Fifty Years of Song, and Still Searching for More

Fifty-one years. Over 130 concerts in a single season. Six voices, one sound — and an ambition that shows no sign of softening.
The King’s Singers arrived in Asia this summer carrying both the weight of a golden legacy and the energy of a group renewed. Speaking from Tokyo, just hours before a performance at Saint Mary’s Catholic Cathedral — with a member of the Imperial family in attendance — countertenor Patrick Dunachie and bass Jonathan Howard offered a rare glimpse into the artistry and philosophy that have kept this ensemble at the pinnacle of choral music for more than half a century.
A Season of Gold, a Year of Transformation
Last year’s 50th Anniversary Gold season was, by any measure, extraordinary. More than 130 concerts across the globe, each built around a program celebrating the finest music the ensemble had gathered over five decades — new commissions, beloved arrangements, and the kind of repertoire that reminds audiences why the King’s Singers endure.
Yet even as that milestone year drew to a close, the ensemble was quietly reshaping itself. Two long-serving members departed after the final Gold concert at Washington National Cathedral — a moment of profound transition. Their successors, Nick and Eddie, made their debut at the Théâtre Montansier in Versailles. From one of the world’s great sacred spaces to one of its most storied royal theaters: a fitting baptism.
The Art of Many Voices
What makes the King’s Singers so compelling across such an extraordinary span of repertoire — from Renaissance polyphony to jazz standards, from sacred choral works to pop — is not virtuosity alone. It is adaptability rooted in deep musical intelligence.
Howard put it with characteristic clarity: the secret is to meet each style on its own terms. To stand differently, to color the voice differently, to think as the music demands. Renaissance music receives a sympathetic early-music approach; jazz is inhabited as jazz. The ensemble does not impose a single identity upon its repertoire — it becomes what the music needs.
Both Dunachie and Howard came through the rigorous choral scholar traditions of Oxford and Cambridge, where performing new music daily sharpens sight-reading and deepens musical instinct. Dunachie holds a rare distinction: he attended both Oxford and King’s College Cambridge, completing what Howard — with warm affection — called “the double.”
Love Songs, Wigmore Hall, and a Korean Farewell
The Hong Kong concert draws from Love Songs, released on Signum Records — a curated collection of the ensemble’s finest romantic repertoire from the past decade. Among its highlights is A New World, originally from the 1944 film A Star Is Born and arranged for the King’s Singers by Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, the composer beloved for his soundtrack to Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Earlier in the season, the group performed Moscow to London at Wigmore Hall — a program tracing a geographical and musical journey across ten countries, five centuries, and a mosaic of languages and traditions. For the Asian tour, repertoire is thoughtfully tailored once more: from German basilicas that call for the resonance of early music, to intimate venues where something more immediate and direct serves best.
Arirang — Beauty Without Borders
No moment on the Asian tour carries quite the cultural weight of Arirang. This ancient Korean folk song — recognized by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity — describes a lover’s departure against a landscape of mountains, rivers, and scarred skies. It is, at once, hopeful and heartbroken.
For Dunachie, performing Arirang is an act of artistic conscience. Beautiful music, he reflects, does not belong to any single tradition. It rises from every culture, every landscape, every human experience of longing. To sing it — especially now, amid a fractured global moment — is to insist on that truth.
The King’s Singers have spent fifty-one years proving precisely that: that the voice, shaped by craft and opened by curiosity, can carry the world’s music home.