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 Cadogan Hall near Sloane Square. For a while there was talk of the possibility of a new concert hall being built with private financing in the heart of Wimbledon and the choir supported this proposal whole-heartedly in the hope it would come to fruition. With little support or enthusiasm from the local council this, sadly, is unlikely to see the light of day.
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. On several occasions it has been invited by BBC TV to participate in recordings of Songs of Praise when recorded in London and in the summer of 2008 it was chosen to be part of the pre-match entertainment for the Rugby League Challenge Cup Final at Wembley Stadium.
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 Neil Ferris' predecessor, Michael Ashcroft, with the express purpose of providing the Choral Society with an orchestra of the highest calibre. Leaders of the Dorian Orchestra included Jacqueline Ward, John Ludlow, James McLeod and Rolf Wilson. In recent years, however, 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 worked with the exciting New London Soloists Orchestra (now known as the Trafalgar Sinfonia) 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. There is a regular invitation, for example, for WCS members to sing Handel's Messiah in the Royal Albert Hall at Christmas with Goldsmiths Choral Union. In November 2011, Wimbledon Choral Society has been invited to be the partner choir with Barts Choir (St. Bartholomew's Hospital Choir) in a performance of Mahler's mighty 8th Symphony (Symphony of a Thousand) in the RAH.
Neil Ferris (left) is the recently appointed Musical Director for Wimbledon Choral Society
having come out top of a very strong field of applicants keen to take on the role after Michael Ashcroft's retirement in June 2009.
He studied at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and at the Royal College of Music where he specialised in choral conducting.
He has been Music Director of the Epworth Choir (Surrey) and currently directs Concordia Voices, a chamber choir based in south-west London,
and the Cardiff Polyphonic Choir. He also works regularly as a guest conductor with other choirs and as tutor on workshops and on the annual
summer Cranleigh Choral Week.
Norman
Harper (right) 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 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 addition, he is Director of Music at St John's Church, Spencer Hill in Wimbledon.
In 2005, Michael made a successful return visit to Auckland to lead workshops for choral accompanists by invitation of the New Zealand Choral Federation.
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.
