Guy Protheroe is a British conductor, musical director, composer and musicologist/forensic musicologist. He has been conductor and musical director of the contemporary music ensemble Spectrum and the English Chamber Choir throughout his career. He collaborated with artists such as Rick Wakeman, Vangelis and Eric Lévi.
Early life and education
Protheroe was born in Worcester in 1947Last Uk Performance conducted By Guy Protehroe
https://www.rwcc.com/programmes/2019JourneyRFH.pdf and began his musical education as a boy chorister at Canterbury Cathedral. He received Music scholarships followed to St Edward's School, Oxford and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he obtained a bachelor's degree in music, and also sang as a Lay Clerk at New College.
Career Protheroe started his career with his academic pursuits developing interest in music theory and composition during this time, his notable collaboration with the renowned Greek musician Vangelis get him into prominence during the late 1980s.
He led the premiere performance of the Arts Council Contemporary Music Network series, as well as the opening concert of the first Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music with the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble. In 2000, he directed a series of staged performances of Xenakis' Oresteia at the Royal Opera House's Linbury Studio Theatre in Covent Garden, garnering rave acclaim.
During the 1990s Spectrum ceased to promote or perform on a regular basis, due to a combination of circumstances: the Arditti String Quartet had risen to become one of the most acclaimed and busiest string quartets anywhere, leaving its players little time to do anything else; Yvar Mikhashoff succumbed to Aids and died in Buffalo in 1993; there was very little public funding dedicated to new music performance (and much of the music then being written was in new styles which turned out to be much more programmable in mainstream classical concerts), and in addition the Protheroes were increasingly in demand in the sphere of commercial music. However, in almost a full circle, Spectrum was brought together again in January 2000 to give the first professional performances in the newly constructed Linbury Studio Theatre at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. The promoter was Lina Lalandi, and the work was Xenakis's Oresteia Suite, in a staged version by the French director Alain Germain. For this production the ensemble was extended to include a group of singers and actors and the performances received universally outstanding critical acclaim.
The English Chamber Choir (ECC) The English Chamber Choir was formed by the conductor David Measham as a splinter group from the London Symphony Chorus and formally constituted in 1972. A few months later it was in need of a chorus master to deputise while the current post-holder was away from London. Protheroe began working with the Choir and has continued ever since. When David Measham left for Australia, Protheroe was appointed conductor and musical director and together he and the Choir have enjoyed over four decades of music-making, in venues ranging from the Royal Albert Hall to village churches in France and Switzerland, singing music from over six centuries in numerous languages and recording not only classical albums and CDs but also taking part in many live and recorded commercial productions. It was in 1972 and '73 that the newly-formed Choir was invited to sing in the stage performances of the rock opera Tommy with The Who, and the 1973 shows at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, London, were Protheroe's introduction to the commercial business of 'popular' music – an area in which he became immediately at home and frequently involved, alongside his more 'classical' engagements. Both Protheroe and the choir took part in the live concert and recording of Rick Wakeman's Journey to the Centre of the Earth at the Royal Festival Hall in January 1974 and the Choir also took part in the 40th anniversary UK tour and a new recording of the work in an extended version in 2014, all conducted by Protheroe.
Over the years Protheroe has directed the ECC in hundreds of performances and projects in the UK and also in Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Greece and Switzerland. A few years after the ECC was founded a chamber orchestra, the English Players, was formed to accompany it in the choral/orchestral repertoire from the 17th century onwards, playing on period instruments as appropriate, both in the UK and Europe. Together the Choir and Players have performed works ranging from Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610, through Bach's Passions and the B minor Mass, Handel's Dixit Dominus and Messiah, Mozart's Requiem and C minor Mass, to Brahms Ein Deutsches Requiem and Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius. In May 2012 he conducted the Choir and Players in a very rare revival of the Portuguese composer Antonio Teixeira's Te Deum (1734) for 16 soloists, 5 choirs and orchestra at the Brighton Festival. The Choir's unaccompanied (a cappella) repertoire ranges from mediaeval times to today – highlights including Thomas Tallis's 40-part motet Spem in alium which it has performed by invitation of the Lord Mayor of London at the Mansion House, and many compositions inspired by the music of the Eastern Church (and in particular Byzantine chant) including Sir John Tavener, Ivan Moody and the Greek-Canadian composer Christos Hatzis. The Choir has sung publicly in the presence of HM The Queen and most senior members of the Royal Family and, at the personal invitation of HM The Queen, at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle.
