Richard Childress
Richard Childress has been a professional singer and choral conductor for 40 years.
He grew up in Crystal Lake, Illinois, USA, and received his undergraduate music degree in composition from St Olaf College, Minnesota. He has spent over half of his life living and working in Britain as a professional singer, where he has performed and recorded with Oxford Camerata (Jeremy Summerly) and Taverner Choir of London (Andrew Parrott), among others.
He has sung eight times per week for many years with the Choir of Winchester Cathedral under conductors David Hill and Andrew Lumsden, while also appearing as a guest conductor in Sweden, Spain and the USA. From 1998 to 2005 he was founder and artistic director of the Winchester International Early Music Festival, which brought some of the finest British and European artists to Winchester each year.
Over the years, choral singing and conducting engagements have taken Richard to nearly every country in Europe, Scandinavia, the USA, Australia and Brazil, and he has sung on some 30 recordings for Hyperion, Virgin Classics, Argo, Naxos and RCA.
Richard has twice been invited to Toledo, Spain as a conductor, most recently in 2014 by the “Festival de Música El Greco en Toledo” to prepare and conduct a choral concert of Renaissance music in the historic church of Santo Tomé. From 2013 to 2018, Richard served as choral clinician for the Sacred Music Summer Choral Course in Chicago, which involved forty teenage singers in the St John Cantius Youth Choir program.
His abiding passion is the sacred music of Renaissance and Baroque Spain, together with its performing traditions.