Adrian Partington

Adrian has been Director of Music at Gloucester Cathedral since January 2008. During his years there, he has introduced Girl Choristers to the Cathedral Choir, has taken the choir to sing in the USA, Canada, South Africa and Sweden, and has made several CDs, most recently a disc of music by the international clarinettist Emma Johnson, in March 2022. In May 2019, he took the Choristers to sing with the Berlin Philharmonic at the Philharmonie in Berlin.

Adrian has been Conductor of the BBC National Chorus of Wales since 1999. Since then he has prepared that chorus for well over a hundred broadcast concerts, (including two or three BBC Proms each year), many of which he has conducted himself. He has conducted many broadcasts of concertos, cantatas and much Welsh music. The chorus has made many CDs, two of which have been nominated for Grammy awards. The chorus's most recent CD - which Adrian conducted - is of Stanford's previously un-performed orchestral mass Via Victrix 1918. A second Stanford disc will be recorded in May 2023.

He has directed four Gloucester Three Choirs Festivals, in which he has conducted the Philharmonia and BBC NOW in many of the great choral-orchestral classics,(e.g. Mahler's Eighth and Beethoven's Ninth Symphonies, and the great oratorios of Berlioz, and Elgar). He has conducted many instrumental symphonies (Beethoven, Shostakovich, Vaughan Williams etc), and concertos (Walton, Bruch, Mendelssohn etc). He has also enjoyed conducting much contemporary music including symphonic works by such important composers as John Adams, Colin Matthews, and Joseph Phibbs.

Adrian enjoys an active career as a guest conductor of orchestras. In recent years he has conducted the Philharmonia at the Festival Hall, several times at St. John's Smith Square , and in various provincial cities. He has conducted the RPO in many cities in the UK most recently in Hull and Northampton in early 2022. Every year he conducts the BBC NOW and has conducted the CBSO, the Royal Northern Sinfonia, the BSO, the Orchestra of WNO and the Royal Flanders Philharmonic.

Adrian was educated at King's College Cambridge, where he was the Organ Scholar. He continues to be in demand as an organist - recent engagements include a Concerto with the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra in 2019, and recitals in Japan in November 2018. He was the organ soloist at one of the televised BBC Promenade concerts in 2018.

As a pianist, Adrian has in the past few months accompanied Emma Johnson and James Gilchrist, and is currently preparing to play the complete "48" Preludes and Fugues of J. S. Bach for the 2023 Three Choirs Festival. Adrian has enjoyed a forty year career as conductor, chorus master, pianist and organist.

(Click here to read a Cotswold Life article about Adrian Partington.)