When the Christmas Eve service from King’s College, Cambridge, was first broadcast in 1928, few people can have realised that the seeds of a revolution in the performance of choral music were about to be sown. The sower-in-chief was Boris Ord, who between 1929 and 1957 created the Choir of King’s College as we know it today. Yet it was during the 16-year rule of Ord’s successor at King’s, David Willcocks, that the revolution gathered wider currency and became irreversible – witness the founding of the Heinrich Schütz Choir in 1962 and the Monteverdi Choir in 1964 by two young choral reformers, Roger Norrington and John Eliot Gardiner respectively.

It seems to have been written in the stars that Willcocks would succeed Ord when the sacred vessel that was the King’s choir was eventually handed on. Willcocks had arrived at King’s as an organ scholar in September 1939, already steeped in the traditions of English choral music from his time as a chorister at Westminster Abbey. But there was more. As a music scholar at Ord’s old school, Clifton College in Bristol, where the redoubtable Douglas Fox was director of music, Willcocks had been introduced to worlds beyond the choir stalls and organ loft.

In June 1937, Fox had driven him to Oxford to hear the BBC SO under Arturo Toscanini. Meanwhile, at Bristol’s Colston Hall he’d heard Wilhelm Furtwängler conduct the Berlin Philharmonic and – of particular interest given Willcocks’s own formidable skills as a pianist – recitals by Alfred Cortot, Vladimir Horowitz, Arthur Rubinstein, Artur Schnabel and (a special memory) Rachmaninov playing Rachmaninov.

One of my own most influential teachers was a young organ scholar from St John’s College, Cambridge, Dr John Bishop, who’d blown into my High Anglican boarding school in Nottinghamshire in 1958. I was already fascinated by the sound of George Guest’s choir at St John’s, whose boys sang in that robust, keen-edged manner described as ‘continental’. But what of King’s? My mentor was an admirer of Ord, but rather cooler about Willcocks, until the day I presented him with a pair of King’s recordings. The first was a bobby-dazzler of a performance of Haydn’s Nelson Mass; the second a King’s carol anthology, ‘On Christmas Night’, from which emanated sounds that mesmerise me still.

I was too young to have heard Willcocks during his time in Worcester, and experienced him live only at the Bach Choir’s Eastertide performances of the St Matthew Passion in London. What I was hearing on those early recordings, however, was that same exactness of rhythm, flawless ensemble and purity of intonation that I was also admiring in recordings by the Chicago and Cleveland orchestras under Fritz Reiner and George Szell, and the same perfectly blended sound textures that were the hallmark of Herbert von Karajan’s rejuvenated Berlin Philharmonic.

Like any master conductor, Willcocks could hold a tempo, however slow, as well as giving to the very longest works an overarching shape and sense of continuity. It helped that he had an astonishing memory, first evident in Cambridge in 1947 when he conducted the St Matthew Passion, tricky recitatives and all, without a score. His role model as an aspiring choral conductor had been Malcolm Sargent, with his immaculate stick technique and an ability, later shared by Willcocks, for drawing professional performances from large amateur choirs.

Working with amateurs, Willcocks could, with no loss of rigour, charm the birds from the trees. With professionals – and in Willcocks’s book that included the King’s choir, where even the youngest boy was taught not by instruction, but by being trained to listen – it was entirely different. It’s said that he ran the choir ‘like an army battalion’, driven by an absolute sense of what should be achieved and bolstered by techniques of organisation and man-management learnt during the Second World War. Those same skills also explain his later success as a legendary director-administrator of the Royal College of Music in London.

Accuracy of pitch was a famous Willcocks obsession. (‘That note isn’t actually flat, but it might be,’ is an oft-quoted remark.) But then, at King’s, it had to be. For a working musician, the principal glories of the King’s acoustic are the purity of the sound, the extraordinary ‘carry’ of the pianissimos and the sustained evenness of the sound’s decay. (As in that legendary live 1963 recording of Allegri’s Miserere.) Yet utter one false note, and that five-second reverberation will make it seem as if the recording angel is registering it for all eternity.

