Robert King (conductor)

Robert King (born 27 June 1960 in Wombourne) is an English conductor, harpsichordist, editor and author. His career has concentrated on period performance of classical music, in particular from the baroque and early modern periods.

Career

As a youth, he was a member of the Choir of St John's College, Cambridge. He read music at the University of Cambridge, and in 1980, while still a student, founded the period instrument orchestra The King's Consort.^[1][2][3] As conductor and artistic director of The King's Consort, King has made more than 100 recordings, mostly for Hyperion Records ^[3] and more recently for the Vivat label.^[4]

He has worked as a conductor with orchestras in Europe and North America, including the Seattle, Houston, New World, Oregon, Detroit, Atlanta, Minnesota, WDR and NDR Symphony Orchestras, the Bergen Philharmonic, the Munich Radio Orchestra, Zurich Chamber Orchestra, Danish National Radio Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo, the Orchestra della RAI Torino, Orchestra Sinfonica Giuseppe Verdi di Milano, the Orquesta Sinfónica de Tenerife, Orquesta Ciudad de Barcelona, Real Filharmonia de Galicia, Real Orquesta Sinfónica de Sevilla and the Orquesta e Coro Ciudad de Madrid.^[5] King is also a noted choral conductor who has worked with the Nederlands Kamerkoor, Orfeo Catala, Orfeón Donostiarra, Swiss Radio Choir and the BBC Singers. Operatic work has included Handel Ottone in Japan and the UK, Handel Ezio in Paris, Purcell The Indian Queen in the UK and Germany, Purcell The Fairy Queen in Spain and Britain and Gluck Armide for Buxton Festival. He has written and presented for the BBC, been artistic director of music festivals in Sweden, Germany, and the UK, and contributed to the scores of a number of Hollywood films including Pirates of the Caribbean, Shrek 2, Flushed Away, and The Da Vinci Code.^[6]

Besides especial acclaim for his work in the field of baroque music, King also is renowned for conducting a wide spread of classical and early romantic works, symphonic and choral, with a particular focus on the music of Mozart, Haydn and Mendelssohn, and a continuing specialisation in early twentieth century English composers, notably the works of Vaughan Williams, Stanford and Parry.^[7]

A published author and editor of many scores, principally of baroque music, King wrote a monograph on Purcell published in 1994, to coincide with the 300th anniversary of the composer’s death in 1695.

2007

In 2007, King was convicted of indecent assault dating from his time as a young schoolmaster before 1994.^[8][9] King was jailed for a sentence of three years and nine months and was placed on the sex offenders' register for life. The judge declined to prohibit King from working with children in future, concluding that he had entered a new phase of his life, being married with children.^[10][11]

In 2013, commenting after a tabloid newspaper criticised him for taking part in a charity fundraising concert for a historic church, King stated that he had ‘accepted my sentence, and have paid my debt to society’.^{[12] [13]}

2009

King made a successful return to the podium in 2009. In 2010 and 2011, two substantial volumes of English church music edited by King were published by Oxford University Press ^[14] joining nearly 100 other works he has edited from the Baroque and Classical eras. In 2009 he was appointed artistic director of the musical charity Vivat Music Foundation^[15]

Since 2013 he has recorded for the Vivat label, on which his debut recording, I Was Glad, went straight to number 1 in the classical recordings charts ^[16][17] and was a finalist in the 2013 Gramophone Awards.^[18] In 2016–17, alongside UK performances including three appearances at Wigmore Hall, The King's Consort perform under King's direction at major European festivals and venues including the Palace of Versailles, Theater an der Wien, Rheingau Music Festival, De Bijloke Ghent, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, KKL Luzern, Auditorio Nacional Madrid, Baden-Baden, Köln and Essen as well as on tour in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland.^[19]

Robert King, his wife and two children live in rural England and farm a flock of rare-breeds sheep.^[20]

Published works

• Henry Purcell - "A Greater Musical Genius England Never had". London: Thames & Hudson, 1995. ISBN 0-500-01625-9
• English Church Music. Volume 1: Anthems and Motets. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-19-336841-5
• English Church Music. Volume 2: Canticles and Responses. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-19-336844-6

Discography

Founded in 1980 by Robert King, the period instrument orchestra and choir The King’s Consort has made more than one hundred recordings under King’s direction which have won many prestigious international awards and sold more than 1,500,000 copies.

Collections

References

Footnotes

External links

• Official website