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David Briggs is one of the world's foremost concert organists, with an unusual specialty in the French improvisatory tradition. He began his career in cathedral posts and then became mostly a concert organist.

Briggs was born on November 1, 1962, in Bromsgrove, near Birmingham, England. His grandfather, Lawrence Briggs, had been a longtime Birmingham church organist, and his parents met while playing in a Birmingham orchestra. David's first formal musical experiences came as a chorister at Birmingham Cathedral, and it was there that he first became interested in the organ; an assistant let him improvise on the organ when the regular organist was not present. In 1973, Briggs earned a full scholarship to the Solihull School, studying piano, violin, viola, counterpoint, harmony, and organ. He won many honors during this period and also traveled to London for lessons with David Popplewell. He also played the viola in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain from 1977 to 1981. From 1981 to 1984, Briggs studied organ at King's College, Cambridge. In 1982 and 1983, he performed in the annual Festival of Lessons and Carols before a worldwide audience of 35 million. Briggs also traveled to Paris for lessons in repertoire and improvisation with Jean Langlais, and there, he became interested in the organ improvisations of Pierre Cochereau. He transcribed Cochereau's improvisations from cassette recordings, a task that took 11 years.

From 1985 to 2002, Briggs held organist posts at Hereford, Truro, and Gloucester Cathedrals. At the latter two institutions, he served as a consultant for the refurbishing of the cathedral organs, and at Gloucester, he also served as conductor for the venerable Three Choirs Festival. In 1994, he made his recording debut on the Priory Records label with the album Improvisation, The Illusionist's Art. Since then, he has also recorded for Delos, Pro Organo, Analekta, and other labels. On Analekta, he recorded a complete cycle of his transcriptions of Mahler's symphonies for organ; he is prolific as an arranger, often of orchestral works. Briggs moved to the U.S. in 2003 and has stayed on in North America, living in New York, Ipswich, Massachusetts, and Toronto. He tours internationally, giving some 65 concerts annually. Since 2017, Briggs has been artist-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. By 2022, his recording catalog numbered some 30 items, and that year, he released the album Vaughan Williams: Transcriptions from Truro on the Albion label. ~ James Manheim

As the long-time music director of the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, Stephen Cleobury led an extraordinary career during which he fundamentally shaped that venerable institution artistically. He championed contemporary music to a degree unusual for a conductor at the heart of the English choral tradition.

Cleobury (pronounced "CLOW-bury" with the first syllable rhyming with "how") was born in Bromley, in Kent County in southeast England, on December 31, 1948. His younger brother, Nicholas Cleobury, is also a conductor. Cleobury's musical career began, as with so many other choral directors, as a boy soprano, in his case at Worcester Cathedral. Cleobury attended St. John's College, Cambridge, as an organ scholar, studying organ and choral music with David Willcocks and George Guest. His first post was as sub-organist at Westminster Abbey. In 1976, he conducted a new work, The Lion of Suffolk, by Malcolm Williamson at a memorial service for Benjamin Britten, and he continued to emphasize contemporary music in his programming. He also worked at the Northampton Grammar School and St. Matthew's Church in Northampton in the 1970s. In 1979, Cleobury was promoted to master of music at Westminster Cathedral.

He moved to King's College as music director in 1982, a position that also involved conducting the school's centuries-old choir. To general listeners, the choir may be best known for its annual, internationally broadcast Christmas-season Festival of Lessons and Carols, which Cleobury revivified through the commissioning of a new work for the event each year. He became director of the Cambridge University Musical Society in 1983; with that university-wide choral-orchestral group, he was able to conduct larger works, including a new piece in 2009 by Peter Maxwell Davies, The Sorcerer's Mirror, that addressed the threat of climate change and marked the 800th anniversary of Cambridge. Cleobury also served as director of the BBC Singers from 1995 to 2007 and continued to be associated with the group as conductor laureate.

He led the Choir of King's College in recordings for a wide variety of labels, as organist as well as choir director, on the choir's own label in the 2010s. For that imprint, he released a recording of Herbert Howells' An English Mass in 2019. Cleobury retired in September of 2019 following a long battle with cancer and passed away in York on November 22, 2019. His influence will continue to be felt in the many choral arrangements he had made, in use at King's and around the world. ~ James Manheim