Greg Skidmore - Baritone
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Greg Skidmore
baritone - conductor

Detailed Profile

Education

    • I received a First Class Honours Bachelor of Music degree from Royal Holloway College, University of London in June 2005.
    • In October 2006, I began doctoral research in Musicology at The Queen's College, University of Oxford. This research is currently suspended following a decision to pursue full-time professional singing.
  • Academic scholarships and awards:

    • October 2006: I received a Clarendon Award, granted by the University of Oxford, covering full international tuition and college fees, valued at approximately £40 000.
    • September 2001: I was awarded the President's Entrance National Scholarship as I entered university in Canada (The University of Western Ontario) in 2001, the top undergraduate scholarship offered by the university, valued at approximately $30 000.

Liturgical Employment

  • I have held the following posts:

    • Bass in the London Oratory Senior Choir, London, January 2012 - present
    • Bass Lay Clerk, Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, September 2007 - April 2011
    • Bass Lay Clerk, Gloucester Cathedral, September 2006 - August 2007
    • Bass Choral Scholar, Wells Cathedral, September 2005 - August 2006
  • I deputise regularly in the main cathedrals and many major churches in London and around the South East. These include:

    • St. Paul's Cathedral
    • Westminster Abbey
    • Westminster Cathedral
    • St. George's Chapel Windsor Castle
    • Winchester Cathedral
    • Guildford Cathedral
    • All Saints Margaret Street
    • St. Bartholomew the Great
    • St. Margaret's Westminster
    • Royal Hospital Chelsea
    • and many others.

Solo Repertoire

Oratorio

Bach Handel Purcell Other

Song

Dowland Schubert Fauré Duparc Other

Conducting, Tutoring, and Workshops

  • In May 2018, I founded The Canadian Renaissance Music Summer School (CRMSS), a week-long residential singing course in Canada aimed primarily, but not exclusively, at undergraduate students, graduates, and young professional singers. CRMSS is dedicated to the study and performance of Renaissance polyphonic vocal music at the highest levels and its patron is Peter Philips, director of The Tallis Scholars. (crmss.org)

  • Since September 2014, I have been Musical Director of The Lacock Scholars, London-based group of young singers drawn together through Lacock Courses. We specialise in Renaissance polyphony and site-specific performances, incorporating seamless presentations of polyphony, plainsong, madrigals, chansons, and secular song from the 16th and 17th centuries. (www.lacockscholars.org)

  • I have given day-long workshops for the Brighton Consort, Renaissance Singers, and Friends of I Fagiolini.

  • I directed The Corsham Winter School, a Lacock Course for amateur singers from around the world specialising in Renaissance polyphonic music, which took place in December 2015.

  • Renaissance Consort Masterclass tutor in Roujan, France on a course for amateur singers organised by Francis Steele with co-tutors Robert Hollingworth and Anthony Rooley.

  • Vocal Ensembles Course tutor at Dartington International Summer School with Ex Cathedra and I Fagiolini.

  • Regular series of workshops with the Byfleet Singers in Box, Wiltshire so far specialising in the music of Palestrina, Victoria, Lassus, Byrd, and Tallis.

  • Workshops with 'Six Vocal Ensemble' based in London, Canada, and further work as vocal producer on their second album recorded in Helsinki in July 2012.

  • Workshop with 'The Island Singers' of Manitoulin Island, Ontario, Canada.

  • In September 2013 I led a workshop with The Thames Scholars, a small chamber choir specialising in Early Music at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada.

  • In 2009, I founded the men's voice polyphony ensemble 'I Dedicati', made up of Lay Clerks and choral scholars at the University of Oxford as well as other professional singers from the south of England. With them I have conducted Richafort's Requiem, and music by Isaac, Brumel, Schütz, Lassus, Mundy, and more. I conducted the entirety of Byrd and Tallis' 1575 collection Cantiones Sacrae over three consecutive evenings in three different Oxford college chapels and an expanded I Dedicati performed Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610 with an ensemble of sackbutts and cornets.

Biography

Born in Canada, Greg Skidmore arrived in England as an undergraduate at Royal Holloway College, University of London. After graduating with First Class Honours in Music, his post-graduate Choral Scholarship at Wells Cathedral led him to Lay Clerkships at Gloucester Cathedral and Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford. He now lives in London and pursues a varied career as a consort, choral, and solo oratorio singer alongside his growing commitments as a conductor and workshop leader.

