The Exon Singers

Andrew Lumsden – Guest Organ Recitalist

Born in 1962, Andrew Lumsden was educated at Winchester College and The Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama before going up to St John’s College, Cambridge as Organ Scholar.  Whilst there, he was assistant to Dr George Guest in training the Choir and in playing the organ for services, concerts, broadcasts and tours.  After three years as Assistant Organist at Southwark Cathedral, he was appointed Sub-Organist at Westminster Abbey, where he played the organ for many important national occasions, including the 50^th anniversary of the Battle of Britain and memorial services for Lord Olivier and Dame Peggy Ashcroft.  He was also a regular broadcaster on the BBC’s Daily Service and Choral Evensong and also appeared in the English National Opera’s 1990 production of Busoni’s Dr Faust.

In 1992 Andrew Lumsden was appointed Organist and Master of the Choristers at Lichfield Cathedral.  During his time there, the Cathedral Choir recorded 5 CDs and toured France, Germany, Italy and the USA.  The Choir regularly appeared on BBC Radio (Choral Evensong, Daily Service and Radio 4’s Sunday Worship) and television and, in December 1998, it broadcast no fewer than 8 times (7 live, 1 recorded) in 24 days, including a highly acclaimed series of 4 live TV programmes for BBC1 on all 4 Sundays in Advent.  During his time, the Choir also appeared in concert with Dame Kiri te Kanawa and Sir Simon Rattle.  He also oversaw the complete rebuilding and extension of the Cathedral’s Hill organ by Harrison and Harrison, which took 21 months to complete.

In September 2002 he took up his current appointment as Organist and Director of Music at Winchester Cathedral, succeeding David Hill. During this time the Choir has continued to record and broadcast frequently and has also performed in the Duomo and Baptistery in Florence, at the Gottingen Handel Festival with the English Concert and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra of San Francisco, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Henry Wood Proms and with Sir Roger Norrington and the Salzburg Camerata.  The Choir also toured the USA to great acclaim in 2007. As conductor of the Waynflete Singers, Andrew works regularly with major orchestras including Florilegium and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.

As a soloist, Andrew Lumsden has appeared with the LPO at the Royal Festival Hall, the ECO at the Barbican and the CBSO in Symphony Hall, Birmingham.  He was the one of the youngest people to broadcast a solo recital on Radio 3 (he was 17 at the time) and he frequently tours abroad – recital venues have included such diverse places as Bergen, San Francisco, Saint Tropez, Harare and Sydney. In 2009 he was guest director of choral courses at St Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue in New York, and at Christ Church Cathedral in Montreal. It is still his long-term ambition to achieve a private pilot’s license.

Jeffrey Makinson – Festival Organist

Jeffrey Makinson is Sub-Organist of Manchester Cathedral, Tutor in Organ Studies at the Royal Northern College of Music and Manchester University and Tutor in Pianoforte at Chetham’s School of Music.

He received his musical training at the Royal Northern College of Music and at Manchester University. He subsequently became Organ Scholar of York Minster from 1992-1994, before spending five years as Assistant Organist at Lincoln Minster. He took up his post in Manchester in 1999 and is busy as a recitalist, accompanist, conductor, teacher and adjudicator in the city and throughout the country.

As part of his duties at Manchester Cathedral, Jeffrey accompanies the critically acclaimed Cathedral Choir for most of the choral services, assists the Organist & Master of the Choristers with the training and direction of the choir and directs the Cathedral Voluntary Choir.

As a recitalist, Jeffrey has performed throughout the country, at many of the major British cathedrals, abbeys, collegiate chapels, churches and concert halls, including numerous recitals at Westminster Abbey, Westminster Cathedral, St. Paul’s Cathedral and King’s College, Cambridge. Jeffrey has also performed in numerous foreign countries including France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, and the USA.

