Richard Baker is stepping up to the podium with BCMG

Oct 8 2010 By Christopher Morley

Christopher Morley talks to conductor and composer Richard Baker as he prepares for a new season.

Birmingham Contemporary Music Group launches its new season on Sunday, and local lad Richard Baker will be conducting an absorbing programme featuring some of the most internationally renowned composers today – Simon Holt (including a world premiere), Rolf Hind and Helmut Lachenmann.

Soloists in the concert will be Rolf Hind himself (piano) and soprano Sarah Leonard.

Baker the conductor was born in Dudley, “into a large, typically warm and close-knit Black Country family from Upper Gornal,” as he tells me.

“My parents moved to North Staffordshire when I was 11, but I spent the first years of my life in Gornal, and my extended family all still live in the area. I think I made my solo performing debut in Upper Gornal Pentecostal Church, in fact.”

Later, Baker became a chorister at Lichfield Cathedral (in the same way that his near-contemporary, CBSO principal guest conductor Edward Gardner was a chorister at Gloucester Cathedral).

“Nobody in my immediate family was musical, but a couple of my primary school teachers spotted that I had a good singing voice, and told the local choirmaster about me,” he said.

“I sang in the parish church choir for a couple of years, and he encouraged my parents to enter me for the voice trials at Lichfield. I think they were very wary. It was another world for them – but I was successful and got a scholarship.

“Being a chorister is an amazing musical education. Kids at that age can learn really advanced musical skills without even realising it. If it hadn’t been for this, I’m quite sure I wouldn’t be talking to you now.”

Baker is equally active as a composer as well as a conductor. Is he an instrumentalist, and still keeping up his singing?

‘‘I started composing almost as soon as I could play piano and read music – it seemed completely normal to me, to want to ‘make’ pieces, not just sing or play them,” he says.

“I was an oboist and percussionist later also – playing in youth orchestras is a great training for a conductor, although I rarely play now.

“But conducting is something I’ve always done, first in performances of my own pieces, with groups of friends, and later with fellow students in repertoire that we particularly wanted to hear.”