The Rev Ronald Corp, who has died 74, was a composer and conductor known for his indefatigable work with orchestras, choral groups and especially children’s choirs in north London; he was also an Anglican priest, serving as a non-stipendiary minister in north London and latterly at the church of St Alban the Martyr in Holborn, which is renowned for its sung solemn mass.
This double life created something of a dilemma. “Once ordained, one is always a priest, it isn’t a part-time calling,” Corp told the Church Times. “I do feel a bit schizophrenic. Someone said, ‘If it’s to be God, he will get you in the end,’ and my feeling is that God finally got me. Perhaps he has had me all the time. But I’m glad I’ve had this ‘other’ calling, outside the Church.”
That “other calling” yielded prodigious amounts of music, some religious, some secular, but all tuneful and enjoyable including four symphonies, two piano concertos and more than one hundred songs and song cycles. His work for choirs includes the sacred cantata And All the Trumpets Sounded (1988) depicting the day of judgment, an atmospheric setting of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (2003), and Adonai Echad (The Lord Is One, 2000), which juxtaposes texts from the Jewish and Christian faiths. This interest in music of other religions was also reflected in Dhammapada (2010), a glorious cycle of Buddhist verses interspersed with recordings of temple bells.
In 1988 Corp founded the New London Orchestra with the aim of blending the familiar with works that otherwise might not make their way into the repertoire. “Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante was lithe, virile and sensitive, though such adjectives do not really convey the sense of enjoyment which the musicians quite obviously felt playing it,” noted a Daily Telegraph critic of a St John’s Smith Square concert that included the lesser-known Concerto for String Orchestra by Bohuslav Martinu, the Czech composer tirelessly championed by Corp.
Other concerts featured French music to mark the centenary of the Eiffel Tower and American music to celebrate that country’s independence day. “Mozart without Mozart” commemorated the composer’s bicentenary – not by featuring any of Wolfgang’s music, but instead works composed in his honour.
Corp was fascinated by uncovering neglected music, whether novelties by foreign composers, gems of the English pastoral tradition or the lighter classics of Sir Arthur Sullivan, many of which he recorded for the Hyperion label. “I’ve always loved the process of discovery,” he said in 2016. “Even today, when I discover something I think is exciting, I want to share it with an audience.”
Ronald Geoffrey Corp was born on January 4 1951 in the precincts of Wells Cathedral, Somerset, the eldest of three children of Geoffrey Corp, a hospital storeman-turned-groundsman, and his wife Elsie, née Kinchin, a cleaner. “I remember hearing the bells and having the cathedral as my playground,” he said.
He was raised in a council house, passed his 11-plus and was educated at the Blue School in Wells, where his first headmaster was a musical enthusiast. “He conducted Messiah and Christmas Oratorio, although off-puttingly he pooh-poohed my composition attempts,” Corp said. The rejection did not stop him having 1,000 opus numbers under his belt by the time he reached university, many of which he later destroyed.
His parents were unchurched, but their precociously musical son found his way to the faith by singing tenor at St Cuthbert’s in Wells. A diocesan youth chaplain broached the idea of the ministry, but by then young Ron had his heart set on music, which he read at Christ Church, Oxford, arriving there at the same time as his tutor, Simon Preston.
Hopes of pursuing research into the Victorian oratorio were dashed by lack of funding. Instead, he joined the BBC’s gramophone library, spending 14 years finding and preparing music for radio and television producers, interrupted by occasional secondments to Radio 3. Before long he was “starting to conduct all over the place”, including the BBC Staff Choral Society, which he directed in Handel’s oratorio Saul at St George’s, Hanover Square, in 1978, and the Highgate Choral Society, with which he was associated for 40 years.
By the early 1980s he was musical director of Finchley Children’s Music Group, leading them in a tribute concert to Peter Pears at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1986 and taking them to the Proms four years later in Britten’s Noye’s Fludde with Cleo Laine declaiming the Voice of God. They subsequently parted company and he started the New London Children’s Choir. By then he had left the BBC and added the London Choral Society, now the London Chorus, to his conducting portfolio.
In his mid-forties Corp’s calling to the ministry grew stronger. He studied at Sarum College, was ordained deacon in 1998 and priest the following year. Meanwhile, his music-making continued including appearances with the BBC Concert Orchestra, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
He also published The Choral Singer’s Companion (1987), a user-friendly guide to running, conducting or singing in a choir with a foreword by John Rutter that ran to three editions. He once said, however, that “on reflection, I think it’s the composing that I would most want to be remembered for”.
Corp was made a freeman of the City of London in 2007 and appointed OBE in 2012. He also received honorary doctorates from Anglia Ruskin and Hull universities.
The Rev Ronald Corp, born January 4 1951, died May 7 2025
