Owen Rees

Owen Rees is a choral conductor, organist, and musicologist, and his various activities, by his own testimony, reinforce one another. He is a professor at Oxford University and organist and choir director at Queen's College there.

Rees was born in 1964. He attended St. Catharine's College, Cambridge University, studying music and supporting himself as an organ scholar, a musician whose expenses are defrayed in return for his contributions to the college's musical life. He stayed on for a doctorate at Cambridge, studying musicology with Renaissance specialists Peter le Huray and Iain Fenlon. By the time he finished his dissertation in 1991, he had already begun teaching at St. Peter's College and St. Edmund Hall at Oxford as a lecturer. He moved to the University of Surrey as a reader (a rank between Lecturer and Professor) in 1996 and then to Oxford in 1997, assuming the posts of Lecturer in the Faculty of Music, Fellow, Tutor, and Organist of Queen's College; and Senior Research Fellow of Somerville College; he was promoted to Reader in 2006 and continues to hold these posts. An early Rees recording, Masters of the Royal Chapel, Lisbon, was made with the group A Capella Portuguesa in 1994 and released on the <a href="spotify:search:label%3A%22Hyperion%22">Hyperion</a> label.

As Queen's College organist, Rees conducts the <a href="spotify:artist:11hvMHAaE2dSXCMJ22DL8d">Choir of the Queen's College, Oxford</a>, and he has also conducted the Cambridge Taverner Choir, <a href="spotify:artist:49PeDF89pZXEFDqzVQpXiZ">Contrapunctus</a>, and A Capella Portuguesa. He has stated that his research activities often inform the repertory he programs as a choir director and that the influence also runs in the opposite direction. As a scholar, Rees has edited works by composers <a href="spotify:artist:6FCLYfyWhx2C2yZg7ne9bB">Manuel Cardoso</a>, <a href="spotify:artist:2WKt6ECajeVnP0x3ffGVTK">Pedro de Cristo</a>, and <a href="spotify:artist:2IbjTarJBxOHkAX9SPK3SV">Duarte Lobo</a>, and he has also programmed the music of these little-known figures in concert. Rees has led choirs in concert at the Oslo Kirchenmusic Festival, Festival International Portico de Semana Santa de Zamora, and the York Early Music Festival. He conducts the <a href="spotify:artist:11hvMHAaE2dSXCMJ22DL8d">Choir of the Queen's College</a> in chapel services three times a week during school terms, as well as at various other events.

Rees has a catalog of well over 30 albums as director of various groups on <a href="spotify:search:label%3A%22Hyperion%22">Hyperion</a>, <a href="spotify:search:label%3A%22Herald+Records%22">Herald Records</a>, <a href="spotify:search:label%3A%22Guild%22">Guild</a>, and other labels. Since 2013, he has led the <a href="spotify:artist:11hvMHAaE2dSXCMJ22DL8d">Choir of the Queen's College</a> and <a href="spotify:artist:49PeDF89pZXEFDqzVQpXiZ">Contrapunctus</a> in a series of recordings of mostly English choral music. Since the late 2010s, he has recorded for <a href="spotify:search:label%3A%22Signum+Classics%22">Signum Classics</a>. In 2020, Rees issued a pair of new releases, one featuring <a href="spotify:artist:49PeDF89pZXEFDqzVQpXiZ">Contrapunctus</a> and the <a href="spotify:artist:11hvMHAaE2dSXCMJ22DL8d">Choir of the Queen's College</a> in <a href="spotify:artist:0ZGj6vmZUz4vk80EfPLjxP">Taverner</a>'s multi-textural Missa Gloria tibi trinitatis, and another with <a href="spotify:artist:49PeDF89pZXEFDqzVQpXiZ">Contrapunctus</a>, Salve, Salve, Salve: Josquin's Spanish Legacy. In 2021, Rees and <a href="spotify:artist:49PeDF89pZXEFDqzVQpXiZ">Contrapunctus</a> released the album The Sweetest Songs: Music from the Baldwin Partbooks, Vol. 3. Rees returned in 2024 with a trio of albums: How the Mighty Are Fallen: Choral Music by Giovanni Bononcini (with the <a href="spotify:artist:11hvMHAaE2dSXCMJ22DL8d">Choir of the Queen's College</a>), Harmonies of Devotion (with <a href="spotify:artist:49PeDF89pZXEFDqzVQpXiZ">Contrapunctus</a>), and That Sweet City (with the <a href="spotify:artist:11hvMHAaE2dSXCMJ22DL8d">Choir of the Queen's College</a>); the latter album was devoted to music about the city of Oxford itself. ~ James Manheim, Rovi