Martin Neary, who has died aged 85, was Organist and Master of the Choristers of Westminster Abbey from 1988 to 1998 and one of the most brilliant choral directors of his generation.

He rose to widespread prominence when he directed the music for the obsequies of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997. While Elton John reworked Candle in the Wind, Neary brought John Tavener’s Song for Athene to international attention. With its Holstian overtones it fitted the difficult occasion perfectly; sung as the coffin left the Abbey, borne by straining guardsmen, it soon became Tavener’s best-known work.

The inclusion of Song for Athene, in the face of some establishment timidity, fitted well with Neary’s dogged championship of modern composers. Despite his commitment to early music – he was a particular expert on Henry Purcell, and in 1978 directed the first complete English performance of J S Bach’s St Matthew Passion with period instruments – he spent much of his life helping less-well known musicians including Tavener, Jonathan Harvey, Sebastian Forbes and Francis Grier to become standard fixtures of the English choral repertoire.

Neary was duly appointed LVO in the 1998 New Year Honours List. If his skills were warmly appreciated at Buckingham Palace, however, the sentiment did not necessarily extend to the Deanery. The Very Rev Wesley Carr, a clergyman with an unhappy reputation for heavy-handed administrative pugnacity, had been appointed as Dean of Westminster only a few months before the funeral. On March 20 1998, just before choir practice, Neary and his wife, Penny, who was the Abbey’s music department secretary, were suspended with immediate effect.

The controversy revolved around a company that the Nearys had founded to help the choir men pay tax on income from concerts and overseas tours, and on Mrs Neary’s freelance fees. All the engagements had been approved (including the first performance of a foreign choir at the Kremlin, in 1994) but Carr accused the Nearys of “financial irregularities” and they were quickly dismissed. Neary appealed to the late Queen, as Visitor; she named Lord Jauncey of Tullichettle, a former Lord of Appeal, as her commissioner.

A public appeal swiftly raised a six-figure sum to help the Nearys cover their legal fees; they insisted that, while they might have made “errors of judgement, which we accept and deeply regret”, they had not been dishonest. Neary later reflected that he should have realised that methods which had run smoothly in the past might not find favour with the new Dean.

Some of the Chapter submissions to Lord Jauncey, meanwhile, ranged from contradictory to incoherent; others confirmed that the existence of the company was well known, so the Nearys could hardly have been accused of concealment. In the end Jauncey upheld their dismissal, but rated the process “gamma minus on the scale of natural justice”.

Afterwards, Neary professed himself astonished by the outpouring of support he had received from unlikely quarters. His friend, the MP Frank Field, compared the final report to “a bad detective novel, where every page gives you clues saying who the main culprit is, but on the last page you find the wrong person in the dock”.

Martin Gérard James Neary was born in London on March 28 1940, during an air raid. His father, Leonard, worked in insurance and was a fine amateur musician; his French mother, Jeanne, had lodged with his paternal grandparents in the 1930s. Named for St Martin of Tours and his two grandfathers, he formed his earliest memories as an evacuee to North Wales.

After the war Neary briefly became a chorister at Holy Trinity, Brompton; he soon moved on to the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace. He sang at the christening of the present King, the opening of the Royal Festival Hall, the funeral of George VI, and the Coronation of Elizabeth II. He attended the City of London School (where, as his voice broke late, he regularly took the female leads in school plays). In 1958 Neary went up to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, as organ scholar.

At Cambridge Neary soon switched to Music from Theology – he had thought of ordination – but not before he had learned Hebrew, which deepened his appreciation of the Psalms. He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Organists in 1962, and came second to Susan Landale at Peter Hurford’s inaugural St Albans Organ Festival in 1963. Invited to record a programme for the BBC for its Sunday-afternoon organ-recital slot, his page-turner was a young Andrew Davis; among his teachers were Marie-Claire Alain and Adrian Boult.

