Lina Lalandi - Telegraph The idiosyncratic Lina Lalandi also took the festival's operatic productions - often with elaborate handmade costumes, carefully reconstructed from paintings of the era - to Spain, Greece and France; in 1965 she staged Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie at the Palace of Versailles . The sheer breadth of programming - re-creating neglected operatic gems such as Gluck's Alceste - and the top-flight range of artists that Lina Lalandi attracted were astonishing. Indeed, she was a persuasive, not to say persistent, promoter. Rarely pausing for breath, she would berate potential funders into submission in broken, heavily-accented English. Isaiah Berlin once wrote of her to Robert Craft, Stravinsky's amanuensis: "I cannot cope with her. Her energy and emotion are admirable, but I feel that if I really did what she tells me I should perish. Madeleine Lalandi was born in Athens in 1920, the daughter of Nikolas Kaloyeropoulos, director of the Byzantine Museum, and studied harpsichord at the Athens Conservatory. She made her British debut at the Festival Hall recital room in 1954 and was soon heard regularly in London in programmes of music by Bach, Scarlatti and Rameau, drawing warm reviews . The English Bach Festival started with Lina Lalandi and Sir Jack Westrup, Professor of Music at Oxford, as joint artistic directors and was always a movable feast, depending on when artists and venues were available. By 1969 its more outré concerts were being presented in London, with music by Berio, Varèse and Greek composers such as Xenakis and Nikos Skalkottas. In 1970 it included an evening of Stockhausen, while two years later Lina Lalandi marked William Walton's 70th birthday by bringing him back to Christ Church, Oxford, where he had been a choir boy. As if being organiser, inspirer, hostess and fund-raiser were not enough, Lina Lalandi continued to perform at the harpsichord. In the late 1960s she also began to sing in public, a career that she often regretted not pursuing in her youth. She became sole director of the festival in 1971 and by the middle of that decade - following a Spanish period that included flamenco dancing and zarzuela, a form of operetta - the emphasis had moved to the revival of early opera, often with the reconstruction of Baroque dance. In 1981 she hired the Royal Opera House to stage Rameau's Castor et Pollux, a work that was not seen in London for another 30 years. Lina Lalandi ran the festival from her home in Belgravia, where she was surrounded by costumes and props, all the while trying to raise cash for her next production. "People think we are rich because my husband was a banker," she complained. She once said that her preferred method of running the organisation was with a committee of three "of whom two should invariably be absent." Among her many helpers in the early days was Nicholas Kenyon, later director of the BBC Proms. Lina Lalandi was appointed OBE in 1975 and received honours from the Greek and French governments. In 1993 she changed her hobbies in Who's Who from "cats and cooking" to "astrophysics and knitting." Her husband died in 2001. Lina Lalandi, born 1920, died June 8 2012