Who’s who

The singers

David Ogden Conductor

David Ogden is a professional conductor and composer. He conducts Exultate Singers, City of Bristol Choir, choirs at Arval and Airbus, and in his post of Head of the Bristol Choral Centre, he conducts the Bristol Youth Choirs. He is Director of Music at Holy Trinity Church, Westbury-on-Trym.

David studied conducting with George Hurst, Norman Del Mar, Michael Rose and Adrian Leaper, and choral conducting with Simon Johnson, Laszlo Heltay and Peter Erdei.

For over 25 years he has worked with numerous professional and amateur groups of all shapes and sizes in many fields of music making, including church music, concerts, musical theatre and opera, community projects, primary and secondary level educational workshops, from small children’s groups to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. He has conducted over 100 large-scale choral works including first performances of pieces by Shostakovich, Roxanna Panufnik, Francis Grier, Thomas Hewitt Jones, James Whitbourn and David Bednall. He has made 15 CD recordings and directed choirs in numerous cathedrals, churches and concert halls in 16 European countries and in the USA, Philippines, and South Korea. 

David has conducted choirs on BBC Radios 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and the World Service, and worked as conductor, arranger and music adviser for over 20 years on BBC TV’s Songs of Praise. He is Religious Music Adviser for the BBC’s hit series Call The Midwife, and worked with the Royal Mail Choir in the BBC Two series The Choir: Sing While You Work. 

His compositions are published by the RSCM and White Light Publishing, and are performed in schools and churches worldwide. His music is broadcast frequently on BBC radio and television. In Bristol, he has written songs and directed choirs for the opening of Cabot Circus, the MShed Museum, BBC Food & Farming Awards and the refurbishment of Bristol Old Vic. 

In October 2015 David was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal School of Church Music in recognition of his service and contribution to choral music and the RSCM over many years.

www.davidogden.co.uk

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Dr Toby Young – Patron

Toby Young is a composer of operas, chamber and symphonic works whose influences range from plainchant to electronic dance music. Born in London in 1990, he studied composition with Robin Holloway at Cambridge, whilst also being a choral scholar in the prestigious King’s College Chapel Choir. He has won the Guardian / BBC Proms Young Composer of the Year competition, the International ABRSM Composition Competition and the ISM Composition Competition.

Toby’s diverse output has included a setting of William Blake for the London Mozart Players, several songs for the urban music duo Chase & Status (2013), a solo Fantasy (2015) for cellist Guy Johnston, and dance piece for Rambert (2015) combining a live DJ with multi-tracked mezzo-soprano. He has had a particularly close relationship with London Symphony Orchestra, writing several orchestra works as a Panufnik scholar (2009-11) and the chamber opera Daisy Chain (2012) for the Soundhub scheme.

Toby has considerable experience writing for choirs, with works including carols, part-songs, Music, Make (2016) for the combined choirs of Westminster Abbey, Westminster Cathedral and St Paul’s Cathedral, arrangements of Prince songs for The King’s Singers, and choral arrangements for The Rolling Stones, which he performed live with the band at Wembley Arena and Glastonbury (2013).

Recent large-scale works include the 30-minute Shakespeare Cantata (2016), a set of Breath Madrigals (2016) inspired by medical research, a chamber opera remix of Handel entitled The Choice (2015), and The Art of Dancing (2016), a dance-music inspired double concerto for trumpet and piano.

Toby is also active as a researcher, exploring the relationship between creative practice and philosophy in his work as the inaugural Gianturco Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford. He frequently gives public talks about this work, including a recent TEDx talk for the University of Arts London (2016) and a panel discussion at Milton Hall for the Incorporated Society of Musicians.

He also works as a curator and artistic consultant, advising on exhibitions at STORE Contemporary, Berlin (2016), Pizza Pavillion, Venice (2015), Museum of the History of Science, Oxford (2015), and Cornell University (2014). Toby is a trustee of the Royal Society of Musicians, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and the Royal Society of Arts. In January 2020, Toby was appointed Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Guildhall School of Music and Drama and he became Patron of Exultate Singers in 2019.

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Dr Jill White – Patron

The singer, BBC producer and former Director of the National Youth Orchestra, Dr Jill White became Exultate Singers’ first ever Patron in 2015.

Jill has an impressive track record, having produced over 2,000 BBC TV and radio programmes, producing many of John Rutter’s CDs including a Gramophone Award-winning album, establishing ‘BBC Young Musician of the Year’, working with St George’s Bristol in its early days positioning it as a first-class broadcasting chamber music venue, and working with many festivals, organisations and ensembles nationwide. She has been honoured by the University of Bristol, the Royal Academy and the Royal College of Music, the Birmingham Conservatoire, the Royal Society of Arts, the Worshipful Company of Musicians and the Polish Composers’ Union and she is a Freeman of the City of London.