Ronald Corp (1951-2025)

News reached us this morning of the death aged 74 of composer and conductor The Revd. Ronald Corp, a musician primarily concerned with working with, and writing for, the voice - though also with several large-scale orchestral works to his name and plenty of adventurous recordings.

Studying music at Oxford and later training in theology at Salisbury, Corp’s musical upbringing and career were firmly in the Anglo-Catholic ‘high church’ tradition; many of his sacred choral works reflect this inclination, though the majority have seen use across a broad range of Christian traditions a particularly enjoyable example being his Christmas Mass, that makes fun and deliberately unsubtle use of popular Christmas carol melodies in the tradition of French Baroque Christmas Masses.

Aside from his compositional output - not just sacred works but dozens of orchestral and chamber works and a wealth of song-settings, from the whimsical to the profound - one of Corp’s most significant legacies is in the establishment of two new ensembles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The New London Orchestra, set up in 1988, provided not only a springboard for his own highly successful conducting career (which saw him conduct with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Ulster Orchestra and more) but also enabled him to record several acclaimed albums for Hyperion, with a particular emphasis on providing British light music with the top-notch performances it deserves.

In 2010 Corp conducted the first recording of Rutland Boughton’s The Queen of Cornwall for Dutton, bringing the composer’s Wagnerian style (indeed, the opera is a re-telling of the tale of Tristan and Iseult) to life and winning widespread critical acclaim. BBC Music Magazine wryly advised listeners to ‘ignore the words’ in order to better enjoy the vocal and orchestral writing. 1994 saw him become musical director of The London Chorus, who posted a brief but moving tribute to him on their website earlier today.

The New London Children’s Choir, established in 1991, was Corp’s major achievement in what today would be called ‘outreach’ - aimed at introducing as many children as possible to the joys of musicmaking, and in a time when school and church choirs largely ruled the roost, it enjoyed great success and was featured on numerous albums and film and TV soundtracks - Charlotte Church’s Dream a Dream and Russell Watson’s Outside In, and most notably the 1999 Star Wars prequel film Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Corp himself was no stranger to the big screen, with his orchestration of Satie’s Gnossiennes featuring in 2000’s quirky romance Chocolat. 

Corp was honoured in the New Year’s Honours in 2012, receiving an OBE for his services to music. Between his compositions, his recordings as a conductor and his tireless work with children’s choirs, bringing who knows how many young people into the musical world for the first time, it seems redundant to speak of his legacy; it is all around us.

Ronald Corp - a selected discography