Christopher Gray

As music director at Truro Cathedral in Cornwall, conductor and organist Christopher Gray has brought international prominence to its choir. He has also performed widely as an organist and has led the Three Spires Singers and Orchestra in large choral repertory. Gray is a native of Bangor in Northern Ireland. He took up the organ early, and while still a student at the Bangor Grammar School, he was named assistant organist at St. George's Parish Church in Belfast. At 18, he won an organ scholarship to attend Pembroke College, Cambridge University, where his teachers were David Sanger and Nicola Kynaston. Gray went on to the Royal College of Music as a graduate student, working with Margaret Phillips and concurrently with Stephen Farr and Geoffrey Morgan under Guildford Cathedral's organ scholarship. In 2000, he was appointed assistant director of music at Truro, often accompanying the cathedral choir in its many live BBC radio and television broadcasts. He pursued further conducting studies with Andrew Nethsingha and Robert Sharpe during this period before ascending to the post of music director in 2008. In 2012, he released his debut album, leading the choir in the album A Year at Truro on the Regent label. As music director, Gray rehearses (and sings in) seven weekly performances as well as in other regular concerts, broadcasts, and tour recordings. He is the leader of the choir's 18 boy choristers, 18 girl choristers, seven lay vicars, and five choral scholars. He has also conducted several other ensembles in the Cornwall region: the Cornwall Youth Choir, the Cornwall Junior Choir, and Truro School's Senior Choir, among others. Especially notable has been the Truro Cathedral Choir's growing catalog of recordings, previously sparse, under Gray's direction. Gray has specialized mostly in 20th century and contemporary British music. The choir has continued to record for Regent, and its releases are not exclusively sacred. The 2014 release Blow out, ye bugles was devoted to choral music from the World War I period and featured the Short Requiem of composer Henry Walford Davies. Gray and the choir released In My Father's House: Choral Music by Philip Stopford, the choir's second album devoted to that composer, in 2017. Gray and the Truro Cathedral Choir released All the World Tonight Rejoices, an album of contemporary Christmas music, in 2021; they returned in 2022 with the album Russell Pascoe: Secular Requiem.
© James Manheim /TiVo