WHO ARE WE? CONTACT REGISTRATION 🇸🇪

Richard Cooke

has been conducting choral concerts and singing weeks in Sweden for nearly 50 years, and, since 1998 the Music Director of Music Weeks in Sweden. He has a vast experience of choirs, both as singer and conductor, and is established as one of England’s leading choral directors.  As a boy treble he sang in the choir of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, and later sang tenor as a Choral Scholar in the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, under David Willcocks.

 

He has been the Music Director of The Royal Choral Society in London since 1995, and before that for ten years of the London Philharmonic Choir, conducting major concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal Festival Hall and in many English cathedrals.  Since 1984 he has also been the Conductor of Canterbury Choral Society, his home city where he lives with his family. He was appointed an Honorary Doctor of Music at the University of Kent in Canterbury in 2010, and was similarly honoured in 1996 by the University of Essex, where he has was Music Director for 39 years.  He has a Grammy award and four Grammy nominations as Chorus Master in recordings of Mahler’s 8th Symphony and other great works.

With his extensive experience and his outstanding leadership, Richard manages in less than a week to guide a group of individuals with different levels of experience into a harmonic and united choir, which, to its own surprise, at the end of the week presents a concert of high artistic and musical quality.

Richard pilots the choir with sensitivity, dedication and humour through difficulties and ditches singing a well-chosen and varied repertoire. An important contribution comes from his, and his singing family’s, active involvement in the social events of the Music Week, participating in informal performances in the night soirées, and pleasant conversations in Swinglish at meals and coffee breaks.