David Leigh is the Assistant Organist and Director of the Cathedral Girls’ Choir at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin and pursues a busy career as conductor, orchestral keyboard player and occasional organ recitalist, playing regularly in a wide-ranging repertoire with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, the NSO, Camerata Ireland and the Ulster Orchestra. He is Musical Director of the Gaudete Singers and of the Ulysses Choir and Chorus Master of the Culwick Choral Society. He has recently been appointed Musical Director of the University of Dublin Choral Society with whom he recently conducted two performances of Haydn’s Creation.
Following organ scholarships at Blackburn and Lichfield cathedrals, David read music at Oxford, where he was organ scholar of St Peter’s College and Assisting Organist of Magdalen College. At nineteen he won the Turpin and Durrant prizes in the examination for Fellowship of the Royal College of Organists, and held the Oxford University Betts Scholarship in 1995-6, and is a former student of David Sanger and Nicolas Kynaston. As a solo recitalist he has performed in most of the leading venues in Ireland and the UK, and has particularly championed large scale romantic and twentieth century works, including the complete organ symphonies of Louis Vierne (1998, 2002) and the Irish premières of Francis Pott’s Christus in 2003 (David remains the fifth of only six organists worldwide who have performed this two and a half hour solo organ symphony) and of Karg-Elert’s Symphony in F# minor, a performance he repeated in Westminster Cathedral early in 2008. In the Pipeworks festival in June 2008, he played the complete organ works of Olivier Messiaen in collaboration with Tristan Russcher (Assistant Director of Music at Christ Church Cathedral Dublin) to mark the centenary of the composer’s birth. In late 2008, he gave solo recitals in Belfast, Wells Cathedral and Magdalen College, Oxford, and Westminster Cathedral. David has broadcast regularly on RTÉ radio and television, BBC Radios 3 and 4 and BBC TV, features on numerous recordings as conductor, accompanist, orchestral keyboard and continuo player, and has released three solo discs on the organ of St Patrick’s Cathedral which include Reger’s Variations in F# minor and Dupré’s Evocation in addition to the first recording of Francis Pott’s Toccata.