Nicholas Snowman, who has died aged 78, was probably the most influential and divisive British arts administrator of the past 50 years; he co-founded two contemporary music ensembles, the London Sinfonietta and the Ensemble intercontemporain in Paris, transformed and opened up the South Bank Centre, and was briefly general director of Glyndebourne Opera until the black-tie-and-picnic set could no longer stomach this devout Francophile’s revolutionary fervour.

To his champions Snowman was not just a concert hall manager, but a proactive artistic director. Instead of the South Bank being merely a “garage”, where orchestras arrive, perform and move on, he installed the London Philharmonic as the centre’s first orchestra-in-residence. Meanwhile, the stage of the Queen Elizabeth Hall was developed “so that you don’t have the feeling that you’re watching people perform through the wrong end of a telescope”, as he put it.

On his watch the centre became more of a partnership organisation, co-producing stagings by City of Birmingham Touring Opera, investing in the nascent Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and moving quickly to celebrate the 80th birthday of Olivier Messiaen in 1988 when nothing else was planned here. He also celebrated the music of other cultures, including using the centre’s resident Indonesian gamelan.

But to his detractors Snowman was a thin-skinned, pretentious and unreconstructed modernist, a determined apostle of all things new who was accustomed to channelling state cash into his pet avant-garde projects. He was not a natural power sharer and was admired more for his single-mindedness than his tact, though in private he was convivial company.

His belief that arts programmers have a duty to lead rather than follow in matters of public taste was evident in concerts that were neither for the faint-hearted nor for lovers of 19th-century melodies, often featuring uncompromising works by composers such as Stockhausen or Boulez. “Music goes on,” he declared unapologetically with as much vigour as his gentle voice would allow. “The arts are not things of the past and life is not just one big museum.”

Michael Nicholas Snowman was born in London on March 18 1944, the son of Kenneth Snowman CBE, who was chairman of the family-owned antique dealer and jeweller Wartski and an authority on Fabergé, and his wife Sallie (née Moghi-Levkine).

Neither parent was musical, but he was encouraged to go to concerts, and played the oboe and violin. He saw his first opera, La bohème, aged 12 in a tiny spa town in Italy. “I found it very upsetting, as I think it always is, when one sees the end of Mimi,” he told Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs in 1990.

At Highgate School he was a classmate of the composer John Tavener, and while reading English Literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge, he restarted the long defunct Cambridge University Opera Society with the conductor David Atherton. He also shared rooms there with the future BBC world affairs editor John Simpson, whom he helped to edit the student newspaper Granta.

As a student Snowman was dismayed that most of the music he was hearing was by dead composers, unlike in painting, literature and cinema. Searching around, he found new music coming from Europe as well as pockets of it being developed in Britain by composers such as Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr. Having visited Bayreuth in 1966, Snowman cut his administrative teeth at Glyndebourne Festival Opera, where he spent three summers as assistant to Jani Strasser, the long-serving head of music.

Meanwhile, he and Atherton were starting the London Sinfonietta, a chamber orchestra dedicated to commissioning and performing contemporary works. At their first concert, in January 1968, for which Snowman secured sponsorship of £1,000 from Marks & Spencer, Atherton conducted the premiere of The Whale by Tavener. Shortly afterwards came the Sinfonietta’s first commission, Harrison Birtwistle’s cacophonous Verses for Ensembles.

In 1972 he was appointed artistic director of the then unbuilt Pompidou Centre in Paris, which was designed to bring together different strands of the contemporary arts. “[President] Pompidou had this extraordinary vision that the arts shouldn’t be in separate boxes but should be brought together,” he said. Later in London he described his yearning for “some of that French curiosity”.

The experience influenced, or contaminated, his ideas for the South Bank, where in 1986 he was appointed general director (arts) after the centre was placed in the Arts Council’s care following the abolition of the Greater London Council. His mandate was to give greater inspiration and coherence to what was then a somewhat disparate group of arts buildings, something he undoubtedly achieved, though rarely without controversy or misstep.

He was promoted to chief executive in 1992, yet by 1998 he was desperate for pastures new. His return to Glyndebourne as general director was marked by a controversial but well-received La bohème, a critically disastrous sex- and violence-fuelled Don Giovanni and disagreements over staff appointments. However, he saw through the appointment of Vladimir Jurowski as music director in succession to Andrew Davies.

The promise, or threat, of new operas by Birtwistle, Elliott Carter and Péter Eötvös had Glyndebourne audiences choking on their champagne, and after two years Snowman departed abruptly, officially to spend more time with his family. In 2002 he resurfaced as general director of the Opéra National du Rhin in eastern France. That same year he succeeded his father as chairman of Wartski, the fourth generation of his family to hold that position.

Since the turn of the century Snowman’s profile in the British arts scene had been much diminished. Yet so too has the profile of that arts scene. He may not have had the right answers at the right time, but he was possibly asking the right questions about the role of the arts in society.

Nicholas Snowman was appointed OBE in 2014; in France he was made a Chevalier of the Ordre National du Mérite in 1995 and of the Légion d’honneur in 2008.

He married Margo Rouard, a French fashion designer, in 1983. They had a son, Hector, named after the composer Hector Berlioz, for whose first birthday Birtwistle composed the minute-long Hector’s Dawn for solo piano.

Nicholas Snowman, born March 18 1944, died March 2 2023