Christopher Robinson was educated at Rugby and Christ Church, Oxford, where he was Organ Scholar. After a period as Organist and Master of the Choristers at Worcester Cathedral, where he was also conductor of several Three Choirs Festivals, Christopher Robinson moved to St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, where he was organist and choirmaster until 1991. He was conductor of the Oxford Bach Choir from 1976 to 1997 and of the City of Birmingham Choir from 1964 to 2002.

As well as conducting most of the large-choir repertoire with the City of Birmingham Choir, there were also concerts of special note. For example, Christopher Robinson’s expertise in and affinity for Elgar’s music produced several highly praised performances of The Dream of Gerontius. In 1981 he conducted Messiaen’s La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jesus Christ and in 1989 two highly acclaimed performances of Tippett’s Mask of Time. The choir gave a widely praised first performance in England of the Jacobite Rising by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies.

He retired from the prestigious post of organist and Director of Music at St John’s College, Cambridge, a choir with an international reputation for excellence. He holds honorary degrees from Birmingham University and the University of Central England and is an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music. He has been chairman of the Elgar Society and president of the Royal College of Organists.

In 1992 the Queen bestowed on him the honour of Commander of the Victorian Order for his services at Windsor Castle, and in the summer of 2002, the Archbishop of Canterbury made him a Lambeth DMus. He became an Honorary Fellow of the Guild of Church Musicians in Autumn 2003 and received a CBE in the 2004 New Year’s Honours List.

Benjamin Britten must be accepted as the most outstanding English composer working in the mid-20th century. He won a significant international reputation while remaining thoroughly English in inspiration, a feat that his immediate predecessors had been unable fully to achieve.

Operas

Britten won a triumph in 1945 with his opera Peter Grimes, first staged when Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London reopened after the Second World War. The aspirations of the central character, the fisherman Peter Grimes, a man at odds with the community in which he lives, are frustrated by a combination of social pressure and sheer chance, leading to his suicide. The drama is set against the background of the sea, in various moods, summarised in Four Sea Interludes, whichforms an evocative piece of concert repertoire. Britten’s subsequent operas include works on a smaller scale for his English Opera Group: The Rape of Lucretia, Albert Herring and The Turn of the Screw. Billy Budd and the coronation opera Gloriana were followed by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the television opera Owen Wingrave, and the remarkable operatic version of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. His three church parables draw inspiration from Japan and from their medieval setting. All these works constitute a very significant element in international dramatic and operatic repertoire. An early collaboration with the poet WH Auden, Paul Bunyan, was staged in New York in 1941, to be revised in 1974 for publication.

Orchestral Music

The best known of all Britten’s orchestral music must be Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell (more generally known under its popular title The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra), a work that is both a tribute to the great 17th-century English composer Henry Purcell and a useful teaching piece. Lachrymae, subtitled ‘Reflections on a Theme of Dowland’, is a tribute to a still earlier predecessor, the lutenist John Dowland; arranged by the composer shortly before his death from its original viola and piano version, it is immensely moving. The early Matinées Musicales, based on the music of Rossini, is an attractive piece, and the Simple Symphony for string orchestra, based on tunes written by the composer in childhood, is a useful element in string orchestra repertoire. Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, written in 1937, serves as a brilliant tribute to his teacher, and his Piano Concerto and Violin Concerto come from the same period. His Cello Symphony was written in 1963 for his friend, the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.

Vocal and Choral Music

Britten was strongly influenced in his music and in his life by the tenor Peter Pears. For him he wrote a quantity of songs, including the splendid Serenade for tenor, horn and strings and the evocative Nocturne (both incomparable settings of the words of various English poets), as well as several other settings of poets (from Michelangelo to Thomas Hardy) for tenor and piano. His folksong arrangements have pleased a wide audience. Major choral works include the War Requiem, which combines the text of the Latin Requiem with the war poems of Wilfred Owen and forms an expression of Britten’s own pacifism. His Ceremony of Carols, settings accompanied by solo harp and designed, as were some other works, for boys’ voices, marked his return from America to wartime England in 1942.

Chamber Music

Britten’s chamber music includes a cello sonata and three cello suites for his friend Rostropovich, a fine suite for the Welsh harpist Osian Ellis, and Nocturnal after John Dowland for the guitarist Julian Bream. Of his three numbered string quartets, Quartet No 2 was written to mark the 250th anniversary of the death of Purcell, who provides the quartet’s inspiration.