The Choir of Royal Holloway, London Mozart Players & Rupert Gough
Biography The Choir of Royal Holloway, London Mozart Players & Rupert Gough
The Choir of Royal Holloway
is considered to be one of the finest university choirs in Britain. The choir was created at the time of the foundation of Royal Holloway College in 1886, and was originally only for women’s voices. The group, comprised of 24 choral scholars and 2 organ scholars, is directed by Rupert Gough and undertakes a busy schedule of weekly services and concerts, international tours, recordings and live broadcasts. Royal Holloway is the only university that maintains a tradition of singing daily morning services, and is home to the only choir in the country performing weekly live streamed concerts.
As part of the choir’s 50+ concerts a year, they regularly collaborate with and perform alongside many famous ensembles. These have included the King’s Singers, the BBC Singers, Britten Sinfonia, London Mozart Players, Onyx Brass, Fretwork and the jazz-trio Acoustic Triangle, with whom they broadcast live on BBC radio. The group also celebrates the work of living composers, and have commissioned works from Sir James MacMillan, Gabriel Jackson, Richard Rodney Bennett, Cecilia McDowall and Paul Mealor. The choir’s diverse repertoire also includes larger-scale works including Vespers by Monteverdi, Rachmaninov and Rautavaara, Requiems by Mozart and Howells, and Gabriel Jackson’s Ave regina coelorum for choir and electric guitar which they also broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. Festival engagements have included the Spitalfields Festival, the Three Choirs Festival, the Windsor and Swaledale festivals, the Cheltenham Festival (with alumna Dame Felicity Lott and the City of London Sinfonia), and numerous residencies at the Presteigne Festival.
International performances are also an integral part of the choir’s work. They have toured most European countries, and have been broadcast on national television and radio all over the world. A tour of all three Baltic states saw the choir performing in the Latvian Song Festival with the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, in a concert (sung in Estonian) broadcast nationally on the Estonian Day of Independence. Further afield, the group has visited Beijing and had a number of successful tours to the US and Canada. The choir regularly sing at high-profile events which have included the Annual Festival of Remembrance at the Albert Hall (live on BBC television), an awards ceremony at Buckingham Palace, and for the Magna Carta 800 celebrations, in which they performed a new work by John Rutter in the presence of HM the Queen and the Archbishop of Canterbury. More recently they sang at the wedding of Ellie Goulding and Caspar Jopling at York Minster.
The choir are much in demand for recording work with orchestras. A live concert recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Thomas Adès and the Britten Sinfonia is due for release from Signum Records. The choir has also recorded James Francis Browns The Heavens and the Heart with Orchestra Nova and Joanna Marsh’s cantata The Pearl of Freedom with the London Mozart Players, with whom they will be recording again in 2020. Future projects include a premiere recording of Dan Locklair's Requiem with the Southern Sinfonia.
The choir has an extensive and highly acclaimed discography with Hyperion, Decca, Signum and Naxos amongst others, and has one of the busiest recording schedules of any collegiate choir. Recordings include music by 16th century composer Peter Philips with the English Cornett & Sackbut ensemble, contemporary American choral music by René Clausen and Stephen Paulus and madrigals from Victorian England. The choir is renowned for their performances of Nordic and Baltic music, and has recorded works by Vytautas Miškinis, Rihards Dubra, Bo Hansson, Tõnu Kõrvits (with the Britten Sinfonia) and Ola Gjeilo to great acclaim. The 2018 release Winter Songs with Gjeilo was No. 1 in the UK and US classical charts. Upcoming releases feature the music of Ben Parry and Joanna Marsh, a live concert recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Thomas Adès and the Britten Sinfonia, and a recently rediscovered work by Pierre Villette with alumna Sarah Fox. Future projects include works by George Arthur, as well as a second cantata by Carson Cooman, following on from the success of Revelations of Divine Love, commissioned and recorded by the choir in 2009 and premiered in Cadogan Hall.
