Almost exactly a year after his death, Stephen Cleobury is to be memorialised in concert by the BBC Singers. Ahead of the broadcast, Timmy Fisher takes a look at his remarkable life in music
To the outside world, the conductor and organist Stephen Cleobury could come across as reserved, stoic – unassuming. But his singers knew better: ‘You have to be in partnership with him to see an entirely different world of emotions revealed,’ one of his young choristers told the journalist Richard Morrison. It was through music that Cleobury best expressed himself, and if his many recordings are anything to go by, he had a lot to say.
Cleobury was born in Bromley, Kent, the son of a doctor and a nurse. With his brother, Nicholas (also a successful conductor), he auditioned as a treble for the choir of Worcester Cathedral – a step that ‘changed the course of our lives’, he later recalled. This early exposure to Anglican church music instilled a passion that would propel him into a long, illustrious career. He went on to become Organ Scholar at St John’s College, Cambridge, and later Organist and Head of Music at St Matthew’s Church, Northampton, Head of Music at Northampton Grammar School, Sub-Organist at Westminster Abbey and Master of Music at Westminster Cathedral.
Although a renowned orchestral interpreter, organist and former Chief Conductor of the BBC Singers, in later life Cleobury was best known as Director of Music at King’s College, Cambridge, a post he held from 1982 until his death – on St Cecilia’s Day (the feast day of the patron saint of music!) – in 2019.
On inheriting a 500-year-old tradition, it might have been tempting to settle into well-established conventions, but Cleobury’s impulse was to innovate. He was the first to introduce contemporary music into the choir’s repertoire, most notably by commissioning a new carol each year for the world-famous Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. As he told The Daily Telegraph in 2012, ‘I felt that a tradition must be nourished with new material, otherwise it fossilises.’