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Artist Description | The Kings Chamber Orchestra
Formed in 1985 by Gerard Le Feuvre, and ranging in size from 9 to 60 players, the King’s Chamber Orchestra is an outstanding professional orchestra, who perform many times throughout the year in London, the Home Counties, and occasionally abroad.
Originally performing as a symphony orchestra, regular concerts as a chamber orchestra began in the 90s to support the Christian charitable work of Youth With A Mission at the suggestion of a cousin of Gerard’s. Consequently the orchestra’s first series in the smaller format were given at YWAM’s beautiful estate in Harpenden Herts. Today, the number of concerts has expanded from its original handful to 20 a year, mostly as a chamber orchestra but sometimes as a symphony orchestra or chamber ensemble ensemble.
KCO’s members are distinguished musicians, committed Christians, and friends whom Gerard has gathered together while freelancing with some of the finest orchestras in the country, and who share an interest in breaking down traditional walls for the sake of reaching a new generation. The orchestra’s enthusiasm and humour, and a unique ability to touch the public with improvisations and worship, has attracted large and often unprecedented audiences wherever it has regularly performed. During the last twenty years KCO has broadcast, recorded, and performed in a variety of venues ranging from the Royal Albert Hall to a number of more local venues in the “shires”.
Because of the unique way our concert programmes are presented, with humour depth and originality, we distinguish between those programmes of our own (Kings Chamber Orchestra) and those programmes where we are effectively hired to perform someone else’s programme. This is common in support of a choir for a special occasion or similar, and under those circumstances we perform under the name Kings Sinfonietta.
Gerard Le Feuvre, Founder
Gerard Le Feuvre was born in the island of Jersey in the Channel Islands in 1962. Like many of his generation, his musical inspiration as a child came from Jaqueline Du Pre (also descended from a Jersey family), with whom he is distantly related, and by his mid teens Gerard had won two national awards and was described as one of the most outstanding young British cellists of his generation.
He went on to win scholarships to the Royal Academy of Music, the Banff School of Performing Arts (Canada), and the Sibelius Academy (Finland), studying with some of the greatest teachers and cellists in the world; Florence Hooton, Aldo Parisot, Vladimir Orloff, T. Tsutsumi, Arto Noras and in master class with Paul Tortelier. He was awarded the Lloyd’s Bank national award for “outstanding musicianship and musical attainment”, as principal cello in the National Youth Orchestra, and also won a large award for study abroad, given by the Countess of Munster Musical Trust. In 1980 while still a student, he gained first prize (CBS Records award) in the Royal Society of Arts national competition, and performed in the Luzern Festival in Switzerland, after which he was described as “a cellist of the highest class” in the international press.
Over the last 20 years, Gerard has given over 500 recitals mostly with the distinguished British pianist Nigel Clayton, and has performed concertos in the UK, Germany, Scandinavia, and in the USA. He has had several works written for him by distinguished British composers and is an active composer himself, writing many works for celli, and for his Bassoonist wife Sarah. He was for seven years the cellist of the internationally renowned English String Quartet (led by Diana Cummings), and continues to work with Diana as principal cellist of the Milton Keynes City Orchestra, the distinguished resident orchestra in Milton Keynes’ hugely successful new theatre. Gerard has free-lanced, playing principal cello with the English Chamber Orchestra, the English Sinfonia, the Royal Ballet Sinfonia, the New Queen’s Hall Orchestra, and many other distinguished chamber orchestras as well as continuing to appear in the UK and abroad as soloist.
In recent years, Gerard has regularly performed in the U.S.A. He received a standing ovation at the Masterworks Arts Festival in up-state New York for a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations for cello and orchestra and a repeat performance in Princeton New Jersey was also highly acclaimed in the press. Gerard is also Director of the Kings Chamber Orchestra, an orchestra renowned as much for its humour and its pioneering improvisations as for its conventional repertoire. In the year 2000, the Royal Academy of Music awarded Gerard the title of “Associate” in honour of his “outstanding achievements in the music profession”.
“I am convinced of his outstanding musical, artistic, instrumental, and human qualities”
Arto Noras, International solo cellist
“Outstandingly talented, as well as a performer, he is a gifted and active composer. He has the very special gift of being able to penetrate to the heart of all that he plays, and thereby rivets the attention of his audience”
Sir David Lumsden Principal , Royal Academy of Music
“His adaptable and original personality enabled us to offer him engagements as a soloist/presenter in situations in which we could have placed none other of the musicians on our comprehensive list. Not only is Gerard an unusually talented musician, but his special qualities of spirituality, and practicality have combined to make him an ideal example of the musician serving his community as envisaged by Sir Yehudi Menuhin in his “Live Music Now” scheme.”
Sheila Gold, Live Music Now International
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