We are proud to have had Matthew Best as our Music Director until very recently.  Matthew conducted his final concert on 8 March 2025 and sadly passed on 10 May 2025.

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Matthew was involved with singing and singers – at choir and solo level, amateur and professional – throughout his adult life, and enjoyed a long and distinguished career as both singer and conductor. He was a choral scholar at King’s College, Cambridge and also sang for a year with the Monteverdi Choir; these two experiences strongly influenced his approach to choir training, and his subsequent 35-year experience as a solo singer, primarily in opera, added significantly to this mix. He was perhaps best known in choral circles for directing Corydon Singers, and later Corydon Orchestra, over a period of 28 years. As a singer he was awarded the Decca-Kathleen Ferrier Award in 1981 and has sung a very wide range of repertoire from Bach, Mozart, Verdi and Wagner to a number of world premieres, and he was also a Principal Study singing teacher at the Royal Northern College of Music.

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Obituaries of Matthew can be found in many newspapers and periodicals including Gramophone, The Times and The Telegraph.