Warwick and Kenilworth Choral Society


Ronald Binnie, Musical Director

Ronald Binnie

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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