Paul Webster

 

Paul Webster

 

Paul Webster read Music as an Organ Scholar at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and subsequently won a scholarship to study Piano Accompaniment at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

 

Since then he has pursued a career of rich diversity as festival director, coach and accompanist, choir master, writer on music, arranger and composer, and teacher of composition. As conductor with a particular interest in contemporary repertoire, he has appeared with his own group, the Orpheus Ensemble, at St. John’s Smith Square, Wigmore Hall, and on BBC Radio 3, where he has also broadcast with the BBC Singers; and in 1987 he conducted Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ “The Martyrdom of St. Magnus” for Opera Factory/London Sinfonietta at the London International Opera Festival.

 

He has worked on the preparation of new works with singers Teresa Cahill and Willard White, and the ‘cellist Rostropovitch; for 20 years he accompanied Master Classes for singers at the summer Académie de Musique in Sion, Switzerland; whilst as repetiteur he has worked with Kent Opera, at Glyndebourne and Opéra Bastille, Paris, and is now in his 19th season as accompanist to the BBC Symphony Chorus.

 

In 1980 he joined the music staff at Morley College, London, where he has conducted choirs, accompanied song classes, and taught composition.

 

Paul has enjoyed a happy and fruitful association with the LSG – resulting in several new pieces – for some 30 years, and he has been a Faculty Member of the Group’s Bryanston Summer School ever since it began in 1989.