Audrey Langford
was the founder and first Music Director of the Bromley Philharmonic Choir,
and could claim to have been the doyenne of voice training and coaching. To
her, singing was the breath of life.
She originally studied piano at
the Royal College of Music, with singing as a second study. But when she
left in 1933, it was to become the youngest singer at Covent Garden,
Sir
Thomas Beecham having invited her to appear there. She continued to sing in
his Wagner seasons until the outbreak of war. She also gave a series of song
recitals for the BBC, replacing
Dame Maggie Teyte at short notice. She spent
the war years entertaining the troops with
ENSA (including a special
performance for Queen Mary at Sandringham), started conducting a local choir
— and took her first steps towards teaching. As an experiment, she helped a
young girl who had ambitions to be an opera singer. Her name was
Josephine
Veasey, and she became a leading mezzo-soprano.
Consciously or not,
she had found her vocation. She began to teach, alongside her already
prospering career as a performer, and her conducting activities. Soon,
however, a perforated ear-drum brought her own singing career to a premature
end. That left conducting and teaching. She founded and conducted the
Bromley Philharmonic Choir and the Kentish Opera Group, challenging them
both with an unexpected and adventurous repertoire, including many world
premières.
In the 1970s she began to be invited to give master
classes all over the world: together with her husband Andy she travelled to
Santa Fe, returning there annually for more than ten years. She was also
regularly asked to Chicago, New York and Sydney, where she grew to like
spending the winter months. In the 1980s she frequently took classes at the
Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. She relinquished the
conductorship of Bromley Philharmonic Choir in 1981 for two reasons: firstly
she was determined that the Choir should continue successfully, and secondly
her teaching career took her abroad far too often for the rehearsals of the
Choir to have the continuity they needed.
