Adrian Partington 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 U.S.A., Canada, South Africa and Sweden, and has made several CDs, most recently (2022) a disc of music by the international clarinettist Emma Johnson. In May 2019, he took the Choristers to sing with the Berlin Philharmonic at the Philharmonie in Berlin.
Adrian has enjoyed conducting Gloucester Choral Society for fifteen seasons, and has directed almost all the great classics of the choral-orchestral repertoire in that time; there are too many to list here!
He has also 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 annual BBC Proms), many of which he has conducted himself. The chorus has made about twenty cds, two of which have been nominated for Grammy awards. Adrian’s most recent cd with BBC NOW (2023) is of Stanford’s previously un-recorded Te Deum and Elegiac Ode. He will be recording Grace Williams’s masterpiece, the Missa Cambrensis, early in 2024, and Holst’s complete Hymns from the Rig Veda later in the year.
He has directed five Gloucester Three Choirs Festivals, in which he has conducted the Philharmonia, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra 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 also conducted symphonies and concertos and much contemporary music, including significant works by Eleanor Alberga, Francis Pott, John Adams, Colin and David Matthews, Jonathan Dove 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 U.K. most recently in Hull and Northampton. Every year he conducts the BBC NOW and has conducted the CBSO, the Royal Northern Sinfonia, the Bournemouth SO, the Orchestra of WNO and the Royal Flanders Philharmonic. He conducted the Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra twice in 2022.
Adrian was educated at King’s College Cambridge, where he was the Organ Scholar.
