David CairnsOBE was chief music critic of the Sunday Times from 1983 to 1992, having been music critic and, later, arts editor of the Spectator and a writer on Times Educational Supplement, Evening Standard, Financial Times and New Statesman. He was co-founder of Chelsea Opera Group (1950) and sang solo roles under the group’s first conductor, Colin Davis. From 1967 to 1972 he was classical programme coordinator at Philips Records, where he was involved in many of the company’s major recordings. His books include Responses: Musical Essays and Reviews (1973), a two-volume life of Berlioz, volume 2 of which won the Samuel Johnson Non-Fiction Prize and the Whitbread Biography Award (2000), Mozart and His Operas (2006), and, as co-author, the ENO Opera Guide on Falstaff. He is Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, president of the City Music Society and of Putney Music, vice-president of Chelsea Opera Group, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a member of the boards of St John’s Smith Square and the International Musicians Seminar, and founder-conductor of the Thorington Players, an amateur orchestra which gives concerts for charity and which recently performed Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis at St John’s. He has taught graduate and undergraduate courses at the University of California, Davis, and has been visiting fellow at the Getty Center in Santa Monica and at Merton College, Oxford.
David Cairns OBE was chief music critic of the Sunday Times from 1983 to 1992, having been music critic and, later, arts editor of the Spectator and a writer on Times Educational Supplement, Evening Standard, Financial Times and New Statesman. He was co-founder of Chelsea Opera Group (1950) and sang solo roles under the group’s first conductor, Colin Davis. From 1967 to 1972 he was classical programme coordinator at Philips Records, where he was involved in many of the company’s major recordings. His books include Responses: Musical Essays and Reviews (1973), a two-volume life of Berlioz, volume 2 of which won the Samuel Johnson Non-Fiction Prize and the Whitbread Biography Award (2000), Mozart and His Operas (2006), and, as co-author, the ENO Opera Guide on Falstaff. He is Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, president of the City Music Society and of Putney Music, vice-president of Chelsea Opera Group, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a member of the boards of St John’s Smith Square and the International Musicians Seminar, and founder-conductor of the Thorington Players, an amateur orchestra which gives concerts for charity and which recently performed Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis at St John’s. He has taught graduate and undergraduate courses at the University of California, Davis, and has been visiting fellow at the Getty Center in Santa Monica and at Merton College, Oxford.