The Choirs
Our Resident Choirs
Chantage
Chantage was formed in 1999 by Musical Director James Davey, and has a national reputation as an outstanding amateur choir, winning the BBC Radio 3 Choir of the Year competition in 2006 and the Malta International Choral Festival Grand Prix in 2015. In 2009 Chantage recorded with Elbow and the BBC Concert Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios in a special live performance of the band’s album The Seldom Seen Kid. Chantage’s second album, Hark! Chantage at Christmas, was released on EMI’s Gold label in 2008 and in Norman Lebrecht’s review of the CD he called the choir “a class act”.
Chantage regularly performs across the UK and collaborates with other choirs and musicians of all types. In 2011 Chantage performed with the Swingle Singers in the première of a new setting of Michael Tippett’s Five Negro Spirituals from the oratorio, A Child of Our Time, premiering featured interludes written by Ken Burton. Chantage also collaborated with famous composer and guitarist Paco Peña in a sell-out performance of his Misa Flamenca at the Royal Festival Hall in 2012. Chantage made its debut at the BBC Proms in 2014 with the première of Meld, by Benedict Mason, rated in the top 10 classical concerts of 2014 by The Guardian. In 2015 Chantage released My Promise, an album of unaccompanied choral music for any wedding and, in 2017, the first recording of works by Mårten Jansson, an emerging Swedish composer. |
Coro
Coro was formed in September 2000 as a London-based chamber choir for experienced singers dedicated to performing a broad range of choral music to the highest standard. Since its inception Coro has undertaken a number of UK and international tours and has successfully participated in many European choral competitions.
The choir’s successes include becoming the first Western European group to win the Grand Prix at the Tallinn International Choral Competition and winning the Renaissance Music and the Twentieth Century Music prizes at the International Polyphonic Competition ‘Guido d’Arezzo’ in Italy. The choir has also reached the Grand Final of the Florilège Vocal de Tours in France and was awarded the competition’s special Renaissance prize. Coro was also selected by the BBC to compete in the international Let The Peoples Sing competition - Coro’s recording was featured on Radio 3’s The Choir programme. In addition to its regular performing schedule which ranges from the highly popular Coro Christmas Concert to extended works, both accompanied and a capella (recent projects include Handel’s Israel In Egypt and Rachmaninov’s Vespers), the choir has recorded on the Dal Segno label, featured on many successful Classical Crossover albums and, recently, hosted an annual Choral Conducting Masterclass given by the well-known US Conducting tutor Dr. John Dickson. |
Our 2018 Guest Choir
FREIA
Chamber Choir cc FREIA was founded in the Helsinki area in Finland in 2015 as an ensemble of highly experienced choral singers who had sung together in various formations for years, in some cases decades. The founding members of cc FREIA had begun their choral careers at roughly the same time, in the chamber choir boom of the 1980s, and thus have a shared basic approach to choral music.
One of the major factors driving the founding of cc FREIA was to create an ensemble that was small enough to function like a vocal ensemble, without a separate conductor, but also large enough to produce a choral sound. The vision, if we wish to call it that, of cc FREIA is thus to be a “chamber choir like a vocal ensemble”, although it would be equally valid to define the vision as “good music in good company”.
The core ideas of the artistic profile of cc FREIA are interpretation of text, communication of emotional content in music and thematic concert programmes.
So why call it FREIA? This name dropped into my head in spring 2015 as I was pitching the concept to potential members. Freia is the goddess of love and fertility in Scandinavian mythology and also a great lover of music; but the name of the choir is in all capitals because it can also be parsed as an acronym for the Latin phrase flamina resurgentes exspirant iterum antiqua = “old winds blow again”. Or, somewhat more prosaically, the Latin phrase flatus resurgentes equitant iterum antiqui = “old farts ride again”.
Jaakko Mäntyjärvi
translator, composer
founder and artistic director of cc FREIA
One of the major factors driving the founding of cc FREIA was to create an ensemble that was small enough to function like a vocal ensemble, without a separate conductor, but also large enough to produce a choral sound. The vision, if we wish to call it that, of cc FREIA is thus to be a “chamber choir like a vocal ensemble”, although it would be equally valid to define the vision as “good music in good company”.
The core ideas of the artistic profile of cc FREIA are interpretation of text, communication of emotional content in music and thematic concert programmes.
So why call it FREIA? This name dropped into my head in spring 2015 as I was pitching the concept to potential members. Freia is the goddess of love and fertility in Scandinavian mythology and also a great lover of music; but the name of the choir is in all capitals because it can also be parsed as an acronym for the Latin phrase flamina resurgentes exspirant iterum antiqua = “old winds blow again”. Or, somewhat more prosaically, the Latin phrase flatus resurgentes equitant iterum antiqui = “old farts ride again”.
Jaakko Mäntyjärvi
translator, composer
founder and artistic director of cc FREIA
