Geoffrey Webber

As director of the Gonville & Caius College Chorus at Cambridge University, Geoffrey Webber has built the group into a major force on the British collegiate choral scene and has led a long series of recordings. Webber is also a noted educator, having long served as Director of Music, or Precentor, at Gonville & Caius; his directorship of the choir is one of his duties in the position. Webber has also written extensively on music in the 17th century. Webber attended New College at Oxford as an organ scholar (a student who receives financial support in the form of work as an organist), studying with Nicholas Danby and Gillian Weir and remaining at the school for master's and doctoral degrees. Webber worked at Magdalene College, Oxford, as Assisting Organist and held various other performing and teaching posts during his student career. His doctoral thesis dealt with the organ music of Dietrich Buxtehude. Between 1986 and 1989, he was director of the Edington Festival of Music within the Liturgy in Wiltshire, as well as Acting Organist at Magdalene College and New College, Oxford, before moving to Gonville & Caius in 1989. He assumed the directorship of the choir and has consistently broadened its activities, adding recordings, tours, and broadcasts to its regular functions of service music at the college. Webber established and has served as course director and examiner for a new master's degree in choral studies. Notable among his performances, broadcasts, and recordings is the breadth of choral repertory he has cultivated; in addition to the mainstream of British a cappella classics, he has programmed continental music of various periods including that of such composers as Rodion Shchedrin and Josef Rheinberger (both rare in British collegiate choir repertories), American music, and even, on the 2015 album Romaria, choral music from Brazil. The choir's catalog of recordings under Webber's direction has been large, appearing mostly on the ASV and Delphian labels; the latter firm released the album Cantique de Noël in 2018. Webber is the author of North German Church Music in the Age of Buxtehude (1996) and of a Royal College of Organists website devoted to the music of Buxtehude, as well as the editor of several volumes of choral and organ music, and he is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Organ. ~ James Manheim