 people on the South Bank mailing list.

Guitar recitals, including jazz and flamenco, and concerts of Indian music were among the most successful innovations. Gilbert and Sullivan operas were staged at the Royal Festival Hall for the first time in 1971. Denison was among the first to champion opera in English.

He accommodated some challenging new works, usually short ones, but he deemed those interested in them adequately provided for by radio broadcasts and recordings. “My theory”, he said, “is that when they come to the Festival Hall they want an evening of leisure, and they don’t want to hear the ‘tough nuts’ in the concert hall.”

John Law Denison was born in 1911, the son of a country parson, and was a chorister at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. His father wanted him to read for the law but he was more interested in music: he decided to learn the trumpet — but his father bought him a French horn instead.

He went to Brighton College and won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. Having for a time been articled to a solicitor, he started, in 1934, to play as a freelance in the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic and the City of Birmingham Orchestra, among others. That year Sir Thomas Beecham sent him to Germany to obtain some Wagner tubas so that he could present an authentic ring cycle with the LPO at Covent Garden. While in Bayreuth he was invited by Winifred Wagner to shake hands with Hitler.

Between 1939 and 1945 Denison served in the Somerset Light Infantry. He made the dangerous crossing to France on D-Day+1 and held various staff appointments which called on his considerable organisational skills. He was mentioned in dispatches.

After the war he was appointed assistant director of the British Council’s music department and two years later he joined the Arts Council’s music department as its director — then perhaps the most senior administrative position in music, in which, one commentator said at the time, he “wielded chief power over the destinies of all professional musical enterprises in Britain”.

He had already come to know many of the great conductors and impresarios when he took up his position on the South Bank “to get a little closer to the greasepaint”.

In the 1970s some 1,200 concerts took place there each year, attracting about 1,250,000 people. He and his staff were not directly responsible for drawing audiences: he called the South Bank halls “a sort of super hotel for promoters” who, he said, “must make sure of their public”. But his wideranging duties included ensuring that the acoustics were as good as they could be; and that the buildings were inviting and put to their best possible use.

He was keen to engage audiences in new ways: he introduced the first musical seminar in the Royal Festival Hall — given by Enrique Barenboim, Daniel Barenboim’s father, in 1970 — and proposed that outside spaces under the halls be used as a meeting place for audience members to discuss concerts afterwards.

He was a charming, ebullient and loquacious man with a vast knowledge of music and a fund of stories about musical figures. He could be shy, but he did not hesitate to, for example, tactfully refuse Herbert von Karajan’s demand that the air- conditioning be turned off, or to condemn coughing among the audience, which he called “as heinous a crime as that of a player making a wrong entry”.

Denison was called as a trusted pair of hands to numerous music committees in London. He was a council member of the Royal Philharmonic Society and he chaired the cultural programme for the Silver Jubilee from 1976 to 1978; he was on the committee of the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund, and a trustee for the Prince Consort Fund. He was appointed CBE in 1960, and became a Commander of the Order of the Lion (Finland) in 1976 and a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des lettres (France) in 1988.

He was a long-time member of the Garrick Club and enjoyed worldwide travel; each year he shared drinks with old army comrades at the Pegasus Bridgehead in Northern France. He eventually retired to Shaftsbury in Dorset.

He married in 1936 the soprano Annie Brown — Anna Russell (obituary, October 26, 2006), the celebrated satirist of classical singing and opera.

The marriage was dissolved in 1946. He married three more times, firstly Evelyn Donald (née Moir), in 1947; she died in 1958. He married Audrey Burnaby (née Bowles) in 1960; she died in 1970; and in 1972 he married Françoise Mitchell (née Garrigues, a former Dior model in Paris). She died in 1985.

He is survived by a daughter from his second marriage.

John Denison, CBE, music director of the Arts Council of Great Britain, 1948-65, and director of the South Bank concert halls, 1965-76, was born on January 21, 1911. He died on December 31, 2006, aged 95