#Music by john rutter plus
#Music by john rutter professional

#Music by john rutter professional

He co-edited four volumes in the Carols for Choirs series with Sir David Willcocks, and, edited the first two volumes in the new Oxford Choral Classics series.ДЄfter leaving Clare College to allow more time for composition, he formed the Cambridge Singers as a professional chamber choir primarily dedicated to recording. He is known for many choral works, and has also written orchestral and instrumental pieces, a piano concerto, two childrenвЂ™s operas, music for television, and for such groups as the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble and the KingвЂ™s Singers. He returned there in 1975 as director of music, conducting the choir in broadcasts and recordings. He studied music at Clare College, Cambridge, where he wrote his first published compositions and conducted his first recording while still a student. John Rutter was born in London in 1945 and received his first musical education as a chorister at Highgate School. Composition pays for all the other musical activities, IвЂ™m very fortunate. Put it down to innate restlessness the balance is probably right for me. I always want to be doing whatever IвЂ™m not doing at the present moment. Are you happy with the balance between all these aspects of your musical life? It makes such a wonderful sound when itвЂ™s done right, it has repertoire stretching back a thousand years, and itвЂ™s got words.ДЄs well as composing and conducting, you are also known as an editor, arranger and record producer. Why do you think choral music has such a perennial attraction to audiences? The most important qualities for any conductor (orchestral or choral, I donвЂ™t make any distinction in my mind) are to have a vision of the music, coupled with the personality and technique to convey that vision to the performers in front of you. What is the most important thing for a choral conductor? It was awfully nice to have the opportunity earlier this year to write a violin concerto for a past prizewinner in the Menuhin competition.ДЄfter being director of music at Clare College you went on to form the Cambridge Singers. I never planned things that way, thatвЂ™s just how it turned out. Pigeon-holed, yes, but not unfairly, because over three-quarters of my compositional output is choral. You have always been particularly associated with choral music, yet your list of works includes a piano concerto and two childrenвЂ™s operas. But I guess I was always drawn towards the sound of choirs.

#Music by john rutter plus

That lit my fire, plus singing for a period in my teens in the choir of St MaryвЂ™s Primrose Hill (cradle of the English Hymnal вЂ“ Martin Shaw and Percy Dearmer worked there). Yes, we had an excellent chapel choir and a concert chorus that took in almost half the school. Is that what gave you a taste for choral music? The immediate stimulus for assembling Psalmfest was indeed a concert in Carnegie Hall where the resources of orchestra and soloists were available to me rather than just church organ, but in fact much of my church music seems to get performed in concert halls anyway. Psalmfest draws together nine of these settings вЂ“ was the idea of the work to get the psalms out of church and into the concert hall? I tend to avoid setting the mean nasty bits to music, however. Two attractions for me (and for many other composers down the ages): the poetry and beauty of their language, and second, their intensely human expression of a whole gamut of emotions вЂ“ hope, trust, joy, delight in nature, faith, wonder вЂ“ and the uncomfortable ones we shouldnвЂ™t experience but all do: envy, frustration, vengefulness, self-pity. You have been drawn to psalm settings many times over the years вЂ“ what is the attraction? Newly released from Naxos is a disc of psalm settings by John Rutter, dubbed by Gramophone вЂthe man who has become the most popular British composer of choral music in recent yearsвЂ™.