William Byrd Festival Founders

DEAN APPLEGATE holds degrees from Linfield College, Colgate-Rochester Divinity School and the University of Oxford, with post-graduate studies in Gregorian chant under Dr. Mary Berry, Newnham College, Cambridge, and Sr. Claudia Foltz, SNJM, Marylhurst University. In 1997, he and Dr. Richard Marlow from Trinity College Cambridge formed the William Byrd Festival. He has served as administrator of the festival for the past twenty-three years, and he was director of Cantores in Ecclesia for twenty-seven years before he handed over leadership of the choir to his son Blake in 2010. His life’s work has been to advocate the use of Gregorian chant and sacred polyphony in actual liturgical circumstances. He was the Director of Music at Holy Rosary Church from 1981 - 2022.

RICHARD MARLOW (1939-2013) was one of the leading choral conductors of the twentieth century. Director of Music at Trinity College Cambridge for 37 years, he directed several critically-acclaimed recordings with the Cambridge University Chamber Choir and the Choir of Trinity College in addition to recording as a solo organist and harpsichordist and publishing widely as an editor and composer. His choirs were renowned for their purity of tone, immaculate tuning, dynamic variety, expressive range and musical elegance.

Born in 1939, Richard Marlow was a chorister at Southwark Cathedral, and sang at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. He went on to become Organ Scholar and later Research Fellow at Selwyn College, Cambridge. A student of Thurston Dart, his doctoral studies focused on the 17th-century virginalist Giles Farnaby, whose keyboard works he edited and published as part of the Musica Brittanicacollection. AfterabriefspellasalecturerattheUniversityofSouthampton,hereturnedtoCambridgein1968succeedingRaymond Leppard as Fellow, Organist and Director of Music at Trinity College and Lecturer in the University Music Faculty.

In 1969, Richard Marlow founded the Cambridge University Chamber Choir which quickly established an international reputation for its stylish performances of music rarely tackled by undergraduate ensembles. Following the admission of women undergraduates to Trinity, he founded the College’s mixed choir in 1982; under his direction the group released more than 40 recordings, exploring both familiar and new repertoire with works by composers such as Sweelinck, Schütz, Lassus and Praetorius being recorded for the first time in the early days of the compact disc. Active as an editor, contributing articles and reviews to scholarly journals and books including the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and the Dictionary of National Biography, Richard Marlow held posts as a Visiting Professor at universities in Tokyo, Texas, New England and New Zealand. He was Honorary General Editor of the Church Music Society for many years and his influence as a key figure in the musical life of Cambridge and many other cities for over 40 years extended over all those who heard him lecture or who had the privilege of performing under his direction. As a conductor, his gentle, understated manner, coupled with musical discipline and scholarly integrity drew performances from singers of which few had imagined they were capable. His insightful and expressive interpretations of music from Byrd to Stravinsky shone new light on familiar repertoire and opened up works unheard for centuries to choral singers across the world.

He retired as Director of Music at Trinity College in 2006, but continued to work regularly with choirs, particularly in Tokyo, New England and California. He co-founded the annual William Byrd Festival with Dean Applegate in 1997 and was its Artistic Direct until he was diagnosed with cancer in 2011. He taught his last undergraduate supervision in February 2013, just four months before he died.