London Mozart Players
Founded in 1949 by Harry Blech to delight audiences with the works of Mozart and Haydn, over the last 70-odd years the LMP has developed an outstanding reputation for adventurous, ambitious programming from Baroque through to genre-crossing contemporary music. It continues to build on its long history of association with many of the world’s finest artists including Sir James Galway, Dame Felicity Lott, Jane Glover, Howard Shelley, Nicola Benedetti, John Suchet and Simon Callow. The orchestra enjoys an international reputation, touring throughout Europe and the Far East, most recently Dubai and Hong Kong, and records for Naxos, Chandos, Signum, Hyperion, Convivium Records and the German label CPO.
The London Mozart Players has been the resident orchestra at Croydon’s Fairfield Halls for thirty years, and in September 2019 enjoyed a gala concert to celebrate the Halls’ reopening. As Croydon’s resident orchestra, the ensemble has shown an invigorated and growing commitment to the borough’s cultural life. In 2016, LMP relocated its office from Fairfield Halls to St John the Evangelist, Upper Norwood, undertaking a programme of initiatives within the local community. The orchestra has brought classical music stars Nicola Benedetti, Michael Collins and Sheku Kanneh-Mason to Upper Norwood in world-class performances, and its annual St John’s season has included family concerts and collaborations with local community groups and schools.
During the closure of Fairfield Halls for refurbishment, the orchestra took classical music to new and unusual venues across Croydon in its award-winning three-year series #LMPOnTheMove. This saw the ensemble pushing the perceived boundaries of classical music performance in the borough, welcoming new audiences and partnerships. Events included a live film score played on top of a shopping mall car park, a house music set at Boxpark with young DJ/producer Shift K3Y, free concerts in libraries for children and a series of musical initiatives in Centrale.
As one of the original pioneers of orchestral outreach work, LMP has enjoyed a host of relationships with schools and music hubs across the UK (and recently in Dubai and Hong Kong), working with teachers and heads of music to inspire the next generation of musicians and music lovers. As well as working with schools, LMP continues its long-established tradition of promoting young up-and-coming musicians. Nicola Benedetti, Jacqueline du Pré and Jan Pascal Tortelier are just three of many young musical virtuosos championed early in their careers by the orchestra.
The LMP enjoys a special relationship with its audience and has thriving Friends and Sponsors programmes. The orchestra always tries to break down the ‘fourth’ wall between musicians and audience, and this is achieved in part as the orchestra is self-directed. LMP is the only professional orchestra in the UK to be managed both operationally and artistically by the players. The orchestra has enjoyed the patronage of HRH The Earl of Wessex since 1988.
Rupert Gough
has been Director of Choral Music and College Organist at Royal Holloway, University of London since 2005. He is also Organist and Director of Music at London's oldest surviving church, Great Saint Bartholomew, which maintains a professional choir. He previously spent 11 years as Assistant Organist at Wells Cathedral where he worked closely with the choir both as accompanist and choir trainer. During this time he featured on 19 recordings as either organist or conductor, including six discs for Hyperion Records.
His overall discography of nearly 50 commercial recordings encompasses work as a choir director, organist and harpsichordist, and includes the organ and choral works of Sir Percy Buck (Priory), the instrumental and choral works of Carson Cooman (Naxos and Albany), the complete works for violin and organ of Josef Rheinberger and choral works of Rihards Dubra, Vytautas Miškinis and Bo Hansson (Hyperion).
Born in 1971, Rupert was a chorister at the Chapels Royal, St. James's Palace, and won a scholarship to the Purcell School. He received (with distinction) a Masters degree in English Church Music from the University of East Anglia whilst Organ Scholar at Norwich Cathedral. In 2001 he won Third Prize at the St. Alban's International Organ Competition. He is particularly renowned for his work in combination with violin as a member of the Gough Duo. The Duo’s many American tours have taken them all over the USA from Florida to Alaska. Recently they performed to audiences of 1,800 in Moscow and 1,200 in Hong Kong.
As a conductor he has worked with a variety of professional choirs and orchestras including the Britten Sinfonia, the London Mozart Players, the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and Florilegium. He has also been fortunate to work with many distinguished soloists including Julian Lloyd Webber, Antony Rolfe Johnson, Felicity Lott, Susan Bullock, Emma Kirkby, James Bowman and Wayne Marshall. This summer he will be working alongside the King’s Singers in their first UK Summer School.
