Wimbledon
Choral Society
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Profile of the
Choir
Official records of the Society seem to start in October 1914 when war had just broken out, Belgium had been invaded and numbers of Belgian refugees were finding a home in Wimbledon. A group of singers was formed to take part in a ceremony on Wimbledon Common called "Salutation to the Belgian Flag" and later gave a concert in honour of Albert, King of the Belgians. Reformed on a permanent basis, the Choral Society has given regular performances of choral music in and around Wimbledon since the end of the First World War. However, an article in the Wimbledon Courier and District Advertiser dated Saturday 3 April 1880 advertised "The First Concert" of the "Wimbledon Choral Society" as taking place on the following Monday 5 April 1880 in the Drill Hall on St. George's Road, so it would appear that the origins of the choir go back 120 or so years. Click here if you would like to read more about this.
Past Presidents of the Society
have included Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sir Henry Wood and George
Malcolm CBE. The current President
is Ian
Partridge CBE, the internationally renowned
lyric tenor, who sang with the choir earlier in his career as
did Janet Baker, the mezzo-soprano, back in 1975.
Concerts were performed in the Wimbledon Civic Hall from its opening in 1932 but this hall was demolished in 1990 as part of the redevelopment of Wimbledon town centre. Since then the choir has been without a permanent home and has had to move to more ambitious locations, all outside of Wimbledon. Venues used since 1990 include the Fairfield Halls (Croydon), the Royal Festival Hall, Southwark Cathedral, the Barbican, Guildford Cathedral, St. James' Church, Piccadilly and St. John's Church, Waterloo, and more recently the newly opened Cadogan Hall near Sloane Square. There is still talk of the possibility of a new concert hall being built in the heart of Wimbledon and the choir would support this proposal whole-heartedly should it come to fruition. Click here for further details and how you can support this project.
The choir's Royal Festival Hall début was in 1990 in the first British performance of Gabriel Pierné's Les Crusades des Enfants and later in December 1993 in the Ernest Read Music Association Christmas Concert. In 1998, as part of its television coverage of the World Cup, the BBC asked the choir to record an adaptation of Fauré's Pavane as the programme title music, heard by millions of people and later released as a CD. Members of the choir also took part in the BBC TV's annual Sports Review of the Year in December 1998 and were seen by more than 9 million viewers. Nearly every year since November 2000, Wimbledon Choral Society has made up half of the Festival Chorus for the Royal British Legion's annual Festival of Remembrance in the Royal Albert Hall, broadcast on BBC TV and in the presence of the Royal Family.
Membership of the choir stands at around 160 with healthy recruitment and a good and regular intake of younger singers in all voice parts. All members are auditioned on entry and at regular intervals thereafter. The musical season runs from September to May and usually consists of three main concerts in and around London with a Christmas concert in the Wimbledon area. Performances are given with professional soloists and orchestra. For many years, the choir worked with the Dorian Orchestra of London, made up of professional freelance players, many drawn from the leading orchestras in and around London and soloists in their own right, and which was founded by Michael Ashcroft (see below) with the express purpose of providing the Choral Society with an orchestra of the highest calibre. Leaders of the Dorian Orchestra have included Jacqueline Ward, John Ludlow, James McLeod and Rolf Wilson. Recently, Wimbledon Choral Society has been working with the New Queen's Hall Orchestra which has a formidable reputation for performances of superb quality using instruments made in the early part of the 20th century. It has also started working with the exciting New London Soloists Orchestra comprising some of London's most talented young musicians.
As well as the Society's own musical season, links with other major choral societies enable members to participate in other choral concerts organised and promoted by these other groups to which invitations have been made. In recent years this has included Handel's Messiah in the Royal Albert Hall at Christmas (with Goldsmiths Choral Union), Mahler's 8th Symphony "Symphony of a Thousand" (with St. Bartholomew's Hospital Choir) again in the Royal Albert Hall, and Elgar's Dream of Gerontius in the Fairfield Hall, Croydon (with Croydon Philharmonic Choir) and in the Royal Festival Hall (with Goldsmiths Choral Union).
