 (home page)
|
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
||
|
|
||
Robert Webb - Musical Director
Robert Webb was educated at Selwyn College Cambridge, where he held a choral scholarship and read Law. He was also organ scholar and then assistant organist at the University Church of St Mary the Great in Cambridge. Following a career as a solicitor in Cambridge, during which Robert was also organist at Trumpington Church and conducted several choirs, he decided that music was a greater calling and left the law in 1996 to become a full-time musician, moving to Oxford and, for a time, working as a motorcycle courier to supplement his income from music. A couple of churches and several choirs later, most notably the Cathedral Singers of Oxford Cathedral, Robert found himself returning to his native Yorkshire to become Director of Music at St. John's church, Ranmoor, Sheffield, in September 2003, a post which he held until this summer, and took up the post of Musical Director of the Sterndale Singers in September 2004.Robert also composes. His first major work, a children's Christmas Cantata, Come Follow Me!, co-written with writer Mellie Buse, won critical acclaim at its premier performance in November 1998 in the Apollo Theatre, Oxford in aid of Save The Children. He was commissioned to write Wantage Bells, a setting of a poem by John Betjeman for a mass held in remembrance of the 15th anniversary of the poet's death. His church music includes works written for the licensing of former curates and the current Priest in Charge at St John's, and his first large-scale work, Laudate Dominum, was performed by the Sheffield University Singers' Society in May this year.
Robert has an active private teaching practice through the Milsom School of Music and is also in demand as an accompanist, recently working with Trent Opera in a performance of Sweeny Todd in the Waterford International Festival.
During his wide-ranging musical career, Robert has conducted many of the major large choral works, including Mendelssohn's Elijah, Elgar's Dream of Gerontius, Bach's Christmas Orotorio and St John Passion, Haydn's Creation and Orff's Carmina Burana, as well as smaller classics, and recently a contemporary work commissioned by Henley Choral Society from the composer Ian Crew. He has led workshops with choirs of varying sizes on a variety of music from plainsong chant through Mozart and Fauré to Duruflé's Requiem. His energetic encouragement of singers, combined with a sense of musicianship and humour, means that rehearsals are fun as well as instructive, Robert getting the best out of the singers, whatever their standard.
(Last updated on 07-01-2012)