Our brother, Ian Fraser, who has died aged 81, conducted the 1961 West End hit Stop the World – I Want to Get Off, and was Julie Andrews’s musical director for 40 years.
Ian went to the US with Stop the World in 1962, but he enjoyed working with British musicians and returned to the UK from time to time for recordings and broadcasts. He directed Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas for BBC television (1977), conducting Bing in both his last rendition of White Christmas and the hurriedly composed duet Peace on Earth, sung with David Bowie. Ian’s last visit to Britain was in 2010, to conduct his own score for Andrews’s telling of her life story, The Gift of Music, at the O2 arena in London.
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