Adrian's Full Biography

Adrian Partington is a conductor, chorus master, solo organist and pianist of international standing and has been Director of Music at Gloucester Cathedral since 2008.  In addition to conducting amateur choirs such as the Gloucester and Bristol Choral Societies, he also conducts the BBC National Chorus of Wales and has worked with world class orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic and the Philharmonia, and with maestros Simon Rattle and Richard Hickox among many others

During his years at Gloucester Cathedral, he has introduced Girl Choristers to the Cathedral Choir, has taken the choir to sing in the USA, Canada, South Africa and Sweden, and has made several CDs, most recently the Church Music of Ian King, in June 2021.  In May 2019, he took the Choristers to sing with the Berlin Philharmonic at the Philharmonie in Berlin.

Adrian has been Conductor of the BBC National Chorus of Wales since 1999.  Since then, he has prepared that chorus for well over a hundred broadcast concerts (including, pre Covid, two BBC Proms each year), many of which he has conducted himself.  The chorus has made many CDs, two of which have been nominated for Grammy awards. The chorus’s most recent CD - which Adrian conducted - is of Stanford’s previously un-performed orchestral mass Via Victrix 1918.  He is to direct for a cd more un-recorded music by Stanford in 2022: the Elegiac Ode and the Latin Te Deum.

He has directed four Gloucester Three Choirs Festivals, in which he has conducted the Philharmonia in many of the great choral/orchestral classics, including Mahler’s Eighth and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphonies, Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust, and the great oratorios of Elgar.  He has also conducted many instrumental symphonies and concertos, and much contemporary orchestral music by such important composers as John Adams, Colin Matthews, and Joseph Phibbs.

Adrian enjoys an active career as a guest conductor of orchestras.  In recent years he has conducted the Philharmonia at the Festival Hall, several times at St.John’s Smith Square, and in various provincial cities.  He has conducted the RPO in many venues over the years, and has directed that orchestra in a series of concerts in the Midlands and the North.  Every year he conducts the BBC NOW - most recently in a programme of Respighi and Piazzolla - and has conducted the Royal Northern Sinfonia, the BSO, the Welsh National Opera Orchestra and the Royal Flanders Philharmonic.

Adrian was educated at King’s College Cambridge, where he was the Organ Scholar.  He continues to be in demand as an organist.  He was a soloist at one of the televised BBC Promenade concerts in 2018, and engagements include recitals in Japan in 2018 and a Concerto with the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra in 2019.