Young conductor takes up the baton for Kingston Choral Society (From Richmond and Twickenham Times)

Young conductor takes up the baton for Kingston Choral Society

5:10pm Wednesday 10th June 2009

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At the age of just 24 Graham Ross, the musical director of Kingston Choral Society, is already an accomplished conductor and composer.

He spoke to Will Gore about the society’s upcoming concert, receiving rave reviews for his latest CD, and taking opera to the Middle East.

Will Gore: You joined KCS as musical director last November. Are you enjoying the experience?

Graham Ross: Very much so. The joy of being a conductor is that you get an awful lot of repertoire to tackle and KCS give me a fairly blank canvas for programming the concerts, which is great.

WG: What do you have planned for the June 20 concert?

GR: It will be my first orchestral KCS concert so it gives me the chance to get to grips with some great choral work. It is the 200th anniversary of Haydn’s anniversary this year, so for the concert on June 20 we are doing his Nelson Mass. We are also doing the Faure Requiem but in its original version, which Faure is said to have preferred. It is an intimate scoring without violins. It is not done in that way very often, so it is a chance to look at a familiar piece in a new light.

WG: How did you get into classical music?

GR: I had a musical upbringing and covered lots of repertoire, both sacred and secular, as a young singer. I then began to compose at the piano and organ. After taking lessons at the Royal College of Music (RCM), I went to Cambridge and studied music before going back to the RCM to do a postgraduate course in orchestral conducting. I was lucky because Cambridge was a fertile ground for trying stuff out. There was an array of instrumentalists and singers at my disposal.

WG: Do you see yourself primarily as a composer or a conductor?

GR: Lots of people say: “Which one are you going to focus on?” My answer is always that it is very much fifty-fifty. At the moment, there is lots going on on both fronts and they feed into each other.

WG: You are about to head to the Middle East with choirs from London. How did the trip come about?

GR: We went to the West Bank in 2007 for the Palestine Mozart Festival, which was set up by two friends of mine who run the Choir of London. We are going back to do a number of performances of La Boheme that I’m assisting on. Last time we were there we did a gala performance of the Mozart Requiem with various choirs and schools and one entire choir missed the performance because they couldn’t get through a check-point. That incident helped keep us aware of the meaning of the trip and anything you can do to help as outsiders trying to unite a troubled area is a bonus.

WG: Your CD, in which you conduct the Dmitri Ensemble performing James MacMillan’s Seven Last Words from the Cross, recently received five-star reviews. You must be delighted?

GR: We have had some really nice feedback and have been in the classical charts for three weeks. It is a great piece but not well known. I would say this but I urge people to buy it so they can hear the music for themselves.

Kingston Choral Society Concert: Fauré’s Requiem, Elgar’s Serenade for Strings, and Haydn’s Nelson Mass, All Saints’ Parish Church, Market Place, Kingston, June 20, 7.30pm, £14/£12/£5, available from Hands Music, The Griffin Centre. or call 020 8390 5689 or visit kingstonchoralsociety.co.uk

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