Ronald Corp [Highgate Choral Society]

THE first publication to register the death, at 74, of Ronald Corp, and with a typically gushing headline, was The Sun: “A beloved music star who performed for millions.”

For all those who have sung under his inspiring direction, or listened to his intricate chamber music, this populist accolade may have come as a surprise.

But it shouldn’t have done, because scarcely a day goes by without one of Ronald Corp’s compositions or arrangements being broadcast on the radio. Most of these have been recorded for the Hyperion label by him and the ensemble he created and ran – the New London Orchestra – or by The London Chorus, an elite choir of which he was music director.

All this served his mission, which was partly to get his own compositions launched, and partly to breathe new life into a wealth of little-known – mostly British – music from the late 19th and 20th centuries. Never was an OBE better earned.

Ron Corp was a musical polymath, combining the instincts of a showman with the seriousness of a professional musicologist. But what made him unique among composer-conductors was the fact that he was also a champion of amateur music-making, as brilliantly exemplified by his work in north London.

In 1991 he founded the New London Children’s Choir, who became stars in their own right, appearing in major London concert halls with symphony orchestras, frequently performing at the Proms, and making film soundtrack and TV recordings, including the soundtrack for Star Wars: Episode 1. And for 41 years Ron ran the venerable, 180-member Highgate Choral Society, who in addition to their regular concerts in All Hallows Church, Gospel Oak, perform all over London and tour abroad.

Many readers of this newspaper will have had their lives touched by Ron, either as child singers, or adult singers, or as part of the audience in All Hallows Church, or at the HCS’s charming Christmas carol services – with recherché European gems alternating with everyone singing We Wish You a Merry Christmas and Ron presiding like a genial uncle – in St Michael’s church.

The way this charismatic conductor – and prolific composer – emerged was typically unorthodox.

“Because my family knew nothing about music,” he told me, “I’ve always been on this journey of musical discovery. And I’ve always wanted to share what I discover. I wanted to be a composer from the start – I wanted to be Tchaikovsky. I created my own manuscript paper with five pen-nibs glued together, and devised my own system of notation – all little squiggles and signs. From 10 onwards I used to write a piece every day. I’d feel a day was wasted if I hadn’t written something – and I still feel like that today.”

And that facility never deserted him. During the pandemic he realised that he had up his sleeve the basic structure of a symphony, so he orchestrated it. “And then a third symphony came out, very quickly. I knew immediately how it was going to begin, and what its sound-world would be like. It just came. So I wrote two symphonies during lockdown! I’m now trying to get performances of them, as they haven’t been heard – and I wanted to hear them myself.”

He began his career as a tenor in the choir of Christ Church, Oxford, but was a born leader from the start. While working at the BBC he founded a staff choir, conducted the BBC Singers and started making recordings with them. In 1984, he took over the Highgate Choral Society (HCS), and a year later began running the London Chorus, and thereafter never looked back.

His taste in repertory was healthily eclectic, and he was always keen to commission new young composers; his own music was eminently singable, spurred on by his conviction that accessibility should be a guiding principle.

“Where is the next War Requiem [by Britten], or the next Child of Our Time [by Tippett] – something gritty and significant – coming from?” he asked. The answer might well have been from Ronald Corp, had he lived a bit longer. His powerful final work – a cantata setting of a series of letters from a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz – suggests that he was moving in the same direction as those two great composers.

“My compositions are my legacy,” he said, but there was another legacy which has been of inestimable value to many a choral conductor: a book by Ron entitled The Choral Singer’s Companion, in which hundreds of works are analysed in terms of their character and instrumental and vocal requirements.

As a member of HCS, I can vouch for the enthusiastic intensity with which he infused every rehearsal of that choir, a fair proportion of whom are seriously good musicians.

He had unusual grace as a conductor, and a rapier wit; his musicological pre-concert talks were models of their kind. And he never lost sight of the fact that this was a community choir, born out of an ordinary evening class, and was essentially a group of friends with him as the anchor.

His aim at the end of each rehearsal was to send people out on a high, and vowing to do even better next time.

Every summer the choir meets for a party at which anyone who wants can get up on stage and do a turn. One of the most polished performances on these occasions was always a mischievous song by Ron, usually raunchy to a shocking degree.

When bass Sherman Carroll and soprano Marie-Claude Gervais met in the choir and fell in love, it was no surprise who tied the knot: “Ron married us,” says Marie-Claire. “Or rather blessed us at a civil ceremony to which he brought his light and loving touch. And Sherman commissioned him to set to music a poem by John Donne, The Sun Rising, for our wedding.”

But for Ron this was simply par for the course, thanks to a detail we have not yet mentioned.

In addition to everything else, Ron Corp was also an ordained priest, regularly saying Mass and delivering sermons at the Anglo-Catholic Church of St Alban the Martyr in Holborn.

“I know I’m lucky,” he told me. “In church and on the podium I do two things I really love. I sometimes think I should do something different after all these years, but I just love taking rehearsals. And though we’re working hard, we’re also having fun.”

His long and mysterious illness was painful to watch. No wonder the HCS’s communal WhatsApp has been overflowing with expressions of sadness, love, and gratitude, these past three weeks.