Simon Carrington | Brian O'Connell | Bronislawa Falinska

Simon Carrington has recently been appointed Professor of Music at Yale University, where, he has formed a new chamber choir for performance, touring, and recording. The choir members receive generous stipends from the Institute of Sacred Music. He also joins Marguerite Brooks at Yale to teach conducting to the graduate students.

He was Director of Choral Activities at the New England Conservatory in Boston, Massachusetts, from 2001 to 2003. After his many years of experience as a professional choral musician, he concentrated his efforts at NEC on teaching the essential ensemble skills which are so important to ensure a successful career for a young singer but which are so often ignored by the major conservatories. In 2003 NEC students chose Simon Carrington for the Krasner Teaching Excellence Award.

From 1994 to 2001 he served as professor, artist-in-residence, and Director of Choral Activities at the University of Kansas (KU) following his 25-year career as founder, member, co-director, and creative force with the internationally acclaimed British vocal ensemble, The King's Singers. He gave 3000 performances at many of the world's most prestigious festivals and concert halls with the group, made nearly 70 recordings, appeared on countless television and radio programs and led workshops and masterclasses in Europe, the United States, Australia and Japan. During the early years of The King's Singers, he also enjoyed a successful career as an orchestral musician, playing with most of London's leading symphony and chamber orchestras and as the double bass continuo player in the performances and recordings of the English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir that launched the career of his Cambridge contemporary, John Eliot Gardiner.

At KU, Professor Carrington developed an extensive choral program that includes masters and doctoral degree programs along with seven choirs and three vocal jazz ensembles. With an ambitious selection of repertoire his choirs were also featured on NPR's Performance Today, made three CDs, a PBS television recording of KU's Annual Holiday Vespers, and undertook highly successful concert tours to New York's Carnegie Hall, England, France, Hungary and Brazil. In his final semester, he took the KU Chamber Choir to perform three concerts before 6000 choral directors gathered from all over the world at the American Choral Director's National Convention in San Antonio, Texas.

In addition to his work at Yale, Mr. Carrington is pursuing an active freelance career as conductor and choral clinician around the world. He is one of the busier All-State conductors in the United States, and he conducts, leads choral institutes and adjudicates festivals and competitions internationally. He has served on the jury and as conductor at the Marktoberdorf Chamber Choir Competition, was a clinician at the Fifth World Symposium on Choral Music in Rotterdam and directed a series of choral workshops at the International Choral Convention in Singapore. Among other more recent activities, he was the featured clinician at the summer choral institute at the University of North Texas, guest conducted the Ars Nova Singers (Boulder, CO) and Portland State University Chamber Choir and ran a series of conducting seminars and concerts at the Franz Liszt Conservatory of Music in Budapest, Hungary. In July 2003 he conducted the Monteverdi Vespers (1610) in Barcelona, sung by some of the finest youth choirs from all over Europe.