“What the choristers do is of extraordinary complexity; seven or eight services a week, many hundreds of people listening, and a relatively short rehearsal time, says master of the choristers and organist Andrew Nethsingha.
“My job is to make them feel it’s easy. If I don’t tell them that this music is difficult they won’t think it is difficult.”
Mr Nethsingha joined the choir school shortly before the King’s Coronation.
“It had been 70 or so years since the last coronation, and so not many people I could ask for advice. I had a wonderful file of letters between the man who had been the organist in 1953 and the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, so I was able to consult their notes and see their advice to their successors.”
He himself grew up at a choir school in Cambridge, where his late father Lucian Nethsingha, external had been the first cathedral organist of colour.
“My dad was born in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, and came over here in 1954 when he was 18 to study music in Cambridge and London. I’ve followed in his footsteps.”