Music Director
Sue Hughes
Sue has been a musician all her life. She was a Junior Exhibitioner and then a full time student at Trinity College of Music where she studied piano, oboe and singing (under James Gaddarn and Jean Allister) and gained the GTCL (graduate diploma) and LTCL (piano teacher's diploma). She later completed her studies at London University, gaining a teacher's certificate from the College of S Mark and S John, Chelsea and a BMus from Goldsmiths' College. She was Director of Music at Sutton High School for over 33 years until her retirement and it was here that she discovered her passion for choir training. Her love of singing from an early age saw her joining various choirs and choruses from the New Philharmonia Chorus to the much smaller London Orpheus Choir. She gained a huge amount of choral experience, singing all the major choral works, both in the UK and abroad, under great conductors such as Klemperer and Giulini and complemented this with work as accompanist to a small choral society.
High points in Sue's life have all been associated with choral music: conducting Parry's 'I was Glad' in St Paul's Cathedral for Sutton High School's Centenary Service was an experience never to be forgotten. Under Sue's direction the Chamber Choir of Sutton High School performed in a variety of venues, ranging from The Hawth in Crawley to Notre Dame in Paris. She started the Mixed Choir of boys and girls from Sutton Grammar and Sutton High Schools and has conducted a large and diverse number of choral works from Mozart's Requiem to Bernstein's Chichester Psalms and Jenkins' Adiemus with many other standard choral works along the way.
In her spare time, Sue enjoys travel, gardening, art exhibitions, painting, learning languages and reading. She lives with her husband who is organist and choirmaster at St Matthew's, Redhill, and her son Tom, who plays the guitar and runs his own music recording business, DragonflyStudios.