Welcome to our new President
We are pleased and proud to welcome Stephen Alder as our new President. Stephen has extensive experience in oratorio and recital, and has sung in most European countries, as well as China, Japan, USA, Israel, Brazil and Argentina. He has sung frequently with the BBC Singers, and also with most period instrument groups in the UK … and is also a previous soloist with Thanet Festival Choir! He has recorded J.S. Bach’s Coffee and Peasant cantatas with his own group ‘The Friends of Apollo’, and also appears on a Hyperion disc of Verse Anthems by John Blow with Winchester Cathedral Choir. He has appeared many times on television, and on both Radio 3 and Classic FM, and is a longstanding friend and colleague of our Music Director, Clifford Lister. Stephen’s recent engagements have included concerts in Rome and Singapore; Bach’s St Matthew Passion in the Barbican and St John Passion in Holland. He has also taken the part of narrator in Honegger’s King David in King’s College, Cambridge under Stephen Cleobury with whom he also sang Brahms’ German Requiem in Ely Cathedral. He sings regularly at Westminster Cathedral, frequently as a soloist, in the choir’s many and varied recordings, concerts, television and radio broadcasts. He was the soloist in the premières of two new works: one by Jon Cullen, telling the story of Bishop Bonner and the persecution of Protestants under Mary; the other by Andrew Parnell, performed in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, with settings of Thomas Campion, and East Anglian poet John Clare.