The pianist Clifford Benson was a hugely gifted and versatile musician whose considerable eminence in the profession was perhaps never appreciated as much in public as by his colleagues. Although a frequent soloist, he was probably best suited to chamber music and enjoyed long-lasting and artistically distinguished partnerships with many fine players, especially his close friend, the violinist Levon Chilingirian, with whom he worked for more than 40 years, but also the clarinettist Thea King (obituary, June 30) and the flautists William Bennett and Trevor Wye. A genial, sociable man with a wicked sense of humour and a fondness for puns (the sillier the better), Benson was, however, a deeply serious musician. Colleagues were in awe of his huge repertoire, his prodigious feats of sight-reading and, above all, his unerring instinct for his collaborators’ musical intentions.

Clifford George Benson was born in Grays, Essex, in 1946. The son of amateur musicians, he took up the piano early. He attended Aveley Technical High School but from his early teens also studied at the Royal College of Music in London, initially in the junior department but moving there full-time after he left school. As well as studying the piano with Cyril Smith and Lamar Crowson, he had composition lessons from Herbert Howells. He also received guidance from the harpsichordist and musical polymath George Malcolm. While at the RCM Benson won many prizes, including the Tagore Gold Medal, awarded to the outstanding musician in each year.

The breakthrough in Benson’s career came in 1969 when he and Chilingirian won the BBC Beethoven Duo Competition, followed two years later by the Munich International Duo Competition. Benson had met Chilingirian as a teenager at the Royal College’s junior school; both felt an immediate rapport and it was natural that they should play together, despite a two-year age gap. Although from 1971 Chilingirian was also enjoying great success with his own string quartet, their duo partnership continued until Benson’s final illness. Obviously in sympathy on the concert platform, they had a warm relationship off it and, unlike many such duos, happily spent the many empty hours of tours in each other’s company.

Benson also established a hectic solo career, making his Royal Festival Hall debut playing Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto in 1970 (RCM contemporaries still recall a scintillating performance Benson gave, while still a student, of the same composer’s Second Concerto). He remained in demand as a soloist to the end of his life, travelling and broadcasting widely, but chamber music was Benson’s real calling. As pianist for the Nash Ensemble for several years in the mid1970s, and through his frequent appearances as accompanist, he showed himself to be a sensitive musician with an acute ear for pianistic sonority. Benson’s regular collaborators, such as the flautist Bennett, with whom he recorded a large portion of the flute and piano repertoire, were fiercely loyal and his musical associations in many cases lasted 30 years or more.

Benson made many recordings, and his discography bears testament to his wideranging musical curiosity. As well as distinguished accounts of some of the great masterpieces of the chamber repertory, it includes comparative rarities by Finzi and Ferguson and a notable series of discs of English song. Comfortable in any period of music, Benson was perhaps best heard in Romantic repertoire, for which he had a natural affinity.

He was a kind teacher, generous with his time and advice: students anxious about problems beyond the musical would find him happy to forget about the piano for a while and listen to their troubles. Appointed Professor of Chamber Music at the Royal Academy of Music in 2001, Benson also gave frequent masterclasses, at which he excelled. An enthusiastic advocate of much new music, Benson was a more than competent composer himself, his works including a delightfully irreverent jazz-inflected Mozart pastiche, Mozart Goes to Town.

Benson married Dilys Morgan, a singer, in 1973. She survives him, as do their two daughters.

Clifford Benson, pianist, teacher and composer, was born on November 17, 1946. He died of a brain tumour on August 10, 2007, aged 60