Greg is one of the UK’s leading consort and choral singers, having appeared with The Tallis Scholars, The Sixteen, The Cardinall's Musick, I Fagiolini, Tenebrae, The Gabrieli Consort, Alamire, Contrapunctus, The Eric Whitacre Singers, EXAUDI, Collegium Vocale Ghent, Ensemble L’Arpeggiata, Cappella Amsterdam, La Grand Chapelle (Madrid), and the Tafelmusik Baroque Chamber Choir (Toronto), and others. He can be heard on discs released by Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, Harmonia Mundi USA, and others, including Alamire’s recent Gramophone Early Music Award winning disc, ‘The Spy’s Choirbook’ and The Tallis Scholars’ final recording in their Josquin Masses series, ‘Missa Hercules Dux Ferrarie, Missa D'ung aultre amer & Missa Faysant regretz’, which also won a Gramophone Early Music Award. In 2015, he featured in I Fagiolini’s Betrayal, a fully staged presentation of the madrigals and sacred music of Carlo Gesualdo, and in 2019 I Fagiolini toured their recent recording project Leonardo: Shaping the invisible extensively in the UK and abroad. During the pandemic, he featured in all of the Voces8 LiveFromLondon festivals, with I Fagiolini and the Voces8 Foundation Choir. Recent highlights have included performances with actress Tamsin Grieg as part of I Fagiolini’s Re-Wilding the Waste Land project and singing in his hundredth concert with The Tallis Scholars.

Solo engagements have included working with ballet dancer Carlos Acosta in his A Classical Farewell at the Royal Albert Hall; Handel’s Messiah with the Irish Baroque Orchestra; Purcell’s Ode for St Cecilia's Day with the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment; Purcell's Fairy Queen with the Gabrieli Consort at the Spitalfields Festival; and Monterverdi’s 1610 Vespers at the Brighton Early Music Festival, and with I Fagiolini and the BBC Singers at the Barbican Centre’s Milton Court Concert Hall. A recent Ex Cathedra CD release of Alec Roth’s oratorio A Time to Dance features Greg in a role written for him.

While at Christ Church in Oxford, he began a course of doctoral research in Musicology at the University of Oxford and started his own men’s voices consort, I Dedicati. More recently he was appointed Musical Director of The Lacock Scholars and has performed throughout the UK with them, including ongoing engagements at Westminster Abbey. In August 2021, he was appointed Musical Director of Brighton Consort and in 2023 is presenting a full year of concerts honouring the 400th anniversary of the death of William Byrd. Greg recently completed major coaching projects with students at the University of York and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and has begun coaching work at the Royal Academy of Music. He has given workshops and masterclasses in the UK, France, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia in association with The Sixteen, I Fagiolini, and on his own. In 2015, he led The Corsham Winter School, and has worked with Eamonn Dougan, Associate Conductor of The Sixteen, and Justin Doyle, Chief Conductor of RIAS Kammerchor, as Assistant Director of the Ludlow Summer School. He is increasingly engaged in Canada as a guest conductor, clinician, and record producer, founding The Canadian Renaissance Music Summer Schools in 2018. 2023 sees an expansion of his work in Canada with the organisation, with two courses running this summer. He has been published in Early Music and his writing has appeared in programmes and CD liner notes for The Tallis Scholars, The Sixteen, The Cardinall’s Musick, The Gabrieli Consort, Tenebrae, and Ex Cathedra.

Download Greg Skidmore's biography and CV. Photographs can be downloaded in the Gallery section of this website.

Past Events

2023

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    2022

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      2021

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        2020

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          2019

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            2018

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              2017

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                2016

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                  2015

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                    2014

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                      2013

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                        Future Events

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                          Click here for information about these recordings.

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                          Social Networks

                          Twitter

                          Facebook

                          You can find my profile page on Facebook here:
                          www.facebook.com/greg.skidmore

                          Contact Information

                          Greg can most easily be reached by email:

                          greg@gregskidmore.co.uk

                          You may also ring him on +44 (0)7833 151 703.

                          Please do leave a message on his voicemail.



                          Greg's works as a conductor with the following organisations:

                          The Lacock Scholars

                          Brighton Consort

                          The Canadian Renaissance Music Summer Schools