Gavin Carr
is one of the UK’s top choral conductors, working with leading orchestras and choruses in major venues. As well as Music Director of Bath Minerva Choir he is Chorus Master of the Philharmonia Chorus and Chorus Director of the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus, with whom he collaborates with many of the world’s leading arts organisations and soloists. He has guest conducted the BBC Symphony Chorus and the London Symphony Chorus, and is founder-director of Chorus Angelorum, his elite professional choir, with whom he has recorded the choral works of Paul Carr. In 2024 he was appointed Choral Director of the new ChoralFest at Dartington Hall, and his historic Hiroshima War Requiem 2025 project has garnered huge attention in the choral world, bringing this monumental work to Hiroshima for the first time.
Read on below for more about Gavin’s career…
With his recent Hiroshima War Requiem garnering huge interest in the choral world as it came to fruition in September 2025, and his recent appointment as Choral Director of the new Dartington ChoralFest, Gavin Carr is one of the most in-demand choral conductors of his generation. The son of Australian Covent Garden Prima Donna Una Hale and the internationally-renowned theatre consultant Martin Carr, and the brother of composer Paul Carr, Gavin Carr works with leading orchestras and choruses in a hugely varied repertoire. A multi-faceted musician, a trained artist, a poet and composer, his celebrated energy and sense of positivity flows through all his activities. Conductor of two of the UK’s leading symphony choruses, the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus and the Philharmonia Chorus, he also directs Bath Minerva Choir and is Founder-Director of Chorus Angelorum and The Carr Consort.
He commenced his training as a choral scholar in the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, before establishing a career as a baritone that has saw him perform all over the globe, with recital, concert and opera appearances in the USA, Australia, China, South America, Russia and throughout Europe. In 2001 he took up conducting alongside his singing career, and quickly gained a reputation in this field. Staff Conductor at the Wexford Opera Festival and the Cantiere d'Arte di Montepulciano, he made his operatic conducting debut with an acclaimed production of La Tragédie de Carmen at the 2007 Wexford Festival, which was nominated for an Irish Times ‘National Arts Award’. In 2009 he became the founder-director of the new Wexford Festival Opera Chorus, which he developed as the Young Artists Programme for the Wexford Festival, nurturing major talent and enhancing the festival’s reputation in this field. Other opera credits include Un ballo in maschera and Eugene Onegin for Dorset Opera, the latter being named by the Guardian newspaper as a standout production of the year. He made his conducting debut with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in September 2011, in Richard Blackford’s Not in Our Time, with performances at the Cheltenham Festival and Poole Lighthouse; his recording of the work on the Nimbus label shot to the top of the classical charts on its release. He made his German debut conducting the same work with the Bremen Philharmoniker in 2012.
At the centenary commemorations of the onset of of World War I he conducted Britten’s War Requiem in Poole with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Chorus on Remembrance Sunday 2014 with soloists James Gilchrist, Svetlana Kasyan and Stephan Loges. For the London Jazz Festival at the South Bank Centre he led the premiere performances of inspirational jazz composer Robert Mitchell’s Invocation, a large-scale work for jazz ensemble and chorus, and in 2015 he conducted the first performance in Poole of Mahler’s Symphony No.8 with the BSC, Bath Minerva Choir, the Amadeus Orchestra and a team of international soloists. Other previous and upcoming performances of the major choral-orchestral repertoire with these two choruses include Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, Richard Blackford’s Pietà, Taneyev’s St John of Damascus, the Mozart Requiem, Beethoven’s Mass in C, Britten’s Saint Nicholas, Bruckner's Mass in F, the Dvorák Stabat Mater, and Handel’s Messiah.
A happy association with the Symphony Orchestra of India began in 2015 when he conducted Messiah for them at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai and in Goa Cathedral. 2018 saw him make a return appearance conducting Beethoven’s Egmont overture, the Choral Fantasy and Haydn’s Missa in angustiis (Nelson Mass) in Mumbai.
He became Chorus Director of the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus (BSC) in 2008, and has led them to international acclaim with world-premiere recordings, tours, and a host of innovative programmes. In 2014 he instigated a new tradition of Bach Passions in Easter Week with the BSC at the Lighthouse in Poole in English – a feature of these performances for which Carr is a passionate advocate. Recent recordings include the world-premiere of Paul Carr’s Four New Seasons with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.
After guest conducting with the BBC Symphony Chorus, the London Symphony Chorus and the Philharmonia Chorus, in 2018 Carr was appointed Chorus Master of the celebrated Philharmonia Chorus, whom he now leads in major projects across Europe. Recent projects include Berlioz’s Grande Messe des Morts at St Paul’s Cathedral with John Nelson, and cycles of the Mahler Symphonies with both the Orchestre National de Lille under Alexandre Bloch and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Vassily Petrenko.
Alongside his work in Bournemouth and London, current music directorships include the Bath Minerva Choir, and his own professional choir, Chorus Angelorum, with whom he has recorded two of his brother Paul Carr’s large-scale choral works, Requiem for an Angel and Seven Last Words from the Cross, with another disc of his smaller choral works, I Offer You Love, released at the end of 2022. He was previously music director of the Bristol Bach Choir (a tenure notable for ambitious projects and tours) and chorus master of South West Festival Chorus, with whom he conducted Sir Willard White in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. In 2025 he founded a new group of elite singers, The Carr Consort, with whom he will explore obscure and rarely-performed corners of the repertoire.
As a baritone, he sang the title role in The Barber of Seville for English National Opera opposite Lesley Garrett, and also appeared for ENO as Aeneas in Dido and Aeneas with Sarah Connolly, and St Ignatius in Four Saints in Three Acts. Concert appearances have included Britten's War Requiem for the Teatro Municipal in Santiago, Chile, with the Novaya Opera in Moscow, and in Tallinn with the Estonian Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus. He sang the baritone part in Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius in Beijing and Shanghai in the mainland Chinese premiere of the work in 2009, and has appeared in Golijov’s Ainadamar with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Robert Spano. Active in Australia, particularly in contemporary music, he appeared as the composer Tchaikovsky in Michael Finnissy’s Shameful Vice for the Sydney Transfigured Nights festival, and gave many world-premieres whilst resident vocalist with the Pipeline Ensemble in Melbourne. His performance with the Elision Ensemble in Michael Smetanin’s Skinless Kiss of Angels was recorded by ABC Classics.
In September 2017, Carr was appointed to the Vocal Faculty of the Royal Academy of Music, where he has taught classes in Lieder, English Song, and Oratorio to the younger generation of world-class talent.