David Willcocks

Few choral conductors have earned greater distinction or praise than Sir David Willcocks. Across more than three decades, his leadership of the Bach Choir and direction of the Royal College of Music produced performance and instructional standards unmatched in the field.

He began as a chorister at Westminster Abbey from age ten to fourteen, continued at Clifton College, and arrived at King’s College, Cambridge as an organ scholar in 1939. Military service in the British Infantry during World War II interrupted his studies; he received the Military Cross in 1944. Returning to King’s College in 1945, he completed his work, became a Fellow in 1947, and that same year took the podium of the Cambridge Philharmonic Society while also conducting the Salisbury Musical Society and serving as organist of Salisbury Cathedral. In 1950 he moved to Worcester Cathedral as organist, simultaneously directing the Worcester Festival Choral Society and the City of Birmingham Choir, a post he retained for seven years.

By the close of the decade he held the posts of director of music at King’s College Cambridge, organist of Cambridge University, and conductor of the Cambridge University Music Society, all of which he kept until the 1970s, when he assumed the directorship of the Royal College of Music. In 1960 he further became music director of the Bach Choir. He appeared in most European countries as well as Japan and the United States, and prepared several anthologies of choral music.

After the late 1950s his recordings were comparatively few, made chiefly with the King’s College Choir and the Bach Choir together with the English Chamber Orchestra, the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the Jacques Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, and the London Symphony Orchestra. The repertoire extended from England’s Tudor period, especially the music of John Taverner, to twentieth-century composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams. In addition to Haydn’s The Creation and The Nelson Mass, masses by Palestrina and Charpentier, and Taverner’s The Western Wind, he led modern scores including Britten’s War Requiem and Hymn to St. Cecelia, Vaughan Williams’ Mass in G, Hodie, and Sancta Civitas, and a limited number of orchestral works such as Vaughan Williams’ Five Variants on Dives and Lazarus, of which his account remains definitive. His 1962 recording of Haydn’s Mass No. 9 largely revived the composer’s choral music for later listeners. His most celebrated achievement, however, is the EMI recording of Handel’s Messiah performed by an all-male choir (counter-tenor replacing alto) with the King’s College Choir and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, distinguished by its measured pacing and finely etched textures.