John Hoban
London Oratory choirmaster who encouraged girl choristers
JOHN HOBAN, who has died aged 90, was director of music at the Brompton Oratory for 24 years, and placed the church firmly on the London scene as a centre of choral excellence.
A devout Catholic with an understanding of the Latin rite, Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony, Hoban took over from Henry Washington in 1971 and immediately consolidated the place of women in the senior choir by focusing on the added dynamic range and tonal sheen that a mixed group of adult singers (as opposed to boy choristers and men) could achieve in such a large acoustic setting.
Moreover, despite the misgivings of some of the Oratory fathers, in 1972 he established a mixed junior choir, the first in a big London church to feature girl choristers, earning the approval of the Guardian.
Hoban modelled the young choir’s singing style on the fuller Mediterranean vocal sound that he had admired on visits to Spain and Italy, realising that it would suit the church’s ambience perfectly.
As a fine interpreter of the composers Palestrina and Tomás Luis de Victoria, he built a reputation for being true to the spiritual essence of the music and to the vocal ability of his singers, both with the Oratory choir and with a successful “pro-am” choir, the Scuola di Chiesa, with whom he recorded and performed regularly.
The youngest of three brothers, John Terence Anthony Hoban was born in Georgetown, British Guiana, on October 15 1926. His father, Richard, a Scots émigré, was a public health inspector; inconveniently, he tended to catch every disease he investigated, resulting in his untimely death when his youngest son was only four.
John’s mother, Ivy, was an outwardly respectable music and dance teacher who, among other weaknesses, never paid the school bills. During a chaotic upbringing, John commuted between the West Indies and Britain, attending some 15 schools in the space of 10 years, before joining the Royal Navy as a rear gunner for the last 18 months of the Second World War.
Demobilised without having seen action, he studied singing and conducting at the Royal College of Music, showing promise as a bass baritone. On graduation he began working as a singer in London’s Catholic churches, and in pantomime (appearing as “King Rat” with Frankie Howerd at the London Palladium) and operas.
In the late 1940s he became a lay clerk at Westminster under the Master of Music, George Malcolm, who instilled in him a deep love of 16th century polyphony.
In 1954 he was appointed choirmaster at Holy Redeemer, Chelsea, where in 1961 he married a soprano from Belfast, Mavis Beattie, with whom he had four children. The parish priest, Canon Alfonso de Zulueta, revived forgotten gems of the Spanish renaissance and baroque by Guerrero, Lobo, Cererols, Morales, Valls and others. Hoban founded the Scuola di Chiesa in order to bring that music back into repertoire, an ambition which, thanks to performances on the South Bank, Radio 3 and recordings, he achieved.
The success of both choirs resulted in his directorship at the Oratory, while he had a longstanding position in the BBC as an external services publicity officer for the World Service, as well as roles on The Listener and on the magazine London Calling. He retired from the Oratory in 1995 and was honoured as a Knight of St Gregory.
Hoban’s wife Mavis and his eldest son predeceased him. He is survived by his second wife, Shelley, and by the three surviving children from his first marriage.
John Hoban, born October 15 1926, died November 10 2016