Brian Kay (Patron)

Brian Kay divides his working life between the broadcasting studio and the concert platform. His BBC radio presentations have included Brian Kay's Sunday Morning, the weekly listeners' request programme 3 for All, Friday Night is Music Night and Music in Mind. His former BBC World Service programme, Classics with Kay, reached an audience of millions all over the world. He has twice won the Sony Radio Award as Music Presenter of the Year, including, in 1996, the coveted Gold Award.

Brian's television presentations include the Cardiff Singer of the World and the Choir of the Year competitions and the New Year's Day Concert from Vienna.

On the concert platform, Brian presents concerts with many of the leading orchestras. His narrations include Peter and the Wolf, Tubby the Tuba, Babar the Elephant, The Snowman, Honegger's King David and Bliss's Morning Heroes.

Brian is conductor of Vaughan William's Leith Hill Musical Festival in Surrey and of the Burford Singers. He is an associate conductor of The Really Big Chorus, conducting massed voices in London's Royal Albert Hall. He was Chorus Master of the Huddersfield Choral Society and Conductor of the Cheltenham Bach Choir, the Bradford Festival Choral Society, the Cecilian Singers of Leicester, and the Kendal-based Mary Wakefield Westmorland Festival. He is a Vice-President of the ABCD and of the RSCM. Further afield, he has conducted the Orpheus Choir of Wellington and the Auckland Choral Society.

Brian has twice appeared at the Royal Variety Show: in 1978 as a member of the King's Singers and in 1987 conducting the Huddersfield Choral Society. He sang the voice of Papageno in the film Amadeus (his wife, soprano Gillian Fisher, sang Papagena). Brian has been the lowest frog on a Paul McCartney single; one of the six wives to Harry Secombe's Henry VIII and a member of Pink Floyd's backing group.

Photograph courtesy of the BBC