For many radio and television audiences around the world, the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols broadcast from King’s College, Cambridge, is the sound of Christmas, and it was the choir’s director, David Willcocks, who turned this Victorian invention into a landmark in the musical year. But Willcocks, who has died aged 95, was behind many other performances, recordings and musical careers that are woven into the nation’s cultural fabric: a Fauré Requiem by which all others are judged, the introduction to British audiences of the Duruflé Requiem, the first St Matthew Passion recorded in English, a whole armoury of descants that breathed new life into the hymnal, and a wave of new musicians who came through the Royal College of Music, London, during his decade as director there.
In the years before his appointment at King’s in 1957, Willcocks started honing a method of choir training quite new for its time, but that would later become highly influential, especially to the Oxbridge-nurtured “authentic” choirs. He inflected music with a light, rhythmic pulse, he insisted on exact tuning, and he encouraged explosive consonants that themselves aided the rhythmic punctuation. He had a deep loathing for “flat” singing, insisting, sometimes almost pathologically, on the highest, brightest, major thirds.
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