Former Fidelity star fund manager Anthony Bolton is playing a new tune as founder of Music Patron, an online platform that aims to fill the gaps in funding for British composers.

While Bolton is well-known for his stellar long-term performance on the Fidelity Special Situations fund and Fidelity Special Values (FSV ) investment trust as well as for launching the Fidelity China Special Situations (FCSS ) trust during his 35-year stint at Fidelity, investors may be less familiar with his other talent: composing.

After he retired from the City, the keen pianist and cellist composed a two-act opera titled The Life and Death of Alexander Litvinenko that took seven years to write and was first performed in 2021. The opera focused on the murder of the ex-Russian spy and political activist and premiered at Grange Park Opera in Surrey.

Bolton (pictured below) has reaffirmed his commitment to the arts, using his Boltini family trust to fund the launch of Music Patron, a website that connects composers with listeners, who can help fund their careers.

Music Patron is the brainchild of Bolton and in 2020 it was confirmed that the development of the platform would be funded by a ‘substantial annual grant’ from the Boltini Trust over the next five years, after which it should be self-sustaining ‘as well as channelling significant donations to hundreds of composers across the UK’.

The platform currently has 29 composers on board, and in an interview on BBC Radio 3, Bolton said: ‘I had been thinking over the last few years: how can I support composers?

‘And if you look back at history, much of the great music of the past was supported by patronage. [Composer Jean] Sibelius’ patron was the state of Finland but [patronage] has really died out in the last 100 years or so.’

Bolton added that he wants to support all types of composers writing a range of music, and the composers using the platform already includes ‘contemporary classical music, some jazz-orientated, and some more electronic’.

The former fund manager joined Fidelity in 1979, launching the Fidelity Special Situations fund. Investors clever, or lucky, enough to have invested £10,000 into the fund at launch would have walked away with £1.4m by the time Bolton stepped down 28 years later in 2007 – a return of 14,124% – putting him in a hallowed position within fund management.

However, he made a surprise return to asset management in 2010, launching the Fidelity China Special Situations investment trust, but retired fully three years later when he passed it on to its current manager Dale Nicholls.