Bob Chilcott has been involved in choral music
for most of his life. He was a chorister and
choral scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, and
for twelve years was a member of the vocal group
The King’s Singers. Since 1997 he has worked as
a full-time composer and has written a wide
variety of choral music, including a significant
amount of music for young choirs. He has over
one hundred pieces published by Oxford
University Press, and a number of his choral
works have been published in German, Swedish,
Norwegian, and Slovenian.
In late 2007, Signum released to great critical
acclaim a CD of his music, Man I Sing, on
which Bob conducts the BBC Singers. Another
recent project was the composition of Like a
Singing Bird, commissioned by a consortium
of 19 American choirs and one from Scotland,
which raised $30,000 for the professional choral
organisation, Chorus America. The piece will be
performed this Spring by choirs from Hawaii to
Boston, and in Dunfermline. Other
highlights for this year include the world
première of High Flight, a work written
for the 40th anniversary of The
King’s Singers, and in which they will join with
the choir of King’s College, Cambridge. Looking
further ahead, the opening concert of the 2009
Salisbury Festival will feature the new
large-scale work, Salisbury Vespers, for
which over 600 musicians from the City of
Salisbury will gather in the Cathedral.
As well as being Principal Guest Conductor of
the BBC Singers, he has conducted many other
leading choirs in their field, including the
World Youth Choir, the RIAS Kammerchor, Orphei
Drangar from Sweden, Jauna Musika from
Lithuania, the
Taipei Chamber Singers, and the Tower New
Zealand Youth Choir. He has worked in 23
countries on six continents, and at festivals
from Festival 500 in Newfoundland to Tallinn,
where in 2004, as the first foreign musician to
be invited, he conducted a choir of 7000 young
singers at the Estonian Song Festival in one of
his most popular pieces, “Can you hear me?”.
