It's nearly five years ago that I shared the platform of the Royal College of Music with Thea, when we hosted the event to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Frederick Thurston, our teacher and Thea's late husband. But it was over fifty years before that that I first met Thea at Thurston's house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where she lived with him prior to their marriage. I knew her then as his partner and accompanist, not realising that she already held the position of Principal Clarinet at Sadlers Wells Opera. It was during a lesson on the then new Malcolm Arnold Sonatina, with Thea at the piano, that Thurston pulled me up on the wrong time value of an up-beat with the words "She's always telling me off about that one". It was after his untimely death in 1953 that Thea, now the established clarinettist, appeared at the RCM to deputise for Sidney Fell, Thurston's successor. She put the fear of God into all of us by demanding scales, which Thurston, reacting against his father's strict teaching, had seldom insisted on. In retrospect, this was only one of the many things for which we were grateful to her.

We realise now that at that time she must have had to overcome two major handicaps - being a woman, and coming out from under the shadow of a giant. The first she accomplished brilliantly. It is hard now to envisage that world, where two of the London orchestras and most of the session orchestras were all-male, and a female professional wind player was a rarity. As for the second, she could have emerged as either a slavish torch bearer or a rebel. She became neither. Thea's genius was to be faithful to the essence of Thurston's musicianship whilst at the same time being not only an individual but a pioneer. Unlike Thurston, she had no need to react against an early diet of virtuoso trivia. The battle which he led, to restore the clarinet to its early nineteenth century position as a solo instrument, had been won, and as well as welcoming and seeking out new music, as he had done, she also felt free to explore lesser known repertoire of the past, including more recent but neglected composers such as Arthur Somervell. She did commission two new works, but she was entrusted with the first performances of many others, such as the Suite of Humphrey Searle and the Sonata of Arnold Cooke. One especial dedication appears at the head of the Benjamin Frankel's Quintet: "For Thea Thurston - to Jack".

Thea was at home in the recording studio, the place where Thurston had seldom been comfortable. His was the world of the concert hall and the live broadcast but, a generation on, she not only felt the need to make personal definitive versions of the landmarks of the clarinet repertoire, but also to promote both new works and those which reflected her own enthusiasms. In this the support of the late Ted Perry, of Hyperion, was invaluable. As for study and research, Thea did not share the distrust of musicologists which had been common among professional wind players earlier in the century. Whereas Thurston had regarded as a curiosity George Dazeley's early paper on the possibility of Stadler's instrument having had a low C natural, Thea not only took to the basset clarinet but acted as an evangelist in its favour, seeking to persuade all her colleagues, not least Karl Leister, to adopt it.

But despite these variations, Thea's adherence to the core values of Thurston's teaching was absolute. Although always determined to capture the spirit of the music as she perceived it, nevertheless respect for the composer's intentions was at the heart of her performances, and, in common with Thurston, she had no time for the intrusion of personal mannerisms. In this both she and he followed the precepts of Sir Adrian Boult, the first principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with whom Thurston had worked from the orchestra's foundation. Rhythmic integrity was also a guiding principle, so much so that, in her student tribute to her professor on his birthday, a set of piano variations in the style of various composers, the most romantic one carried the instruction ma in tempo, a marking that must have raised a wry grin.

Above all, the clarinet, for Thea as for her husband, was but the medium through which music was expressed. She was a musician who played the clarinet, and the seamless transition over the past few years back to the piano demonstrated that she could express music equally well in a different way. On that September evening in 2002 we celebrated not only Thurston's memory but Thea's musical lineage. For both of them the finest memorial is the music their playing inspired. In remembering Thea we could well vary John Ireland's sentiments, expressed in the letter he wrote to Thurston, offering to dedicate to him the Fantasy-sonata. "We are now in a position, Thea, to appreciate your playing, and what it has meant to music".

This article is a version of Colin Bradbury's address at the farewell to Dame Thea Thurston King at the Royal College of Music, London, on July 18, 2007.