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Aidan Oliver
Musical Director 2002-2007
Aidan Oliver is Director of Music at St. Margaret's Westminster, the
Parliamentary Church, where the organist is Thomas Trotter. As a choral
conductor he is much in demand: this year he made his debut as Chorus
Master with English National Opera, working on a production of Wagner's Twilight
of the Gods, and he has worked with the BBC Singers as one of their
inaugural Conducting Fellows. Since last year he has been the chorus
master of Philharmonia Voices, a professional chorus linked to the
Philharmonia Orchestra which recently performed Haydn's Creation
in the Royal Festival Hall and Salisbury Cathedral. He also directs
Spiritus, the professional chamber choir which he founded, and which
specialises in performing imaginative programmes in venues of particular
historical or architectural interest.
Aidan is heavily involved in the field of opera as a conductor and
repetiteur. He studied at the National Opera Studio, and has worked for
the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, Garsington Opera, Opera North and at the
Spoleto Festival, where he was Assistant Conductor to Richard Hickox on
a production of Menotti's The Saint of Bleecker Street. He has
also assisted Hickox on recordings for Chandos of operas by Vaughan
Williams and Lennox Berkeley, and most recently a highly acclaimed
recording of Britten's Death in Venice.
Aidan began his musical career as a chorister at Westminster
Cathedral, later studying at Eton College and King's College Cambridge
as a Choral Scholar. Having graduated from Cambridge with a double first
in Classics, he studied musicology at Harvard University as a Kennedy
Scholar, and at King's College London. In 2002 he was awarded a Winston
Churchill Travelling Fellowship to study choral music in Russia, an
interest he continues to develop as speaker and performer.
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