About
Ben is a versatile classical music professional, balancing arts management with a freelance career as a conductor and keyboardist.
As Festival Manager of King’s Lynn Festival, he oversees all aspects of creative and administrative planning, strategy, development, and delivery. He joined the Festival from James Brown Management in Cambridge with whom he worked as an Artist Manager, providing high level creative, operational, and administrative support to celebrated conductors and instrumentalists of international renown.
He is Music Director of King’s Lynn Festival Chorus, a one hundred strong choir collaborating with distinguished soloists and ensembles to perform from a wide-ranging repertoire. Recent highlights include Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B minor, Duruflé’s Requiem, Orff’s Carmina Burana, and a gala concert of Gilbert and Sullivan including a semi-staged performance of the one-act comic opera Trial by Jurywith soloists Sarah Fox and Simon Butteriss. As a conductor he has worked with choral ensembles across a wide range of age and ability and has studied the art with Patrick Russill and Paul Brough.
An MA graduate of the University of York — where he achieved one of the highest marks ever awarded by the faculty — his studies with Professor Peter Seymour focussed on historically informed performance; specifically, the influence on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach by his European counterparts and their country’s cultures and practices.
Church music shaped much of his initial training and early career, and he has previously held positions at several of this country’s most eminent churches and cathedrals. Indeed, his musical life began aged seven as a chorister in the then men and boys’ choral tradition of his local parish church choir. Despite a considerable waiting list for the most well-regarded piano teacher locally, lessons began in earnest when aged just nine he wouldn’t take no for an answer, personally telephoning daily to check availability. She eventually gave in!
Equally at home at the organ, piano, harpsichord, and forte piano, he collaborates with both instrumentalists and singers as an accompanist, and as an ensemble and continuo player has worked with notable groups including The Royal Northern Sinfonia, Yorkshire Baroque Soloists, The Sixteen, London Mozart Players, and BBC Philharmonic live on BBC Radio 3. He has studied the organ with Andrew Reid, David Titterington, Ian Curror, Henry Fairs, and Robert Quinney, and harpsichord and forte piano with Peter Seymour.