Musical Director

Andrew joined the choir as a stand-in conductor in Autumn 2007, and quickly established a positive and enthusiastic rapport with choir members. He subsequently accepted our offer to become our permanent Musical Director and we look forward to a rewarding and constructive partnership with him.

Andrew read Music at the University of Birmingham and studied singing at the Royal College of Music under the late Frederick Sharp. He has travelled widely, singing as a soloist with choral societies and music clubs throughout the United Kingdom as well as working with many of the professional choirs in London. His international work has taken him to Canada and the USA, Australia and New Zealand, most of Europe and to the Far East.

Performances over the last thirty years have ranged across an extensive repertoire, covering most of the popular oratorio field from Monteverdi to Britten as well as more challenging contemporary work. Equally at home with Baroque classics and the larger scale 19^th century works of Verdi and Rossini, his work is always musically informed.

As a conductor he worked for many years with the Hampshire-based chamber choir Voci Cantanti and The Thames Singers of London, presenting each year a full season of concerts in venues throughout the country. With the choirs he built an enviable reputation in the recording studio, collaborating with major companies as conductor and producer on film scores and CD projects, work which he continues as a busy freelance record producer.

A former member of the choirs of Guildford and Winchester Cathedrals and, by way of complete contrast, the cabaret vocal quintet The Demon Barbers, he has always combined his work as a performer with that of coaching and teaching and was for twenty-five years the singing tutor at Wellington College in Berkshire.

For twenty years he has been the Director of Chameleon Arts Management, a music agency which represents a wide variety of musicians throughout the UK for concert promotion and which also provides a choral and orchestral booking service for concert performances, recordings and commercial work.

Marion Lea studied at the Royal Academy of Music. As a freelance pianist and accompanist she has performed in recitals and concerts with many singers and instrumentalists and broadcast on both television and radio. She also works as an orchestral pianist, accompanies auditions for the BBC, plays for choral societies and operatic companies and coaches singers.