Biography
Ralph Allwood
Ralph Allwood is Precentor and Director of Music at Eton College. He was a pupil at Tiffin School, where he was taught by David Nield and Bruce Pullan. He graduated from Durham University in 1972 with the Eve Myra Kysh prize for music, conducting the University Chamber Choir from 1970-1972. He was later a member of the Choir of King's College, Cambridge under Sir David Willcocks.
While Director of Music at Uppingham he founded the annual Eton Choral Courses for prospective choral scholars. There are now six of these courses attended each year by four hundred singers aged between 16 and 20. Each year the courses broadcast and record evensongs and sequences for BBC Radio Three, and this has led to choral courses and workshops all over the world.
He has collaborated with Mike Read of Classic FM by arranging and composing music for the Choir of King's College, Cambridge for a CD based on Rupert Brooke's poems, and collaborated with Roger Waters by making choral arrangements for an opera. He has written the music for commercials, and is a series editor for Novello Ltd. He has been Musical Director for National Youth Music Theatre musicals for ATV, Granada and BBC2, and conducted on two occasions for the Edinburgh International Festival. He is a judge for the Choir of the Year Competition and the Llangollen International Eisteddfod.
He has taught choral directing at the Hereford Summer School and at the Voices Foundation Symposium and was for a time Musical Director of the National Youth Choir of Wales. He is taking them over again this year. He has worked with James Levine on a Brahms' Requiem with the Philharmonia Chorus and with Christoph von Dohnanyi on Mahler 2 with the Bach Choir.
Eton College Chapel Choir, which he directs, has toured Israel, the Arabian Gulf, America, France, England, Ireland, Japan, Hong Kong, the Czech Republic, South Africa, China and Italy. It has appeared in the Bruges Festival with the King's Consort, and has released seven recordings, most recently with Signum. He also directs the Windsor and Eton Choral Society and the Rodolfus Choir. The latter, a young choir made up of the best singers from the last four or five years' Eton Choral Courses, have released recordings of music by Tallis, Francis Grier, Bax and Villette and one of English Folk Song arrangements. A disc of arrangements by Gottwald has just come out, and one of the Monteverdi Vespers with the Southern Sinfonia is about to be released, both with Signum. He is a choral advisor for Novello and Co, for the National Youth Choir of Great Britain and for the Voices Foundation.
In 2002 he was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal School of Church Music, and in 2003 an Honorary Associate of the Royal Academy of Music.