Dr George Guest

President of Gwent Bach Society 1988-2002

North Wales born Dr Guest achieved world wide fame during his years as director of music at St. John's college, Cambridge.

He had always taken a keen interest in the Welsh music scene and was well known for his work with the National Youth Choir of Wales.

He conducted several workshops run by Gwent Bach Society before taking up the Presidency.

Notes about Dr Guest at the Cambridge Festival of Music 1988 -
0ne man who has lent continuity to the Cambridge Festival for all of its 26 years is George Guest, the long-serving organist of St John's College. He has appeared in every one and does so again this year. Indeed Guest is now the most constant figure in the city's musical life since the war. He went to St John's as organ scholar in 1947 and returned to take over as organist and choirmaster in 1951 at the age of 26. For those who wish to flavour the Guest era, which has established the choir as one of the most recorded and respected in the world, there are just three more years in which to do so before he retires.

Guest's success at John's is put down to two main factors - his determination to foster a distinctive sound and repertoire which marks it out from other English choirs, and the rather ungainly character of the college chapel, built in the 1860s to a design by Sir Gilbert Scott to replace the 14th-century building considered too small to accommodate the fervour of the Victorian Fellows. 'However good or bad the choir at King's,' says Guest 'people will still always go there to visit the building, whereas here they are only likely to come for the music.'

Guest is in many ways an outsider in the tradition of English 'cathedral' sound. He was one of the first to embrace the notion that the over-riding stylistic loyalty should be to the composer and the sound he might have expected to hear, rather than to college practice. He has fostered a more continental sound than is usual and is not afraid to ask for a full sound from his trebles, even if it is sometimes at the expense of tonal purity.

'It is a matter of what is appropriate,' he says. 'For polyphonic music you need a rounder sound than you do for contrapuntal music. Of course you do not want Spanish brilliance in British music, but equally Victoria would have been shocked at the way his music is sung in many cathedrals. A lot of the time I encourage the use of gentle vibrato of the sort you would expect from a top-class string player, to bring emotion into music that it would be incongruous to sing in a dry technical fashion. You have to answer the question: 'Do you want to admire the choir or be moved by it?" We aim for the latter.'

In its repertoire the choir of St John's has more Latin masses than any other in the country and a total catalogue of some 1,500 items. It is also one of the very few English choirs capable of singing in Welsh (which it does regularly), reflecting Guest's own upbringing in Bangor. This proved a useful asset last month at the service for the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the translation of the Bible into Welsh by William Morgan, himself a student in the college. The two strands, Latin and Welsh, are also reflected in the composers commissioned by Guest to write for St John's over the years, among them Howells, Tippett, Matthias, Hoddinott and Lennox Berkeley.

Before he leaves, Guest will be taking the choir on tour to Norway and Sweden, the United States ('we seem to go there about every two years'), possibly to Russia, South America and, for the third time, to Australia. Guest believes the tours, all in the holidays, offer the young choristers an 'unrivalled chance to absorb and learn about how other people live.' After 41 years at the college he admits to few ambitions except 'keeping up the standard. I cannot take part in a performance without aiming for perfection. Even a simple 'amen' is a performance in itself' and he is quietly pleased that the choir now seems secure, not only in Cambridge terms, but in its international reputation.