Vice Patrons
The London Chorus is exceptionally fortunate to have two leading international singers and a broadcasting heavyweight as our vice-patrons.
Roderick Williams OBE
Roderick Williams was the baritone soloist in our charity concert for Ukraine in the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral in London in November 2022. Roddy is one of the world’s greatest and most popular baritones, his relentless energy and conspicuous talent allowing him to combine performing, recording and teaching in a prodigious workload around Britain, Europe and the wider world. He was a choral scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, and until the age of 28 a music teacher. He then resumed musical studies at the Guildhall School of Music and rapidly became highly sought-after for operatic roles, solo parts with orchestras and for recitals.
He has built up a substantial recorded catalogue, notably in 2021-22 the four-volume set of complete Vaughan Williams folk songs, which also featured his fellow vice-patron, Mary Bevan. He became President of the Three Choirs Festival Society in 2016 and was appointed OBE in 2017. Since 2022 he has been vice-president of the Bach Choir. His operatic repertoire is broad, notably with the title roles in Britten’s Billy Budd, Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. He has also sung Figaro in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, Papageno in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, and Escamillo in Bizet’s Carmen, among many others. His association with the works of Britten – he has also sung in Albert Herring, Gloriana, Peter Grimes and The Rape of Lucretia – is typical of his exceptional contribution to the English canon, having (as well the Vaughan Williams project) recorded songs by Finzi, Butterworth, Elgar, Howells, Moeran, Parry, Gurney and Warlock. He is also a fine composer, and wrote a choral work for the Coronation of King Charles III in 2023.
Mary Bevan MBE
Mary Bevan sang the solo soprano role in our performance of the Bach B Minor Mass in Southwark Cathedral in March 2022. Mary is from a highly musical family – her sister Sophie and brother Benjamin are both highly acclaimed singers too, and from the age of eight she sang in a choir composed of her mother and aunts and uncles, and conducted by her father. Later, she joined the children’s chorus at Park Opera in Bracknell, and then sang in the opera company started by her mother. After reading Anglo Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Trinity College, Cambridge she trained at the Royal Academy of Music. She won the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Young Artist award and the UK Critics’ Circle Award for Exceptional Young Talent, and was awarded the MBE in 2019.
Although she believes she sings comic characters in opera best of all, her repertoire is extensive, ranging from Handel to James Macmillan. Her latest album is Visions Illuminées (Signum Classics), but she also played a leading part, with Roderick Williams, in the historic Albion four-disc set of Vaughan Williams folk songs. Her operatic repertoire notably includes Handel (Semele, Saul and Cleopatre in Giulio Cesare) and Mozart (Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Despina in Cosi fan Tutte), but extends as broadly as Stravinsky (The Rake’s Progress) and Weill (Street Scene), Gluck (one of the title roles in Orfeo ed Eurydice), Monteverdi (the title role
in L’incoronazione di Poppea) and Humperdinck (as Gretel in Hansel und Gretel). Her concert repertoire includes a wide range of Bach, Brahms’s Ein Deutches Requiem, Fauré’s Requiem, Handel’s Messiah and Dixit Dominus, Haydn’s Creation, Mendelssohn’s Elijah and Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral Symphony.
Petroc Trelawny
Petroc Trelawny’s best-selling book ‘Trelawny’s Cornwall – a Journey Through Western Lands’ was published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson in August this year. Petroc is one of the best-known voices on BBC Radio Three – where he presents the daily Breakfast programme. He was part of the commentary team for BBC Television’s coverage of the Coronation of King Charles III and the funeral of Her Majesty The Queen. He has presented BBC Proms on radio and television for twenty five years and introduces the annual live BBC broadcast of the Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s Day Concert. Last June he hosted BBC Television’s ‘Cardiff Singer of the World’ for the thirteenth time. He has presented the international telecast of Eurovision Young Musician to more than two dozen countries from Edinburgh and hosted Eurovision Choir live from Gothenburg. He presents performances by the Royal Ballet shown in cinemas around the world, and anchors note-by-note coverage of the Leeds Piano Competition for Medici.tv. In 2015 he hosted the first ever BBC Proms Australia, a week of concerts and recitals in Melbourne broadcast live on ABC Radio; he has also twice hosted BBC Proms Dubai at the new Dubai Opera House.
A frequent contributor ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ (BBC Radio 4), he has written on travel, music and the arts for publications including The Observer, The Sunday Telegraph, The Spectator and Radio Times.
Raised in west Cornwall, his early career includes broadcasting in Hong Kong for the British Forces Broadcasting Service, being part of the launch team for Classic FM and London News Radio, presenting breakfast on BBC Radio Manchester, and working as a presenter for RTE in Ireland. He is President of the Lennox Berkeley Society, Luton Music and the Three Spires Singers. As well as classical music he loves books, travel, food and wine, cinema and theatre. He is a Trustee of the Hall for Cornwall, Truro and a member of English Heritage’s Blue Plaque panel.