Jeffrey has made numerous CD recordings, with the Albany, Delphian, Herald, Lammas, Naxos, Priory and Regent labels. He works extensively for the BBC, as regular musical director and organist for Radio 4 Daily Service. In addition, he has worked on programmes such as Songs of Praise, Chorister of the Year, Choral Evensong, Minstrels in the Gallery, Young Musician of the Year, Sunday Morning Worship and the Radio 4 Pilgrimage to Rome. Since 1998, he has been Organist in Residence at the Exon Singers Festival.

Jeffrey has a keen interest in promoting new music and has given first performances of works by numerous leading composers, including Mark Blatchly, Martin Bussey, Bob Chilcott, Naji Hakim, Grayston Ives, Francis Jackson, George Lloyd, Richard Lloyd, Philip Moore, Andrew Sallis, Howard Skempton and Philip Wilby.

Joseph Phibbs – Festival Composer in Residence

Joseph Phibbs was born in London and studied at The Purcell School with the support of a Suffolk County Council scholarship, before continuing his education at King’s College London (B.Mus, M.Mus) and Cornell University (DMA).  His teachers have included Param Vir, Sir Harrison Birtwistle. and Steven Stucky, and his works have been performed by leading ensembles in the UK and beyond including the London Sinfonietta, Britten Sinfonia, BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, and National Symphony Orchestra (Washington).  Much of his output has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, and he has received commissions the Aldeburgh, Cheltenham, and Bath festivals, among others. He has also written for the theatre, scoring for a number of productions at the Wolsey Theatre (Ipswich), Sadlers Wells, Setagaya Theatre (Tokyo), and The Globe.

Large-scale works include In Camera (BBC SO/Slatkin), Lumina (BBC SO/Slatkin, 2003 Last Night of the Proms), Tenebrae (St Albans Bach Choir/Andrew Lucas), Shruti (LSO/Petrenko), Rainland (a choral drama, to a libretto by Stephen Plaice), The Spiralling Night (featured at the 2007 WASBE conference, conducted and commissioned by Phillip Scott), a clarinet concerto for Sarah Williamson, and a setting of Psalm 98 for choir and orchestra, commissioned by the Bachakademie Stuttgart to mark the Mendelssohn bicentenary.   His largest chamber work to date, The Canticle of the Rose, was premiered at Wigmore Hall by Lisa Milne and the Belcea Quartet, and shortlisted for a RPS Chamber Music Prize.  Other recent chamber works include FLEX (a joint RPS/BBC commission for the City of London Festival), Personnages for Nicholas Daniel, Arc de Soleil for clarinet and piano (premiered by Sarah Williamson at Wigmore Hall in 2008), The Moon’s Funeral for James Bowman and Andrew Plant, and The Silence at the Song’s End, a song cycle for soprano and string quartet based on poems by Nicholas Heiney.  Both Lumina and The Spiralling Night were shortlisted for a British Academy Award, the former in two categories.

A work combining school choirs in Suffolk with the Britten-Pears Chamber Choir will be premiered at Snape Maltings in November 2010, and he will be Composer in Residence at both the Presteigne Festival in 2011 (for which he is writing a new work for strings) and at this summer’s Exon Singers Festival in Tavistock, where smaller choral works will be performed alongside a newly commissioned Ave Regina.  A extract of an opera-in-progress, based on the novel Under the Volcano, was recently featured at Covent Garden’s Linbury Theatre.

Commissions for 2011-12 include a percussion concerto for Evelyn Glennie (Cheltenham Festival, 2011), a large-scale orchestral work (2012), a work for cello and piano (Park Lane Group, 2011), a song cycle for Jeremy Huw Williams, and a work for harp and strings for David Watkins. An NMC CD of his chamber music is due to be released in 2011-12.  

Since 2003 Phibbs has combined his composing career with the editing and promoting of Benjamin Britten’s music, and he is a director of the Britten Estate Ltd. He is currently a visiting member of staff at the Purcell School and King’s College London.

A number of his works are published by Faber Music and Oxford University Press, and he is represented by David Wordsworth.  Further information on repertoire is also available at www.josephphibbs.com