Lancastrian Michael Ashcroft
was appointed as Musical Director in 1979 and has been the Society's
longest serving conductor. The choir has attained a very high
standard under his leadership and is now considered among the
leading amateur choirs in southern England. Since
studying the organ and conducting at the Northern School of Music
and the Royal School of Church Music, where his teachers included
Sir Charles Groves and Ernest Read, Michael Ashcroft held successively
the posts of Director of Music at Giggleswick School, Yorkshire,
Pilgrim School, Bedford, the Camden School for Girls and Dulwich
College from where he retired in 2004. Before leaving Dulwich College,
he achieved the restoration of the Choral Foundation in keeping with the wishes
of the College's founder Edward Alleyne resulting in the formation of a 32-strong
choir which continues to sing the Anglican offices in the College Chapel. Michael
is now a professional freelance conductor and music education consultant.
He has appeared in all the major London concert halls and undertaken tours of Finland, Russia, Estonia, the Czech Republic and the USA. Michael's repertoire is vast but he particularly enjoys researching and conducting works which are either not often performed or are little known works from the early 20th century. In November 1997, he conducted a rare performance of Parry's Pied Piper of Hamelin in the Fairfield Hall, Croydon. Apart from Pierné's work noted earlier, he has conducted a number of other first performances including Francis Routh's setting of John Skelton's poem Woefully Array'd, which is dedicated to Michael.
Norman
Harper is
the choir's Assistant Musical Director and joined us at the start
of the 2000/2001 season taking over from Brian Lodde who had
been in the role for many years. Norman was an Organ
Scholar at Caius College, Cambridge, where he took a music degree
and studied organ playing with Peter Le Huray and Gillian Weir.
Alongside a teaching career based in south London, he performs as a soloist,
giving organ recitals at cathedral and concert venues throughout the
UK, and has broadcast in BBC Radio 3's Music for Organ series.
Norman enjoys an excellent reputation for accompanying
choirs and soloists both as a pianist and organist, and in recent
years has accompanied Wimbledon Choral Society in Guildford Cathedral,
St. James' Church, Piccadilly, and St. John's Church, Waterloo.
Michael
Higgins studied
with Margaret Newman at the Birmingham Conservatoire, later specialising
in piano accompaniment and chamber music at the Royal
Academy of Music, London, with Julius Drake and Iain Ledingham. He
was also Organ Scholar at the Metropolitan
Cathedral of Saint Chad, Birmingham. Michael was awarded the
Joseph Weingarten Memorial Trust Scholarship and completed his studies with
Kálmán Dráfi at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Budapest.
Abroad, Michael has toured with singers and instrumentalists in Germany, Hungary, Italy, Australia and New Zealand. He performs regularly in London and throughout the United Kingdom and also works with the Birmingham Bach Choir, Midland Festival Chorus, the National Youth Choirs and National Children’s Choir of Great Britain, New London Singers, Barts Choir and the LSO Discovery Youth Choir.
In 2005, Michael made a successful return visit to Auckland to lead workshops for choral accompanists by invitation of the New Zealand Choral Federation. More recently Michael was appointed Director of Music at St John's Church, Spencer Hill in Wimbledon.
As a composer, he has answered a number of commissions, including songs
for a set of educational books published in Singapore by Prentice Hall, and
many of his choral and organ works are published worldwide by Kevin Mayhew
Publishers.
The choir is managed by a dedicated team of members without whom the Society just would not run as efficiently as it does. An upgrading to the Constitution & Rules of the Society approved by the members at the AGM in 2001 resulted in the creation of an executive team within the full Committee. It is the executive team who manage the overall operation of the choir and shape the strategies that take the Society forward. This makes for more effective decision-making. It is still the full committee, however, that retains the responsibility for approving on behalf of the whole membership the principle items of budgets, music programme and the appointment of the Musical Director. The list of current committee members and other main roles within the choir can be found by clicking here. Similarly, the list of the senior appointments of the Society since 1914 can be found here.
The Society is completely self-financing, receiving no grants from any local or national funds. Consequently, income for supporting the choir's activities comes mainly from concert ticket sales and membership subscriptions. To see what rates are currently in force please click here.