Neary spent a summer on a conducting scholarship with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood; he was interviewed for the opportunity over tea with Aaron Copland, and it began a lifelong connection with the American choral scene. He then took up an appointment at St Margaret’s, Westminster, in 1963, where he rose to be Organist. In 1972 he followed the Rector of St Margaret’s, Michael Stancliffe, to Winchester.

As Organist of Winchester Cathedral, where his predecessors included Samuel Sebastian Wesley, Neary was responsible for the daily choral services, and a bevy of boy choristers. He made a point of learning his singers’ names quickly, and persuaded the Dean and Chapter to push Evensong back by 15 minutes to allow for a brief rehearsal.

Over the next 15 years Neary turned Winchester into a world-class choral outfit with international reach. Recordings and tours featured heavily, to say nothing of the annual Southern Cathedrals Festival – which rotates between Winchester, Chichester and Salisbury – and the Waynflete Singers, the local choral society. In 1985 the cathedral choir, under his direction, gave the first performance of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Requiem.

Although Neary could sometimes come across as brusque, and often as over-exacting, he knew how to rally the troops. When the choir went to the US and Canada to commemorate the cathedral’s 900th anniversary in 1979, the caravan included the Bishop and Dean, their wives, the Precentor, matrons and sundry others. The choristers’ matching red woolly hats had been knitted by two dozen women from the congregation and one retired colonel.

When they returned on the day flight from New York three weeks later, after a final concert in Carnegie Hall, their fame had spread to the extent that the pilot insisted that lunch service could not proceed until Winchester Cathedral Choir had sung grace – at 35,000 ft. In 1980 Neary returned to the States on sabbatical, as a British Council Bicentenary Fellow at Princeton.

Neary’s second stint in the US would prove invaluable in the wake of the Westminster affair; by the time it broke he had in addition spent three decades working with some of the most prominent choral musicians in the business. International invitations poured in, and he was instrumental in setting up the Royal School of Church Music’s Millennium Youth Choir.

Despite having been nominated for a Grammy in 1995 for Music for Queen Mary – recorded with the Abbey choir and the New London Consort – and with dozens of covers to his name, Neary found unlikely stardom as the director of The Choirboys. They produced one of the fastest-selling classical debut discs in the UK, which earned him another round of global engagements.

The years after Westminster saw Neary working to worldwide acclaim as he rebuilt his professional life. His lifelong love of cricket, which began at school, also sustained him deeply. One of his most prized memories of his time at the Abbey was a long conversation with his hero Denis Compton, there for Brian Johnston’s memorial service.

Long after the dust had settled, Rowan Williams made Neary a Lambeth Doctor of Music in 2012, “in recognition of his outstanding contribution at national and international level as an organist and conductor and of his sensitive and dynamic interpretation of sacred and secular music in the choral tradition”. By then Carr had retired, with the KCVO.

Neary, who received an honorary DMus from the University of Southampton in 1997, served as President of the Royal College of Organists from 1994 to 1998, and of the Organists’ Benevolent League (now the Organists’ Charitable Trust) from 1988 to 2018; he was Chairman of the Herbert Howells Society from 1992 to 2024.

He was active almost to the end: from 2012 to 2022 he was Director of Music at St Michael and All Angels, Barnes. After a stellar career he might have been forgiven for being sniffy about “normal” parish music, but Neary took the reins (effectively by accident) and led the St Michael’s choir with unequivocal commitmen​t – and through the Covid-19 lockdowns.

In his last years Parkinson’s disease severely curtailed Neary’s ability to conduct and perform; in his memoir Time to Declare: My Life in Church Music, which the RSCM published earlier this year, he wrote about enjoying music in his head.

In 1967 Martin Neary married Penny Warren, daughter of the doctors Dame Josephine Barnes (the first woman president of the BMA) and Sir Brian Warren. She survives him with their two daughters and a son.

Martin Neary, born March 28 1940, died September 27 2025​