James Whitbourn, composer whose works included an oratorio based on Anne Frank’s diary

At the BBC in the 1990s he presented Prayer for the Day on Radio 4 and for Radio 3 edited the enduringly popular programme Choral Evensong

James Whitbourn, who has died from cancer aged 60, was a versatile composer, conductor and producer who wrote orchestral pieces such as Bridge Over Tay, the BBC’s title music for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in 2002, and D-Day 60, for the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings two years later; for the commemoration at Westminster Abbey of the 9/11 terrorist atrocities he composed Living Voices (2001) for saxophone and voices, which was performed in New York on the first anniversary of the attacks.
His music was in a similar vein to the mystic minimalism of John Tavener and Henryk Gorecki and included the Son of God Mass (2001), a spin-off from his theme tune for the BBC TV series documenting the life of Christ, and A Prayer of Desmond Tutu (2004), an ethereal piece with African rhythms, with the text spoken on the CD by Tutu himself. 
More recently he wrote the choral work, The Seven Heavens (2014), a musical portrait of CS Lewis using the imagery of the seven medieval planets.
Whitbourn, an erudite and gentle figure with dark square glasses, often tackled big issues, as in Pika (2000), a large-scale cantata commemorating the bombing of Hiroshima, for which he won the Sandford St Martin Premier Award with the poet Michael Symmons Roberts.
His best-known work, however, was Annelies, a 75-minute oratorio that uses the diary of Anne Frank adapted by Melanie Challenger to tell the story of the young Jewish girl as she hid with her family from the Nazis. Annelies was premiered in London in 2005 on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and has been recorded on several occasions, including one that received a Grammy award nomination in 2014.
Reviewing the first performance, by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra with the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, conducted by Leonard Slatkin, The Daily Telegraph noted how Whitbourn “can draw on the manner of a Bach chorale just as easily as he can craft a 19th-century ballad waltz. He can make grand gestures or spoon a sugary line from a violin solo. He can emulate plainsong with a skill in choral writing that would not have disgraced Vaughan Williams or Walton.”
James Philip Edwin Whitbourn was born in Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent, on August 17 1963, the younger of two children of Philip Whitbourn and Anne, née Marks. 
He was educated at the Skinners’ School and by 16 was writing anthems for St James’s Church, Tunbridge Wells, before winning a scholarship to read music at Magdalen College, Oxford.
Landing at the BBC in the early 1990s, he produced and presented Prayer for the Day on Radio 4. For Radio 3 he edited Choral Evensong, explaining to Gillian Reynolds in the Telegraph that the programme’s enduring popularity was because the listener’s experience so closely resembled that of someone who is there in person. 
“Choral evensong is a time for great stillness when the people are uplifted by the sheer beauty of choral music and singing,” he added.
He also produced the annual broadcast of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge, and presented episodes of Seeds of Faith (1993), investigating the history of the Christmas carol, and The Sound of Prayer (1995), discussing the musical challenges facing parish churches whose congregations have diverse musical tastes. 
His contribution to Between the Ears included a dramatisation in 1990 of the Book of Revelation featuring Judi Dench and Derek Jacobi.
Elsewhere, Whitbourn was executive producer for the Royal Opera House’s record label Opus Arte. On the podium he conducted the BBC Philharmonic, the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields and his own professional vocal ensemble The Choir, whose DVD recording of John Tavener’s choral music, Choral Ikons, was nominated for a Gramophone award in 2002.
The pull of Oxford eventually brought Whitbourn back to the city, He was an Honorary Research Fellow of St Stephen’s House from 2011 and its Senior Research Fellow from 2019; in 2020 he was appointed director of music at St Edmund Hall. 
His first composition for the college choir was a setting of the Evening Canticles for a live Evensong over Zoom during the Covid-19 pandemic, with the choir accompanying themselves on whatever musical instrument they had available using chords he had provided.
In 2022 he was appointed musical director of Harris Manchester College, Oxford. 
Despite his faith, Whitbourn had a healthy scepticism of formal religion, recalling that someone once made the comparison to him between religions and political parties: “Both start with a flame of faith but eventually turn into bureaucracies which preserve power and influence.”
Latterly his musical interests lay in Egypt and last year his Zahr Al-Khayal (“Flowers of Imagination”), for soprano and symphony orchestra and sung in Arabic by Fatma Said, received its premiere at the Konzerthaus Berlin. 
His final work, a Requiem orchestrated by John Rutter, will have its first performance in New York on April 13 given by Westminster Choir College from Rider University, which commissioned the piece.
In 1991 Whitbourn married Alison Jones, who also worked in religious broadcasting at the BBC. She survives him with their three children, his parents and his sister.
James Whitbourn, born August 17 1963, died March 12 2024