Education and career
Having attended St Bede's College, Manchester and played bassoon with Stockport Youth Orchestra, Kenyon studied history at Balliol College, Oxford, Balliol College, University of Oxford, Oxford. After graduating, he worked for the English Bach Festival, and as a freelance writer on music. From 1979 to 1982 he was a music critic for ''The New Yorker''. He then returned to the UK as the music critic for ''The Times'', then List of chief music critics, chief music critic of ''The Observer''. He was also music editor of ''The Listener (magazine), The Listener'' and editor of the journal ''Early Music''. In 1992 he was appointed Controller, BBC Radio 3 and director of the BBC The Proms, Proms from the 1996 season, his title changing in 2000 to Controller BBC Proms, Live Events and Television Classical Music. In February 2007 he was announced as the new Managing Director of the Barbican Centre in the City of London, in succession to Sir John Tusa, a post he took up in October 2007, remaining until September 2021, when he became opera critic of the Telegraph and a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Music of Cambridge University. Kenyon has been a member of the Board of Arts Council England, and previously of the Board of English National Opera, a Governor of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, a member of English Heritage's Blue Plaques Panel, a Trustee of the Dartington Hall Trust, a member of the Dartington International Summer School, Dartington International Summer School Foundation and a patron of Spode Music Week. He is also a Fellow of The Radio Academy.Honours
In the 2001 New Year Honours, he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to music and millennium broadcasting. He was created a Knight Bachelor in the 2008 New Year Honours. In 2011, he was awarded the President's Medal (British Academy), President's Medal by the British Academy.Publications
Amongst his publications are ''The BBC Symphony Orchestra: the first 50 years'' (1982), the biography ''Simon Rattle: from Birmingham to Berlin'' (2001), and the ''Faber Pocket Guide to Mozart'' (2005) and Faber Pocket Guide to Bach (2011). He edited the influential ''Authenticity and Early Music'' (1987), and the BBC Proms Guides to Great Symphonies, Great Concertos, Great Choral Works and Great Orchestral works. In 2021 he published“Rule Britannia” discussion
In 2020 Kenyon commented on a controversy about whether ''Rule, Britannia!'' should be sung at the Last Night of the Proms. In recent years the inclusion of the song has been criticised because of its jingoistic words, for example by Leonard Slatkin, the second non-British person to conduct the Last Night of the Proms. In 2020 the BBC proposed to perform the music in the Royal Albert Hall without the words, citing the difficulties the traditional arrangement posed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Kenyon dismissed the criticism of this decision as "kneejerk" BBC bashing. In the end, there was a u-turn and the lyrics were sung after all.References
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