Simon
Carrington has enjoyed a long and distinguished career in music,
performing as singer, double bass player and conductor, first in the
UK where he was born, and latterly in the
USA. From 2003
to 2009 he was professor of choral conducting at Yale University and director of the Yale
Schola Cantorum, a 24-voice chamber choir which he has brought to
national and now international prominence, attracting the interest of his
successor, Masaaki Suzuki, director of the Bach Collegium Japan. During his
Yale tenure he led the introduction of a new graduate voice degree for
singers specializing in oratorio, early music and chamber ensemble, and, with
his faculty colleagues, he guided two Yale graduate students to their first
prize wins in consecutive conducting competitions at American Choral Directors
Association National Conventions. From 2001 until his Yale appointment, he was
director of choral activities at the New England Conservatory,
Boston, where he was selected by the students for the
Krasner Teaching Excellence Award, and from 1994 to 2001 he held a similar
position at the University of Kansas.
Prior to
coming to the
United States,
he was a creative force for twenty-five years with the internationally
acclaimed British vocal ensemble The King’s Singers, which he
co-founded at
Cambridge
University. He gave 3,000
performances at many of the world’s most prestigious festivals and concert
halls, made more than seventy recordings, and appeared on countless television
and radio programs, including nine appearances on the Tonight Show with the
late Johnny Carson!
Carrington
was a chorister at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford,
attended The King’s School, Canterbury, and then won a choral scholarship to King’s
College, Cambridge, where he sang in the chapel choir for four
years, and for a subsequent year at New College, Oxford.
In the
early days of The King's Singers he had a lively career as a double bass
player, first as sub-principal of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and then as a
freelance player in London. He specialised in continuo playing, particularly
for his Cambridge contemporary John Eliot Gardiner, with whom he made a number
of recordings, but he also played with all the major symphony and chamber
orchestras under such diverse maestri as Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim,
Benjamin Britten, Pierre Boulez, Sir Colin Davis, Carlo Maria Guilini, Otto
Klemperer, Ricardo Muti, Georg Solti and George Szell. As a teacher of conductors
himself for fifteen years he only wished he'd paid more attention!
Now a
Yale professor emeritus he maintains an active schedule as a freelance
conductor and choral clinician, leading workshops and master classes round the
world. He has conducted the Monteverdi Vespers in Barcelona, the Fauré Requiem
in Orchestra Hall, Chicago, Handel's Messiah in Dublin and Boston, Rachmaninov
Vespers in Victoria, Canada, and Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevski in Poland. He is
a regular guest conductor at
the Monteverdi Choir Festival in
Budapest and
the Tokyo Cantat in
Japan
and leads annual conducting courses at the Chamber
Choir Festival in Sarteano (Italy), and the Yale
Summer Festival in
Norfolk ,
Connecticut. In 2010 he has
conducting engagements in
Europe, Asia and South America, as well as his customary round of performances in the
US.
