Leslie became our Music Director in September 2023.
He was born in Swansea and grew up in Surrey, studied music at Reading University and holds a diploma in conducting from the Royal Academy of Music.

Sharing his career between teaching in schools and working as a professional musician, Leslie created ambitious young choirs at schools in Kent and Surrey and most recently at Colchester Royal Grammar School, where the packed programme of his boys’ choir of nearly 100 teenagers included touring to many European centres including Vienna and Salzburg, singing choral evensong with the choir of Trinity College, Cambridge and performing alongside the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. His youth opera The Master of Ashmore is a full length work written for young voices.

In 1980 Leslie formed The English Arts Chorale, an ambitious voluntary choir which has sung from memory major works including the Verdi Requiem, performed around the UK including at London’s Barbican Concert Hall with the Philharmonia Orchestra. Approached by the BBC, for three years Leslie conducted live broadcasts of The Daily Service for BBC Radio 4.

As founder and Artistic Director of the 50-event Reigate Summer Music Festival in 1994, Leslie created an international youth orchestra, a festival chorus, and conducted the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra in a decade of memorable outdoor firework spectaculars drawing up to 6,000 people.

Since moving to Suffolk in 2000, Leslie has been conductor of Stowmarket Chorale and most recently Eye Bach Choir, and the invited chamber choir Carillon. In 2012 Leslie created Suffolk Philharmonic Orchestra, a gathering of world-class professional orchestral musicians who give concerts of supreme quality in Suffolk venues, while also taking first-class playing into the community with free community concerts in village halls, and in workshops with children in schools across the length and breadth of Suffolk.