All of us at the Sydney Symphony Orchestra are enormously saddened by the death of our former Concertmaster Donald Leslie Grant Hazelwood AO OBE on Saturday 8 March 2025.

A wonderful musician, colleague and friend, Don was Concertmaster of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra for 33 years from 1965 until his retirement in 1998, an extraordinary career that assures his place among Australia’s best-known and most respected musicians.

Born on 1 March 1930 and named after the dashing young cricketer Donald Bradman, Hazelwood grew up on Little Plain, a large property near Urana, NSW, 700 kilometres southwest of Sydney. He first encountered a violin at the age of four, and according to family legend would practice daily in the family farm’s machine shed. Don received recognition for his playing from an early age, winning regional eisteddfods and performing in ensembles in Albury, 117 kilometres away from home. In the audience at one of these Albury concerts was Alex Sellars, headmaster of Albury Grammar School, who was so impressed by one of Donald’s performances that he made him the offer of a half-scholarship to board at the institution.

While at Albury Grammar School he received violin lessons from Sister Mary Thérèse at the Convent of Mercy, who taught him all the way through the Royal Schools of Music and Australian Musical Examination Board (AMEB) examinations, up to and including the Associate Diploma. His final examiner was Florent Hoogstoel, then-Professor of Violin at the Sydney Conservatorium, and Don went to study at that institution from 1948. It was while at the Con that Don met Anne Menzies, a clarinet student, and by 1952 they were nigh inseparable until Anne’s death in 1998.

Don first played with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 1952, under our inaugural Chief Conductor Eugene Goossens. In 1965 Don was appointed co-concertmaster alongside Robert Miller, becoming sole concertmaster shortly after upon Miller’s retirement in 1967. For 20 years he held this post on his own until the arrival of Dene Olding in 1987, with whom Don shared the role until his retirement.

The concertmaster acts as the leader and spokesperson for the orchestra, a role Don took extremely seriously, but always with his trademark sense of humour. In this role Don guided the orchestra through triumphs (including the opening of the Sydney Opera House in 1973, and numerous international tours) and hardship, most notably the death of Chief Conductor Stuart Challender in 1991. Diplomatic and gentlemanly in his interactions with colleagues, conductors and visiting guest musicians, Donald was able to manage positive and professional relationships with hundreds of people over the years.

Of course the concertmaster must be above all else a superb musician, and Don never lost sight of this core responsibility. His commitment to proper rehearsal time was well-known, and he ensured he was meticulously prepared for every single performance – even when featuring in up to 300 per year.

Don also starred as a soloist over many years, performing numerous violin concerti – always from memory – including those by Prokofiev, Sibelius, Elgar, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruch, Bach’s Concerto in A minor and Peter Sculthorpe’s Irkanda IV, and in a highlight of his career performed Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending to 100,000 people at the Orchestra’s first-ever Symphony Under the Stars concert. Elgar’s concerto in particular became a signature work, with performances in 1973 and 1978 receiving acclaim. Following a 1981 performance of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto with Louis Frémaux, the eminent Sydney Morning Herald critic Roger Covell wrote, ‘there are many leaders of famous orchestras who…could not take as sure a plunge into the different challenges of memorised virtuosity.’

Don was an enthusiastic and committed chamber musician, performing for many years in The Austral Quartet, Australian Trio and Hazelwood Trio.

He was also a huge supporter of music education programs and training orchestras. He and Anne were perennial tutors at National Music Camps around the country for many years, Don was asked to serve as Director of the short-lived National Ensemble (1989–1991) training orchestra, and he was involved in Australian Youth Orchestra programs for many years.

For 23 years Don was President of the Sydney Symphony Benevolent Fund, a retirement fund and financial assistance program established in 1947 under the patronage of Eugene Goossens. The fund raised money chiefly though an annual benefit concert, which Don, as president, organised every year; he performed in almost every benefit concert from 1952-1995, save for two when he was overseas.

Upon Hazelwood’s retirement from the Orchestra in 1997, the Sydney Morning Herald’s music critic Fred Blanks described Don as ‘a musician whose outstanding musicianship, diplomatic finesse and modest personal demeanour have made one of the most significant contributions to Sydney music in the last four decades.’ Our then-Chief Conductor, Edo de Waart, was moved to write, ‘Don Hazelwood is an icon of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and his retirement will mark the end of an era. He is a first-class musician who is highly respected by all his colleagues and the conductors who have had the privilege of working with him.’

Donald was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1976 and was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 1988 for his services to music. He was awarded the 1997 Sir Bernard Heinze Memorial Award for outstanding contribution to music in Australia.

Following his retirement Don remained closely attached to the Orchestra, a regular concertgoer and a valued member of the Orchestra’s Honorary Council.

Through all this Don was supported and encouraged by his first wife, Anne Menzies, a clarinettist with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra for 26 years until her retirement in 1994. Following Anne’s death in 1998, Donald remarried in 2000 to Helen Phillips.

We extend our deepest condolences to the family, and especially to Don and Anne’s daughter Jane, a long-serving and much-loved member of the Orchestra’s viola section (1995–2024).

Commemorations for Don’s incredible contribution to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra will be announced in the coming days.

Read more about the decades-long connection between the Hazelwood family and the Sydney Symphony in this article published shortly before Jane Hazelwood’s retirement from the Orchestra in 2024.

Further resources:

• ‘Concerto for Don’, Four Corners, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (1997)
• From Farmer to Fiddler: The Story of Donald Hazelwood, Concertmaster Emeritus, by Helen Bunday (Bowerbird Press, 2007).