The Choir of The Queen’s College, Oxford is among the finest and most active university choirs in the UK.

Its wide-ranging repertory includes a rich array of music from Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces to contemporary works, including commissions. During the academic year the Choir provides the music for regular services in the splendid Baroque Chapel of The Queen’s College and its extensive concert schedule involves appearances in many parts of the UK and abroad, including work with various professional orchestras such as the Academy of Ancient Music, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, The Brook Street Band, the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, and Instruments of Time and Truth. The Choir broadcasts regularly on BBC Radio, while tours in recent years have included China, the USA, Sri Lanka, Italy, Portugal, Spain, France, the Low Countries, and Germany. Summer 2019 sees the Choir’s first visit to South America.

The Choir's latest CD recording was released in February 2019, and features the Missa Gloria tibi trinitas and other works by the sixteenth-century composer John Taverner. It met with universal acclaim as critics praised the grandeur of the full ensemble and the wonderful wall of sound. Equally glowing reviews met The House of the Mind in 2018, a disc celebrating the music of Herbert Howells, setting his works alongside pieces he inspired and influenced, including works by Nico Muhly and David Bednall. Reviewers commented on both the excellent performance and the intriguing choice of repertoire. Queen's Choir has also recorded for film at the famous Abbey Road Studios, and appears on the Grammy-nominated soundtrack of the Warner-Brothers film Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which was released in July 2009.

Coupling powerful interpretations with pathbreaking scholarship, Contrapunctus presents music by the best known composers as well as unfamiliar masterpieces. The group’s repertoire is drawn from England, the Low Countries, Spain, Portugal and Germany, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The scholarly facet of the group’s work – including the discovery of long-lost music and reconstructions of original performing contexts – allows audiences to experience the first performances of many works in modern times. Since its foundation in 2010, the group has appeared in the AMUZ Festival in Antwerp, the Utrecht Early Music Festival, the Festival van Vlaanderen in Mechelen and Averbode, the Music Sacra Festival in Maastricht, the Festival de Música Antigua de Úbeda y Baeza in Spain, the Eboræ Musica Festival and Setúbal Festival in Portugal, the concert series at De Bijloke in Ghent, and the Martin Randall Festival of Spanish Music (Seville Cathedral). The ensemble’s first two recordings, Libera nos and In the Midst of Life, were both shortlisted for the Gramophone Early Music Award. As Vocal Consort in Residence at the University of Oxford, the group is a collaborator in the Tudor Partbooks Project, the aim of which is to study the Baldwin partbooks and other sets of Tudor partbooks, to restore the missing voice parts of the repertories they contain, and to broaden public knowledge of this repertory.

Owen Rees is both performer and scholar, his scholarship consistently informing his performances. Through his extensive work as a choral director, he has brought to the concert hall and recording studio substantial repertories of magnificent Renaissance and Baroque music, including many previously unknown or little-known works from Spain and Portugal. His interpretations of these repertories have been acclaimed as ‘rare examples of scholarship and musicianship combining to result in performances that are both impressive and immediately attractive to the listener’, and he has been described as ‘one of the most energetic and persuasive voices’ in this field. He has conducted at festivals worldwide, and is increasingly busy as a leader of workshops on performance of Renaissance polyphony. He has broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4, and on Portuguese, Spanish, and Norwegian radio. He has released CD recordings on the Hyperion, Signum, and Avie labels to consistently high critical acclaim and his work has been shortlisted for the Gramophone Early Music Award.
Owen Rees began his academic and conducting career as Organ Scholar at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, studying with Peter le Huray and Iain Fenlon. After a period as College Lecturer in Music at St Peter’s College and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, he joined the Music Department at the University of Surrey, where he was promoted to the post of Reader. In 1997 he returned to Oxford, where—in addition to his posts of Fellow in Music at The Queen’s College and Director of Music of the Choir of The Queen's College—he is Senior Research Fellow at Somerville College and a Professor in the Faculty of Music. His numerous published studies include work on the Spanish composers Cristóbal de Morales and Francisco Guerrero and the English composer William Byrd.