Queen's College Choir, Oxford & Owen Rees
Biographie Queen's College Choir, Oxford & Owen Rees
The Choir of The Queen’s College, Oxford
is among the finest and most active university choirs in the UK. Its wide-ranging repertory includes a rich array of music from Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces to contemporary works, including commissions. During the academic year the choir provides the music for regular services in the splendid Baroque Chapel of The Queen’s College, Oxford. Its extensive concert schedule involves appearances in many parts of the UK and abroad, including work with various professional orchestras such as the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, The Brook Street Band and Oxford Philomusica, and it broadcasts regularly on BBC Radio. Tours in recent years have included China, the USA, Sri Lanka, Italy, Portugal, Spain, France, the Low Countries, and Germany. Queen's choir's latest CD releases are on the Signum and Avie labels. May 2013 saw the release of a CD on the Avie label of Dixit Dominus settings by Handel and Alessandro Scarlatti, which was hailed as 'a disc of unusually high calibre' by Early Music Review and awarded 5 stars by Choir and Organ. In 2011 Queen's choir commissioned and premiered a major new work, Welcome all Wonders, by the British composer David Bednall. That concert was hailed as ‘a glorious performance’ by The Oxford Times, and the choir’s recording of the work, released on the Signum label in 2013, attracted excellent reviews. Queen's choir has also recorded for film at the famous Abbey Road Studios, and appears on the Grammy-nominated soundtrack of the Warner-Brothers film Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which was released in July 2009.
Owen Rees
is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, and Fellow in Music and Organist (Director of Music) at The Queen’s College, Oxford. He directs the Chapel Choir of The Queen’s College and also conducts the professional early-music choir Contrapunctus. His work as a conductor has taken him to the USA, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France, Norway, and the Netherlands, and he is increasingly busy as a leader of choral workshops. He has broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4, and in several other countries. His CD recordings with Queen’s and other choirs – on the Hyperion, Signum and Avie labels – encompass a wide variety of choral repertory, and have attracted consistently high critical acclaim. Owen Rees has brought to the concert hall and recording studio substantial repertories of magnificent Renaissance music, particularly from Portugal, Spain, and England, including many previously unknown or little-known works. His interpretations of these repertories have been acclaimed as ‘rare examples of scholarship and musicianship combining to result in performances that are both impressive and immediately attractive to the listener’, and he has been described as ‘one of the most energetic and persuasive voices’ in this field. Owen Rees's work has been shortlisted for the Gramophone Early Music Award three times.
