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‘Her smile lit up the room.’ Ex-Charlotte Symphony director recalls times with the queen
Of all his memories of Queen Elizabeth II, Christopher Warren-Green will miss Her Majesty’s smile the most.
Warren-Green, a U.K. native who recently stepped down as music director of the Charlotte Symphony, had conducted concerts at Buckingham Palace and other royal venues during royal weddings and for the queen’s birthday.
“She (would) light up the room,” he told The Charlotte Observer in an exclusive interview Thursday after the announcement of the queen’s death at age 96. “You feel genuinely embraced by that smile. You felt it.”
“I’ve been in tears all afternoon,” he added. Warren-Green spoke to the Observer from his 15th-century thatched farmhouse in Norfolk, a county that’s home to one of the royal residences, Sandringham Estate.
Warren-Green said he still was in shock over the news of the queen’s death.
“Most people in the United Kingdom, and most all of us anywhere, have never not had the queen,” he said of the queen’s seven-decade reign. “You can’t imagine the world without the queen.”
At the palace and the royal performances
The 67-year-old Warren-Green led the Charlotte Symphony as music director for 12 years, until the middle of the year. He’s now its conductor laureate and artistic adviser until a successor is named, potentially next year or in 2024.
Throughout his tenure with the symphony, Warren-Green has been dividing his time between Charlotte and his native England, where he’s been music director of the London Chamber Orchestra since 1988.
Warren-Green has conducted at three royal weddings and two birthday concerts for the queen. He last saw her on her 90th birthday and said he has “no idea” if he’ll be called to be involved in her funeral or the coronation events for King Charles III.
He performed at the weddings of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles in April 2005 at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle; Prince William and Kate Middleton in May 2011 in Westminster Abbey; and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in May 2018 at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle.
During the reception at Buckingham Palace after William and Kate’s wedding, Warren-Green later told the Observer, he knew he had done well when he saw Prince Charles. “I’ve never seen him so thrilled. He kept saying that everyone was raving about the music,” Warren-Green said.
The reception had the air of “a family wedding,” he said. ”The queen just sort of walked in — just popped through a door and started to chat,” Warren-Green said. “There was no big officialdom.”
Warren-Green and the orchestra had played a stately march that accompanied Elizabeth II’s procession into the wedding.
When the queen spoke with Warren-Green at the reception, he said, “she said she didn’t know what she was processing to, but she liked it.” (It was the march from “The Birds” by Hubert Parry, an early 1900s composer who was one of Prince Charles’ favorites.)
Her Majesty’s ‘commanding presence’
Warren-Green also said the queen had a great sense of humor.
He also recalled how “incredibly gracious and grateful” she was to him after he performed at her Charles’ 60th birthday party.
What most surprised Warren-Green the first time he met the queen — he couldn’t immediately recall the year — was how short she was. She stood 5-feet 4-inches at her coronation.
Yet you always knew by her “commanding presence” that she was the queen, he said.
Warren-Green said he will always remember Queen Elizabeth II’s “profound sense of duty and unwavering loyalty to service to others. She did that her entire life, and it could not have been an easy life.
“She was always the rock,” he said.
Arts editor Adam Bell contributed to this story
This story was originally published September 8, 2022, 5:30 PM.
