Our Musical Director
 

PAUL DRAYTON  is a pianist, composer and conductor.  He gained the advanced piano performing diploma of the Royal Academy of Music while still only sixteen, then read for a music degree at Oxford, followed by a B. Mus. in composition.  Alongside his day-job as a teacher he has performed several of the mainstream piano concertos, given informal lecture recitals and even appeared occasionally in a jazz trio. 

Now living in Cornwall he is conductor of St. Austell Choral Society who gave the first performance of his cantata The Lady of Shalott.  He is also musical director of Duchy Opera, which recently premiered his opera The Hanging Oak.  His compositions have been published, performed and broadcast worldwide, and he has enjoyed a particularly long relationship with The King’s Singers, who have just commissioned a new work to mark the Queen’s jubilee.  His recent book Unheard Melodies, a light-hearted and non-technical guide to music, is available online at Amazon.com and his beginner’s piano guide Fun for Ten Fingers (OUP) has sold around 50,000 copies to date.

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This web site is written and maintained by Andrew Crawshaw: Crawshaws@aol.com