Together Protheroe and the ECC have a long list of recording credits which include The Byzantine Legacy (Sony Greece, 2000) EcleCtiCa (2008) and The Troparion of Kassiani (Naxos, 2011). [These titles are all available for download.] The Choir is also featured on many of the albums on which Protheroe collaborated with Vangelis, Rick Wakeman, Eric Lévi and many others. (See discography for more details)
In recent years the ECC has enjoyed a successful association with the Belmont Ensemble and their conductor Peter G Dyson, taking part in many concerts at the Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square, London.
Protheroe has also conducted with the Choir and Players a wide range of Jewish music, often in his own arrangements, in concerts and recordings, including contributing to the massive Milken Archive of American Jewish Music.
In the choir's 50th-anniversary season (2022–2023) Protheroe has conducted the choir in concerts ranging from Cadogan Hall, Chelsea, to Tuscany in Italy, and also rock concerts and live music to screen film shows in the Royal Albert Hall, The London Palladium, and on tour in the UK.
He has also appeared with the Choir many times on television shows with stars including Stephen Fry, Gordon Ramsey and Chris Moyles, and also on BBC Radio 2, 3 and 4 – with for several years a regular slot each year the Sunday before Christmas on Radio 4's Broadcasting House with Paddy O'Connell.
Commercial music After beginning as chorus master for The Who's Tommy, Protheroe has worked on films, television and radio commercials and in concerts with a wide variety of artists as conductor, musical director, arranger, composer and lyricist including John Anderson, Tangerine Dream, Black Sabbath, George Martin, Larry Adler, Barrington Pheloung, Dave Stewart, David Arnold, Roy Wood and Mark Almond. He had a long-standing relationship with Vangelis as musical director, arranger, lyricist and vocal soloist in many recordings and films, from the 1975 album Heaven and Hell to the Ridley Scott films Blade Runner and 1492: Conquest of Paradise. Concert venues with Vangelis include the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal Festival Hall, a Docklands concert in Rotterdam to an audience of nearly 300,000 and a concert on the Acropolis in Athens, both the latter with live television coverage. He was chorus master for the Vangelis title music for the 2002 World Cup, and in 2004 he recorded an album of Vangelis works with Giorgia Fumanti, a second album following in 2005. In 2012 the BBC commissioned from Protheroe a large-scale orchestration of the title music of Conquest of Paradise for Music Nation, performed in Glasgow in March 2012 by 300 singers and musicians as part of the 2012 Olympic celebrations.
Protheroe has also long been associated with Rick Wakeman, from the 1974 Journey to the Centre of the Earth and 1975 The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (performed on ice in Wembley Arena) to the 1999 Return to the Centre of the Earth and The New Gospels, and the more recent albums The Wizard and the Forest of all Dreams (2002), Out There (2003) and the DVD Amazing Grace (2007). With his wife, Ann Manly, he has orchestrated all the works for an "unplugged" concert programme (Rick on concert grand piano, with symphony orchestra and chorus) first given in Bulgaria in 2008, and he has since conducted many further performances in London (Chelsea Festival), the Lugano Jazz Festival (Switzerland), Poland, Chile and Argentina, in Cheltenham Centaur and also in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London. In May 2009 he conducted two large-scale open-air performances of a new and expanded, orchestrated version of The Six Wives of Henry VIII at Hampton Court Palace with Wakeman celebrating 500 years of the accession of Henry VIII, also released on DVD and CD. In September 2012, he conducted the recording of the new expanded version of Journey to the Centre of the Earth in Abbey Road Studios and also conducted the first live performance of this version, together with The Six Wives of Henry VIII, in Buenos Aires. (The new orchestrations of all these recent albums have also been undertaken by Protheroe and Ann Manly.) Among other concerts and recordings, in April/May 2014 he conducted Journey on a 14-concert UK tour, with a further concert tour in October 2014 of Argentina and Brazil. In June 2016 he conducted with Wakeman a revival and expansion of King Arthur at the O2 Arena in London (and recorded it for CD in April 2015). For this he had to reconstruct all the original score by ear and, together with his wife Ann Manly, orchestrate an equal amount of new music. In 2018 he conducted recordings for a new album Piano Odyssey and also more P’n’O performances in Argentina, the Czech Republic and Ukraine. In June 2019 he conducted a private gala concert of the P’n’O programme in Moscow with the Russian Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus (in one of Moscow's palatial railway stations), and in July at the Royal Festival Hall in London two nights of Journey to the Centre of the Earth, for Wakeman's 70th birthday celebrations (and 45 years on from when he was chorus master for the first performances of Journey in the RFH in 1974). Post Covid pandemic, in February 2022 he conducted another P'n'O concert with Rick in Györ, Hungary. In February 2023 he conducted the ECC in more prog rock concerts with Rick Wakeman and the English Rock Ensemble at The London Palladium