Ronald Binnie, Musical Director
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Ronald Binnie became accompanist for WKCS in 1993 and took over as conductor in
March 1996. The summer 2005 concert marked the fortieth time he had conducted
the Society.
He has had a varied career. His earliest musical tuition was at
the
hands of his mother, a singer and music teacher. While other
teenagers were at
the Saturday night hop, Ronald would frequently be
found at home playing string
quartets and quintets with his father, a
viola player, and his father's
chamber-music companions. He never
considered this an unusual childhood, and if
his contemporaries did,
they never commented on it. Subsequently he studied at
the Royal
Scottish Academy of Music, from which he graduated in 1968, to take
up
a position as a music teacher in Edinburgh, and later in St Andrews.
In order to preserve his great love for music, he abandoned the classroom
in
1978 and embarked on a new venture in the world of educational
publishing,
eventually going into partnership and setting up his own
publishing house in
1993. Throughout all this runs a constant thread
of music from the singer,
sometime organist and violin player, and
most frequently the conductor,
variously of choral societies, chamber
and church choirs, symphony orchestras
and in the light operatic world
- everything from Annie Get Your Gun to
Zadok the Priest!
Ronald Binnie describes the business of running a thriving and
rapidly
expanding company as 'frenetic', with his Monday night
rehearsals of the
Warwick and Kenilworth Choral Society his 'weekly
oasis of sanity'. Besides his
passion for the baton, the other loves
in his life include reading books in the
sun, snorkelling over coral
reefs and being a granddad.
As befits a musician, Ron's birthday is on the feast day of St Cecilia, patron
saint of music, a date he shares with the composers Benjamin Britten,
Orlando Gibbons and Joaquín Rodrigo.
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