Artistic director
© Benjamin Harte
Tim Brown comes from a family of keen musicians. His grandfather was a professional singer, and singing was part of family life from the very beginning. Following his brother into the choir of Westminster Abbey, Tim had there his first introduction to the music of Monteverdi and Bach, as well as to the five-hundred year old tradition of English cathedral music. He was later an alto choral scholar in the choir of King's College, Cambridge, under the legendary (Sir) David Willcocks, and a layclerk in New College Choir, Oxford. This was followed by a number of years as a founder-member of The Scholars vocal ensemble. After some years as a schoolteacher, in 1979 he became Director of Music at Clare College, Cambridge University, where he was an affiliated lecturer in the Faculty of Music. With the choir of Clare College he made regular overseas concert tours and many acclaimed radio broadcasts and CDs, including recordings of music by John Rutter, John Tavener, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Under his leadership, Clare College Choir undertook successful projects with eminent international conductors, including Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Sir Roger Norrington. Ivor Boulton and René Jacobs (with whom the choir recorded Handel's Messiah).
During his tenure at Clare College, Tim Brown also re-founded the Cambridge University Chamber Choir, with whom he gave many acclaimed concerts of Bach and Handel oratorios, and also recorded music by Christopher Tye and Samuel Barber. In 1986 he founded English Voices, with the intention of creating a professional choir for young professional singers, the majority of whom to begin with came from the distinguished choral background of Oxford and Cambridge. Since then the choir has performed with Tim Brown at major international festivals, and with a number of other conductors, including René Jacobs (concert tour of Rossini's Tancredi), Ivor Bolton (Gluck's Alceste in the 2010 Aix-en-Provence Festival), and Louis Langrée (Mozart's Don Giovanni, also in Aix).
His work with Clare College Choir, Cambridge University Chamber Choir and English Voices has brought Tim an international reputation as a choral trainer and conductor; he is much in demand as a guest conductor all over the world and as a choral clinician. Tim Brown also works as a chorus master, and has been involved in a number of opera projects with René Jacobs and Ivor Bolton, in Germany, Austria, Holland and Belgium. In 2008 he assisted René Jacobs in a production of Handel's Belshazzar in Berlin, Aix-en-Provence and Innsbruck, followed by Cavalli’s Ercole Amante in Amsterdam, conducted by Ivor Bolton. In 2010 he was chorus master for two productions in the Aix festival, of Gluck's Alceste and Mozart's Don Giovanni. This season includes concerts in Finland, Israel, Germany and the USA, as well as a revival of Belshazzar in Toulouse.
In 2010 Tim resigned as Director of Music of Clare College to pursue a freelance conducting career, but remains involved in university music-making as co-Director of the newly-formed Cambridge University Consort of Voices, and as visiting Director of chapel music at Robinson College. In 2011 he was appointed founding artistic director of the Zürcher Sing-Akademie.
Tim Brown is a contributing editor to the complete edition of the Music of William Walton (Oxford University Press) and editor of a number of other choral editions.