Sound choice

SIR – Keith Parsons’s objections (Letters, May 31) to the appointment of Daniel Hyde as the next director of music at King’s College, Cambridge, are surely unreasonable.

Keeping the throat open where it should be open is a basic necessity of classical singing, and is certainly not a common characteristic of pop singers.

Sir David Willcocks – a former director, praised by Mr Parsons – may have been a great musician, but he seemed not to understand voice production, and did few favours to the generations of choristers and choral scholars under him. The King’s sound lacked focus and was compromised by a massive outflow of breath.

Unfortunately, because of the prestige of the choir, this sound was widely imitated. The Anglican Church has not had a tradition of good voice production, but there are signs that this is improving. Peter Tyrrell

Salisbury, Wiltshire

SIR – For all his love of an “unmistakable pure sound”, it doesn’t sound as though Mr Parsons would have much time for Keats’s entrancing nightingale, who “singest of summer in full-throated ease”.

Some people are very hard to satisfy. Victoria Owens

Bristol