The Richard Williams Singers

Our History

The choir was formed in 1965 as the Tonyrefail Children's Choir under the musical direction of the late Richard Williams and very soon established itself as one of the premier youth choirs in the country. Prize winning performances in numerous eisteddfodau and the International Choral Festival in Montreux quickly became the norm. In 1973 the choir changed its name to the Richard Williams Junior Singers and later became the Richard Williams Singers. For well over two decades the choir performed on TV and radio programmes on an almost monthly basis, totalling around two hundred and seventy appearances including their own 6 week series on S4C, Gorau Corau Richard Williams. in addition, the choir has made several very successful commercial recordings. Overseas tours by the Richard Williams Singers to Canada, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Ireland, Russia and the Ukraine, Switzerland and the USA have given more distant audiences the chance to hear the choir's unique sound.

There have been many concert highlights over the years. These have included 12 performances at the Royal Albert Hall, London, being guests at the “World Choir Concert” in Cardiff with 10,000 Male Voices and Shirley Bassey, appearing at the opening of St David’s Hall, Cardiff followed by over 50 further performances at this venue.

The choir appeared on Rick Wakeman’s No 1 album ‘Going for the One’ recorded in Switzerland. The choir has many friends and admirers both home and abroad among these being a number of artists with whom we have performed, such as Stuart Burrows, Dame Shirley Bassey, Bryn Terfyl, Owain Arwel Huggies, Rick Wakeman, Iris Williams, Max Boyce, Peter Karrie, Catherine Zeta Jones, Kerry Ellis, Ria Jones, Owen Money to name but a few.

Richard Williams MBE

My Lord and Chancellor, I am delighted to present to you today one of the most distinguished practitioners of the great Welsh tradition of choral conducting.

Richard Williams has lived for almost all his life in Tonyrefail at the mouth of the Rhondda valley. He showed signs of musicality when he was young and was successful as a singer at several eisteddfodau. At the 1938 National Eisteddfod in Cardiff he was ‘talent spotted' and at the age of fifteen was packed off to London to join a troupe of singers called Steffani's Silver Songsters, with whom he spent the next eighteen months touring music halls.

On his return to Wales he got a job as a clerk in an aircraft engine factory. For the next thirteen years he worked in the factory and studied singing privately with Frank Kellsey and Idlois Owen. He also sang with the Lyrian singers and the Welsh National Opera, soon becoming one of its principal bass singers. He was well poised for a career in music when domestic events caused him to change course. The most significant concerned his only son, who contracted meningitis as a very small baby; though he recovered he was left profoundly deaf. Mr Williams was appalled by the facilities then available and decided to educate his son himself. He re-ordered his life, taking a job as a part-time insurance salesman. He gave up his professional music and devoted his musical interests to private study and to music in Tonyrefail.

His first choir was The Gentleman Songsters, formed in 1951. Then came The Richard Williams Singers and The Richard Williams Junior Singers. Each achieved remarkable success, broadcasting frequently, recording and touring throughout Europe and North America. Through his work Tonyrefail has become synonymous with choral singing. After a long fund-raising campaign its music centre was opened, and is now active almost every dav of the week. It is possible to see there generations of his choristers passing through the nursery choir, the children's choirs and one of the senior choirs. In the mid-1970s Richard Williams formalised his own musical education. At the age of fifty-four he became a qualified teacher at the Tonyrefail Comprehensive School, where he spent the rest of his teaching career. In 1977 he was awarded the MBE for his services to music in the community.

Richard Williams' story is very special, both for the number of people who have been touched by his work and for the quality of the music-making he has promoted. His success has been written about and has been the subject of radio and television documentaries. It is to do with dedication to the community, but also to do with the richness of Richard Williams' musical imagination and its firm base in an understanding of the human voice and its repertory. He has invested the tradition of Welsh choral singing with freshness and modernity so that the idea of community music, far from being identified with narrow parochialism, serves the future of Welsh music as well as its past.

For the first time in its twenty-four years the Open University in Wales honours a musician. There can be no-one more fitting for this honour, nor a better mentor for the highest values of the musical tradition of the ordinary people of Wales.

And so, my Lord and Chancellor, by the authority of Senate I present to you for the degree of Master of the University, Richard Williams.