Matthew Best obituary: conductor and bass singer

Times

15-05-2025

In 1973 a small choral group in Sevenoaks, Kent, were giving their first concert and needed a name. Their programme included several 15th and 16th-century madrigals, many of which referred to Corydon, a shepherd or rustic figure, and thus they became the Corydon Singers.
'Yes, I know it looks like Croydon spelt backwards, but 70 concerts later we are stuck with the name,' Matthew Best, their founder and conductor, told Gramophone magazine in 1990. 'At the time, just after my O-levels, all very precocious, we had no idea we would give more than a one-off performance.'
Over the years the Corydon Singers evolved into one of the country's finest choral groups, performing in London concert halls and recording previously uncharted repertoire for the Hyperion label, often ecclesiastical in nature. 'Although we have always had a regular concert series, it has been through recordings that we have made our name,' Best said.
Selecting the right voices was in itself an art form. 'Singers are booked individually for each rehearsal and performance, and we don't meet once a week like choral societies,' he explained. 'I used to twist people's arms to join. Now we receive many requests for auditions.' The critics were impressed by the results. 'The Corydon Singers would lift the roof as required one moment and the hair on the back of one's neck a few bars later,' The Guardian noted after one concert.
The Corydon Singers were one of many outlets for Best's musical talents. 'I've always had a double career, as an opera singer and as a conductor,' he told the journalist Andrew Green in a recent online interview looking back on their 1994 recording of Vaughan Williams's opera Hugh the Drover that also featured the New London Children's Choir directed by Ronald Corp.
Gradually Best narrowed his own singing down to a select band of repertoire. 'I made a conscious decision in 1992 to cut out the rest and concentrate on the Wagnerian roles,' he said. At the 2000 Edinburgh International Festival he gave a towering performance of Wotan in Scottish Opera's Ring Cycle, appearing on stage for almost the entirety of Die Walküre, including the full 90 minutes of Act Two. This brought not only mental demands, but also physical difficulties. 'I drink huge amounts of liquid because it's good for the voice,' he told The Scotsman. 'But I always have to bear in mind that once I step on to the stage I'm there to the bitter end. There's no loo on the set.'
Matthew Robert Best was born in Kent in 1957, the son of Peter Best and his wife Mary (née Reid). He recalled hearing Wotan's farewell for the first time. 'I was sitting with my mother at home doing my homework while listening to the wireless. My ears pricked up when it came on and I sat spellbound. It made a big impression,' he said.
He started playing clarinet at the age of 12 and moved on to singing, conducting and composing while at Sevenoaks School. 'My best creation was the opera Humbug, which was performed at the school last year,' he told the Sevenoaks Chronicle in 1974 about his adaptation of Dickens's A Christmas Carol.
As a choral scholar at King's College, Cambridge, Best's robust singing occasionally got the better of him. On one occasion he was in the choir rehearsing Michael Wise's 17th-century setting of the canticles for choral evensong when Philip Ledger, the director of music, fixed him with stern gaze and growled somewhat presciently: 'Mr Best, you are singing Wise in F, not Wotan.' He was a soloist in the university music society's performance of Handel's Israel in Egypt and in 1978 Opera magazine praised his 'astonishingly ripe and sonorous voice' as Seneca in a student staging of Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea.
He went on to train at the National Opera Studio and in February 1979 returned to King's College to conduct the premiere of his own operetta Alice, based on Lewis Carroll's Alice Adventures in Wonderland, directed by Nicholas Hytner. There were further performances in that year's Aldeburgh Festival, including a guest appearance by the tenor Sir Peter Pears.
In 1980 he joined the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, as principal bass though was rarely cast in anything other than minor roles, and two years later won the £1,000 Decca-Kathleen Ferrier Prize. He made his Proms debut in the first half of the 1986 Last Night as one of the soloists in Puccini's rarely heard Preludio Sinfonico and Messa di Gloria.
Meanwhile, in 1983 he married Roz Mayes, a member of the Corydon Singers. She survives him with their children, Alex, who is a sports teacher, and Natasha, a music teacher. By then much of his energy was going into the Singers. 'In 1981 we decided to make a record for the fun of it; a compilation of English music through the ages,' he said. This caught the attention of Ted Perry, the founder of Hyperion, who released the Singers' next album, featuring Bruckner Motets, and followed this with the first recording of Herbert Howells's Requiem, which was made a few days after the composer's death.
In 1991 the Corydon Singers were joined by the Corydon Orchestra, which made its debut in a series of Mozart concerts at St John's, Smith Square. They accompanied the Singers in their recordings of Bruckner's Masses, some of which they brought to the Proms in 1994, while their recordings of Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ and Beethoven cantatas were runners-up at the 1996 and 1997 Gramophone Awards respectively.
In recent years Best taught at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, though conducting and singing remained his greatest passions. 'I'm consciously trying not to blur the issue, but ultimately I feel that the combination of the two must come together,' he once said. 'Somewhere along the line, I would like to think I could combine the two experiences.'
Matthew Best, bass singer and conductor, was born on February 6, 1957. He died from cancer on May 10, 2025, aged 68