Brian Kay’s working life has been divided between the broadcasting studio and the concert platform. His many presentations for BBC radio have included Brian Kay’s Sunday Morning, Brian Kay’s Light Programme, the weekly listeners’ request programme 3 for all and Choirworks – all on Radio 3 – on Radio 2 the popular programmes Melodies for You and Friday Night is Music Night, and for Radio 4, Comparing Notes, The Tingle Factor and Music in Mind. His former BBC World Service programme Classics with Kay reached an audience of millions all over the world. Brian’s television presentations have included the Cardiff Singer of the World and Choir of the Year, and for fifteen years, the New Year’s Day Concert from Vienna. He has twice won a Sony Award as Music Presenter of the Year, including the coveted Gold Award in 1996.
Brian is Principal Conductor of The Really Big Chorus, with which he regularly conducts massed voices in London’s Royal Albert Hall, together with recent concerts in Salzburg, Prague, Venice, Dubrovnik, Madeira, Malta, Riga, St. Petersburg, Hong Kong, Cape Town, New York, a performance of Handel’s Messiah in China, in Beijing’s Forbidden City Concert Hall, an annual summer school and singing cruises.
He was, for ten years, Chorus Master of the Huddersfield Choral Society, and Conductor of the Cheltenham Bach Choir, the Bradford Festival Choral Society, the Cecilian Singers of Leicester, the Kendal-based Mary Wakefield Westmorland Festival and for twenty one years, Vaughan Williams’ Surrey-based Leith Hill Musical Festival and The Burford Singers. He is a Vice-President of abcd and of the RSCM.
Brian has twice appeared at the Royal Variety Show – in 1978 as a founder member of the King’s Singers and in 1987 conducting the Huddersfield Choral Society. He sang the voice of Papageno in the movie Amadeus (his wife, the soprano Gillian Fisher sang Papagena). He has also been the lowest frog on a Paul McCartney single, one of the six wives to Harry Secombe’s Henry VIIIth, and a member of the backing group for Pink Floyd!