Brian Aschinger was a remarkable, kind, visionary man of music and theatre. It was my great pleasure and privilege to have known him and to have had him champion my works in the USA for many years. Brian approached everything he did with an immense energy and generosity of spirit - two qualities I associate, as it happens, with Americans in general, but he had more than his fair share -  and I believe my first musical The Hired Man owes such recognition as it has in the United States entirely to him. He enthused, cajoled and inspired to promote often unfamiliar works not just in the theatre but also with his choral groups such as the Shrewsbury Chorale, who performed choral pieces of mine under his baton.

He wrote me a regular flow of (unfashionably) long, chatty, typed letters across the Atlantic, discussing and analysing new shows, trends, ideas, cultural and political events with seemingly limitless interest and compassion. It was a measure of his intelligence that it was impossible to second-guess his reaction to what was happening - he was always fascinating and superbly well-informed.

In 1992 I invited him to London to oversee a one-off charity revival of Girlfriends. The English cast adored him and found his objectivity and clarity fresh and stimulating, as did I. They also fell for his broad, uninhibited laughter and good humour. His husky roar was a favourite feature of every tea break. In turn he found them, I think, hilarious: there was an openness and sociability to them that surprised him and somewhat confounded his preconceptions about the English. But it helped him understand the spirit of the characters in Girlfriends too. The crisis of the Second World War, and Britain's extreme vulnerability in its first two years, created a community spirit and patriotism in our country, I believe, that Americans experience at all times. Brian identified this and it may have been this aspect that so drew him to the show and motivated his efforts to premiere it in the USA. Sadly, other commitments and his increasingly serious illness prevented this from coming about in his lifetime: it is therefore immensely gratifying and appropriate that his pupil and friend Mia Reeves took up the challenge on his behalf  and has mounted this wonderful production of Girlfriends, though she and her colleagues could not have known when they first contacted me that the show would be playing at so extraordinarily apposite a moment in modern history.

Thinking of Brian and Girlfriends in the same breath reminds me of the closing phrases of a beautiful poem written during the war by Patricia M Saunders about an RAF pilot recently killed in action, 20th Century Requiem:

It was so like him to go before us
into the mapless region of death
thereby diminishing the terror for us.

For however we may recoil
from the invisible torrent
we shall not be entirely fearful to follow on
into the unfathomable canyon where he has gone.

Howard Goodall March 31 2003