Conductor

Patrick McCarthy has been a notable figure on Colchester’s musical scene for over twenty years.

He was trained as a singer at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the London Opera Centre. His operatic and singing career has taken him all over the British Isles and Europe. Some music lovers may remember him replacing an ailing soloist at a televised Albert Hall Prom performance of Carmina Burana with the LSO and Chorus under André Previn back in 1974.

Since coming to Colchester in 1980 he has been a part-time member of the teaching staff at the School of Music, Colchester Institute.

He first took up conducting in 1992, founding the Colchester Bach Choir and since has directed this choir in many concerts of music ranging from Schütz to Elgar, including both Bach passions, the B minor Mass and over twenty church cantatas.

Patrick currently has a busy schedule as musical director of the Witham and Dovercourt Choral Societies, the Ipswich Bach Choir and the Ipswich Chamber Orchestra, the Harwich Festival and, of course, the Colchester Bach Choir and Orchestra and the Colchester Philharmonic. He was for a time also conductor of the Clare and Maldon Choral Societies.

He has conducted many of the major choral works with his choirs and orchestras and, in 2000, was delighted to revive Sir Arthur Sullivan’s Golden Legend and Festival Te Deum (available on CD) as a centenary tribute to the composer. Other works include Handel’s Solomon, Orff’s Carmina Burana, the Verdi and Brahms Requiems, opera galas, Beethoven nights, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, Schubert’s E flat Mass, Britten’s St. Nicolas and Dvorak’s Stabat Mater, Vivaldi’s Gloria, Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony and Mass in E flat, Haydn’s Seasons and Creation and Rachmaninov’s Vespers

However, the high spot was the co-operation between Witham Choral Society and Ipswich Bach Choir in presenting Bach’s St Matthew Passion at Snape Maltings Concert Hall, which Patrick directed on Palm Sunday 2002 with an array of soloists, Amberfield School Choir and, of course the Ipswich Chamber and Colchester Bach Orchestras. Patrick also conducted Elijah there in 2004.

At Easter 2001 he both conducted and sang the Evangelist in Bach’s St. John Passion with the Witham Choral Society and in 2003 sang the Evangelist in the St Matthew Passion for Suffolk Villages Festival, for whom he performs regularly. March 2005 he conducted a rare revival of Elgar’s Caractacus, a performance much praised by the Elgar Society. Patrick returned to Snape in April 2006 for The Dream of Gerontius.

The choir was featured twenty-three times on the ITV Sunday Morning programme and was seen in Anglia TV’s Winter Wonderland five times over Christmas 2004.

Patrick is still often heard as a tenor soloist, having recently performed The Creation in Germany twice, Elijah at Brentwood Cathedral and the Monteverdi Vespers, and released a fourth CD for Hyperion with Peter Holman and the Parley of Instruments.