Revered as a teacher and as a player of rare sensitivity, Derek Simpson was among the most admired chamber musicians of his generation. An immaculate ensemble player, he was the cellist of the Aeolian Quartet for the last quarter-century of its existence, and, during almost 40 years as a professor at the Royal Academy of Music, produced a succession of accomplished young players.

Derek Simpson was born in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, in 1928. His parents were both keen musicians: his mother was a singer and piano teacher, while his father, a glass and china merchant, was an amateur trumpeter. At the age of 10 Simpson was encouraged to take up an instrument by his father and chose the cello. He quickly displayed great talent and won a music scholarship to Worksop College. In 1948, aged 19, he moved to London to study at the Royal Academy of Music, where, in his teacher Douglas Cameron, he encountered one of the truly great cello pedagogues. During the course of his studies Simpson met and fell in love with Cameron’s daughter, Fiona, a pianist; in 1954 she would become his first wife.

In 1952 Simpson became the first winner of the prestigious Suggia Prize, which enabled him to continue his studies in Paris for a year with the great Pierre Fournier. On his return to Britain, Simpson enjoyed rapid professional success, initially as an orchestral player with the Brighton Philharmonic and Anthony Barnard’s London Chamber Orchestra. Solo engagements quickly followed, and Simpson made his London debut at the Royal Festival Hall recital room in 1953. The following year he and Fiona started giving recitals together, a successful partnership that lasted for almost a decade.

Concerto engagements and regular broadcast recitals meant that Simpson was by now enjoying a highly successful solo career, but in June 1956 his professional life took a decisive turn when he was invited to succeed John Moore as cellist of the Aeolian String Quartet. He was to remain in the ensemble until it was disbanded 25 years later. Another significant appointment followed in 1959 when his friend Yehudi Menuhin asked him to be the first principal cello of his newly founded Bath Festival Orchestra.

Although he remained much in demand as a soloist, it became apparent in the 1960s that Simpson derived most pleasure from chamber music, and the number of his recitals and concerto appearances declined steadily. A player incapable of extravagance and with faultess intonation, he was the ideal cellist for the Aeolian Quartet, and his unobtrusive but elegant playing graces their many recordings of the period, including a celebrated account of the Schubert Quintet.

(Simpson’s playing can also be heard on the Beatles’ single Eleanor Rigby.) In 1970 Simpson’s great friend Emmanuel Hurwitz (obituary, December 9, 2006) joined the quartet as leader, and the group embarked on a project to record the complete Haydn string quartets, a mammoth undertaking that took six years to complete. The resulting performances are marked by great wit and verve, and remain a landmark in recording history.

For four decades a professor at the Royal Academy of Music, Simpson was an inspiring teacher, and many of his students have gone on to have outstanding careers. Kind but firm with his students (who adored him) and strict on matters of technique, he also had a wicked, but not malicious, sense of humour. Never keen on the British style of double bass playing, he once told a student that bassists were “guilty of at least 20 years of undetected crime”.

Derek Simpson married three times, the first two marriages ending in divorce. His third wife, his former Aeolian Quartet colleague Margaret Major, whom he married in 1981, predeceased him. He is survived by his two children by Fiona Cameron. Another son was killed in a road accident in 1972.

Derek Simpson, cellist and music teacher, was born on March 29, 1928. He died on June 22, 2007, aged 79