Michael Downes

MA, MPhil, DPhil

Michael Downes became the University's first full-time Director of Music in 2008, having previously held a similar post at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. He read English and Music at King's College, Cambridge, and completed a doctorate on Debussy at the University of Sussex. He studied the cello with teachers including Ioan Davies and Timothy Mason and conducted with teachers including Lionel Friend and Colin Metters. Before moving to Scotland, he conducted numerous choral, operatic, orchestral and contemporary music groups in London and the South-East.

For the Music Centre, he shares the conducting of the St Andrews Chamber Orchestra, which brings together the best players from the University community, with Bede Williams, Deputy Director of Music. He also conducts the McPherson Singers, a new choir for staff, postgraduates and friends of the University. In 2009 he founded Byre Opera, which he has subsequently conducted in well-received annual productions including Britten's Rape of Lucretia, Albert Herring and The Turn of the Screw, Handel's Xerxes and Acis and Galatea, and the world premiere of Matthew Rooke’s chamber version of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. Michael’s conducting of Turn of the Screw was praised by Andrew Clark in Opera magazine as ‘impressive … maintain[ing] dramatic momentum while remaining acutely sensitive to the needs of his cast’. Since 2009 he has also been the musical director of the town-gown St Andrews Chorus, one of the largest and most enterprising choral societies in Scotland, whom he has conducted in works including Elgar’s The Apostles,The Kingdom and The Dream of Gerontius, Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. Michael is heavily involved in the Music Centre’s academic teaching: he contributes to modules including MU1005 (Words and Music), MU2001 (Making Music 2) and MU5002 (Sacred Music in the West: History and Context) as well as to music-related modules offered by other Schools in the University.

Michael is also active outside the University as a lecturer and writer on music and opera. He has lectured for most of the UK’s leading opera companies and writes programme notes for organisations including Wigmore Hall and Snape Maltings. He collaborated with Nike Wagner, great-granddaughter of Richard, on the English version of her book about her family’s history, and has written books both with and about the British composer Jonathan Harvey. Michael’s new book on Wagner’s Ring cycle is published in the UK by Faber and Faber as Story of the Century, and in the US by Pegasus Books as Wagner and the Creation of the Ring. It was named in the Presto Music Awards as one of the five best music books of 2024, and described by Gramophone magazine as ‘the best introduction to the Ring out there’. Michael’s next book will be a biography of Edward Elgar focusing on his religious preoccupations, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2027 as part of its Spiritual Lives series. 

Personal website: www.michaeldownes.com