The Ord/Willcocks choirs eschewed vibrato. This didn’t suit all music, nor is it to everyone’s taste, but vibrato didn’t sit well with the choir’s core repertoire of 16th- and early 17th-century music: Masses by Taverner, Tye and Byrd, Tallis’s 40-part motet and the music of Gibbons.

Seen from today’s perspective, that post-war era was another country, not least in the crucial matter of diction (the choir’s ‘Noël Coward diction’, as John Rutter put it), which was such a boon before received pronunciation was kicked into the gutter during a time of accelerating social change.

Willcocks the workaholic rarely had time to listen to records, yet he was meticulous in listening to playbacks – until, that is, he had complete trust in his producer, which was usually quickly won. One such was EMI’s Christopher Bishop, to whose suggestion we owe the recordings of ‘The Psalms of David’, which were one of the choir’s in-house specialities, with Willcocks himself as the famously inventive organist. For many, the two discs are among the most memorable and enduringly satisfying of all Willcocks’s King’s recordings. As Bishop later put it, ‘The words, the fabulous choir, the fabulous singing, and David’s word-rhythm – absolutely perfect.’

For Willcocks, the gramophone was vital for taking the choir’s work to a wider audience and for leaving to posterity what he called ‘material for scholars to study’. The move in the early 1960s to take on repertoire that involved recording with orchestras both strengthened the choir and widened its reach and reputation. The work itself was typically intense – his family often holidaying on a canal boat to give him domestic space during recording weeks.

Like Fauré and his beloved Vaughan Williams, Willcocks was what might be called a Christian agnostic. Asked in a 2010 edition of BBC Radio 4’s Soul Music about the events of July 1944 for which he was awarded the Military Cross, he said that whenever he looked back to that time, and the many comrades who lost their lives, it was the Fauré Requiem which played in his mind. We hear the impact of that in the more than usually powerful, yet unfailingly eloquent recording of the Requiem he made at King’s in 1967.

Unsurprisingly, those qualities of courage and persistence that had earned him the Military Cross are similar to those which underpinned what was, by any measure, an extraordinary life of service to music.

Defining moments

• 1929 – Launch of a life in music, aged nine

Having been home-schooled by mother, as youngest of three boys (born Newquay, Cornwall, December 30, 1919), and after piano tuner discovers he has perfect pitch, is enrolled as Westminster Abbey chorister. Organ lessons with choir director Ernest Bullock

• 1934 – Scholarship boy

Wins music scholarship to Clifton College, Bristol, where he studies with revered all-round musician Dr Douglas Fox

• 1938 – Journey towards King’s

Begins gap year at School of English Church Music (now Royal School of Church Music), Chislehurst, and Royal College of Music, London, in preparation for successful bid to secure organ scholarship at King’s College, Cambridge, beginning 1939

• 1944 – War hero

Having joined Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry in 1940, plays crucial role in defence of Hill 112 during advance on Caen, July 11-12; awarded Military Cross, December 21

• 1947 – A cathedral beckons

Elected to a fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge. Accepts position of organist and choirmaster at Salisbury Cathedral

• 1950 – Worcester and beyond

Succeeds Sir Ivor Atkins at Worcester Cathedral. Works with Three Choirs Festival and City of Birmingham Choir

• 1957 – Return to King’s

Noel Annan, Provost of King’s, ensures Willcocks inherits choir from now ailing Boris Ord. Full takeover occurs January 1958

• 1958 – First recording

The Christmas Eve Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols is recorded live in King’s College chapel by Argo

• 1960 – Worlds elsewhere

Succeeds Reginald Jacques as musical director of the Bach Choir (in post till 1998). 1961: first volume of Carols for Choirs
(ed. Jacques and Willcocks) published by Oxford University Press

• 1974 – Administrator extraordinary

Takes up post as Director of Royal College of Music, a 10-year tenure that includes start of building of new Britten Theatre

• 2008 – Recollections in tranquillity

A Life in Music: Conversations with Sir David Willcocks and Friends published by Oxford University Press ahead of 90th birthday. Dies September 17, 2015, age 95