Director of RSNO Junior Chorus
Born: May 10, 1925;
Died: October 10, 2016
JEAN Kidd, who has died aged 91, was the founder and director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra Junior Chorus, a role which, from 1978, she was fabulously well equipped to play.
As head of music at Bellahouston Academy in Glasgow, she had recruited a school choir of notable quality, which had sung for Sir Alexander Gibson, the orchestra’s conductor. By that time the scheme for forming a much-needed junior chorus was taking shape and her musical abilities were regarded as the right ones to bring it to reality.
She had studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, winning a City of Glasgow bursary as the best student of her year. When invited to assemble the new RSNO Junior Chorus she chose many of her young voices from Bellahouston for their first RSNO appearance, participating in a performance of Berlioz’s Requiem in one of the RSNO’s Kelvin Hall proms, with Gibson conducting.
Her ambitions for them were always of the highest, and by the time of the chorus’s 30th anniversary appearance, a ceaseless flow of young singers had been trained by her and she had become a renowned figure in Scottish musical life, with Christopher Bell as her established successor.
Yet her musical ambitions for her young singers had been visible from the start. When, in the 1960s, the Edinburgh Festival had required a junior chorus at short notice for Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust with the excitable Sir Georg Solti as conductor, he hissed to the chorusmaster after the performance that the young singers had been out of tune. It was against that unforgotten background that Jean Kidd’s RSNO junior chorus was subsequently created, and her chorus made its own festival debut singing the same work as an antidote to the Solti performance.
By 1980 it had become an integral part of the RSNO alongside the full-size RSNO Chorus, taking part in major concerts, recording sessions and broadcasts with Gibson and various guest conductors. A grant from the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust in 1983 enabled Kidd to form a new training offshoot for less experienced voices and a Mixed Voice youth chorus.
By the time of Glasgow’s year of culture in 1991, the RSNO Junior Chorus had sung in Mahler’s massive Eighth Symphony in the new Glasgow Royal Concert Hall as well as an RSNO commission, Gordon Crosse’s Sea Psalms.
It had also appeared in a children’s ballad opera inspired by West of Scotland street songs in the RSAMD’s Athenaeum Theatre and in Christmas Carol concerts with the RSNO. Bach’s St John Passion was sung in Glasgow University Chapel, a Carmina Burana at the RSNO proms and, some time earlier, a celebrated account of Britten’s War Requiem, with its atmospheric children’s choruses, conducted at the Edinburgh Festival by Sir Alexander Gibson.
With Jean Kidd’s musical know-how, recruiting new voices into the Junior Chorus had always been through scrupulous audition with visits to schools in and around Glasgow and as far away as Perthshire. Today, thanks to all she did, the chorus goes from strength to strength as one of the RSNO’s special assets, and at the 30th anniversary she spoke of how her choristers continued to benefit from the opportunities they had been given.
By that time she had retired to live in Comrie, where she founded the Comrie Kids Music Group and encouraged people of all ages to participate, hosting their concerts in her living room.
CONRAD WILSON
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