| Biography | Born in Canada, Greg Skidmore arrived in England as an undergraduate at Royal Holloway College, University of London. After graduating with First Class Honours in Music, his post-graduate Choral Scholarship at Wells Cathedral lead him to Lay Clerkships at Gloucester Cathedral and Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford. He now lives in London and pursues a varied career as a consort, choral, and solo oratorio singer alongside his burgeoning work as a conductor and workshop leader.
Solo engagements have included working with ballet dancer Carlos Acosta in his A Classical Farewell at the Royal Albert Hall; Stravinsky's Canticum Sacrum, Fauré's Requiem, and Handel's Messiah with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in Symphony Hall, Birmingham; Handel's Messiah with the Irish Baroque Orchestra; Purcell's Ode for St Cecilia's Day and Handel's Dixit Dominus with the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment; Purcell's Fairy Queen with the Gabrieli Consort at the Spitalfields Festival in London; Bach's St. Matthew and St. John Passions, Mass in B Minor, Christmas Oratorio, and Magnificat all with Ex Cathedra as part of a long and regular association with the group; Mendelssohn's Elijah; Carl Orff's Carmina Burana; Monterverdi's 1610 Vespers at the Brighton Early Music Festival, and with I Fagiolini and the BBC Singers at the Barbican Centre's Milton Court Concert Hall; and two recent performances of Samuel Barber's magnificent song for baritone and string quartet, Dover Beach, at the Southwell Music Festival and with Ensemble Perpetuo.
His solo work has taken him to Washington National Cathedral in the United States; the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice; deSingel in Antwerp; Laeiszhalle in Hamburg; Wells, Gloucester, York, and Hereford cathedrals in the UK; and the Queen Elizabeth Hall and St. John's Smith Square in London among many others. His solo recording debut, released in 2011, was as Christus on Ex Cathedra's recording of the Lassus St. Matthew Passion. A 2016 CD release of Alec Roth's oratorio A Time to Dance features Greg performing a role written specifically for him.
Equally comfortable in choral and consort singing, he has appeared with The Tallis Scholars, The Sixteen, The Cardinall's Musick, Tenebrae, The Gabrieli Consort, Alamire, Contrapunctus, The Eric Whitacre Singers, Collegium Vocale Ghent, Cappella Amsterdam, La Grand Chapelle (Madrid), Currende and Psallentes (both based in Belgium), The National Chamber Choir of Ireland, and the Tafelmusik Baroque Chamber Choir (Toronto), among others. He can be heard on discs released by Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, Harmonia Mundi USA, and others, including Alamire's recent Grammophone Early Music Award winning disc, 'The Spy's Choirbook'. A recent highlight was his participation in I Fagiolini's Betrayal, a fully staged, devised presentation of the madrigals and sacred music of Carlo Gesualdo. 2017, the 450th anniversary of Monteverdi's birth, is a busy year for I Fagiolini, and Greg looks forward to many concerts of Monteverdi's madrigals and sacred music, a new CD release, and a tour of his opera Orfeo with the group.
While at Christ Church in Oxford, he began a course of doctoral research in Musicology at the University of Oxford and started his own men's voices consort, I Dedicati. Recently he was appointed Musical Director of The Lacock Scholars and gives a regular series of concerts with them, creating site-specific evenings that weave polyphonic music with plainsong and silence. He has given workshops and masterclasses in the UK, France, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia in association with The Sixteen and I Fagiolini and on his own, specialising in various collections of Renaissance polyphonic repertoire. Last year he joined the long list of early music conductors associated with the week-long Lacock Courses. He is increasingly engaged in Canada as a guest conductor, clinician, and record producer. He has been published in Early Music and his writing has appeared in programmes and CD liner notes for The Tallis Scholars, The Sixteen, The Cardinall's Musick, The Gabrieli Consort, Tenebrae, and Ex Cathedra.
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