Stephen Cleobury has been Director of Music at King’s College, Cambridge since 1982, and, since 1983, conductor of the orchestra and chorus of the Cambridge University Musical Society. In November 1995 he was appointed Chief Conductor of the BBC Singers. Stephen is active as a conductor and organist both in the UK and abroad, frequently visiting North America, Australia and Europe in these roles.

During his time the King’s College Choir has performed with leading soloists and orchestras, among them Lucia Popp, Brigitte Faessbender, Robert Tear, Thomas Allen, and Olaf Bär: the ECO, RPO, LPO and Philharmonia, the City of London Sinfonia, the Hanover Band, the Academy of Ancient Music and the Brandenburg Consort. With this last the choir has recorded Handel’s Messiah, Bach’s St Matthew Passion and Handel’s Israel in Egypt. As well as being dedicated to an approach to earlier music which is stylistically aware, Stephen Cleobury has commissioned many works for the choir from important contemporary composers.

Stephen’s work with the BBC Singers includes studio recordings, invitation concerts and public engagements, across a range of choral repertoire from the Renaissance right up to the present day. He has recorded five CDs with the BBC Singers and recent collaborations have included concerts in Stratford, Canterbury and Cambridge, a performance of Schnittke’s Choir Concerto for the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Schnittke Festival, the world premiere of BBC Singers Associate Composer Edward Cowie’s Gaia with the Endymion Ensemble and, outside the UK, concerts in Belgium, Budapest and the Netherlands.

In his work with Cambridge University Musical Society, Stephen combines presentation of new works with the standard repertoire. In 1991/92 the chorus premiered Robin Holloway’s Hymn to the Senses, in the following season CUMS undertook the first Cambridge performance and a recording of Alexander Goehr’s The Death of Moses. Its most ambitious recent projects have been Mahler’s Eighth Symphony and Britten’s War Requiem given with the Bach Choir in Ely Cathedral, and in the Royal Albert Hall, London. Robert Saxton’s Canticum Luminis, a CUMS commission, was premiered in March 1994.