FELIX APRAHAMIAN was a critic, organist, publisher, broadcaster, adjudicator, lecturer, editor, concert organiser and much more besides. Above all, he was an enthusiast: an animator, with a cosmopolitan touch, of British music, musicians and musical events over a period of more than 60 years.

Generous, quick-witted, energetic especially in the cause of French composers, he did much to sustain music in England during the war by his work for the London Philharmonic Orchestra. He did no less, once the fighting was over, to build bridges with the Continent. For many years his short, tubby, goatee-bearded presence, spectacles flashing with delight, made him a magnet at London musical events.

Felix Aprahamian was born in London in 1914, of Armenian parentage, and educated at Tollington School in Muswell Hill. He began contributing articles to the musical press when not yet out of his teens.

An early enthusiasm for Delius sent him off to the composer’s home at Grez-sur-Loing, some 45 miles south of Paris, and was sustained throughout his life: he was an adviser to the Delius Trust from 1961.

In 1940, abandoning a business career, Aprahamian became assistant secretary and concert director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, then in economic difficulties and feeling the loss caused by Sir Thomas Beecham’s departure. Aprahamian, refusing to compromise, devised enterprising programmes that included, in 1944, the first performance of Tippett’s A Child of Our Time.

In 1946 Aprahamian left the LPO to become, nominally, a consultant to the firm United Musical Publishers, but in effect he made himself through the firm’s Paris connections one of the main agents, along with the French cultural attaché Tony Mayer, of the promotion of French music in Britain.

The Concerts de Musique Française which they organised between 1942 and 1964 not only introduced French music to London but also brought to British notice artists including Gérard Souzay, Monique Haas, Yvonne Lefébure and, with Poulenc, Pierre Bernac.

His gift for friendship stood him in good stead, and the affectionately signed photographs festooning his office were a sign of real appreciation from composers including Poulenc and Messiaen, conductors including Ansermet, Munch and Désormière, and many other artists.

Aprahamian’s particular interest in organ music — he had an organ in his house and encouraged young organists to use it for practice — led to much greater English awareness of the riches of the French repertory.

He was honorary secretary of the Organ Music Society from 1935 to 1970 and was made an honorary member of the Royal College of Organists in 1973 and an honorary fellow in 1994. He was energetic in the successful campaign in the early 1970s to save the Alexandra Palace organ which the GLC was proposing to sell, and led an appeal to restore it; this became a much greater challenge when it was badly damaged in a fire in 1980.

In 1948 Aprahamian also became deputy to Ernest Newman as music critic of The Sunday Times. Especially when the aged and increasingly Olympian Newman’s weekly articles tended to become reflections or pronouncements, Aprahamian provided urbane and well-judged reviews of the London concert scene. It was a testament to his abiding respect for Newman that he found the time to edit two volumes of his senior’s essays in 1956 and 1958.

He also much enjoyed his forays on the paper’s behalf to the Edinburgh Festival, where he held something of a court in an obscure hotel, and where his amusement at his own exotic aspect once led to him, when driving along Princes Street in a tourist horse-drawn open carriage in his scarlet-lined opera cloak, to toss halfpennies as largesse at the feet of some awed Americans. He relished his fleeting appearance as an art dealer in the John Schlesinger film Darling (1965).

Aprahamian’s immense capacity for hard work took him in many other directions. From 1942 he was a regular and well-loved broadcaster, especially on Music Magazine.

He lectured widely, including at Morley College, the City Literary Institute and Surrey University, and from 1989 he was Visiting Professor of the University of East London. In 1991 he was Regents Lecturer at the University of California.

He was a regular member of international juries in Geneva, Montreux and Biarritz. His musical editorship of The Listener drew contributions of a high standard, so that he was able to edit a selection for publication. He served on the BBC Central Music Advisory Committee from 1958 to 1961.

As president of Putney Music, he helped to make it one of the most important gramophone societies in the country. In 1995 he was made an honorary doctor of music by City University.

Aprahamian’s house in Muswell Hill — which he liked to refer to as “the stately pleasure-dome” — was one dispensing boundless hospitality.

He did not marry, and in the postwar years, his much loved, much put-upon widowed mother would cook vast, wonderful meals for streams of visiting friends, who would play chamber music with him, be made free of his enormous library, be shown his Proustian treasures or explore his beautifully tended, floodlit garden in the Japanese style.

Felix Aprahamian, musician and writer, was born on June 5, 1914. He died on January 15, 2005, aged 90.