Saturday 27^th June saw current and former members of the Chapter House Choir join together in song and friendship to celebrate our 60^th anniversary in style.

The gala concert took place at St Olave’s Church and was the culmination of our birthday season. The programme reflected the whole of the choir’s history and included  Britten’s Hymn to St Cecilia which was in the repertoire from the earliest days and Are you going?  a Yorkshire-inspired commission by David McGregor, first performed in our God’s Own Country concert in April this year. Shruthi Rajesekar’s Numbers, commissioned by the National Youth Choir of Great Britain in 2019, was new to the choir and, with its exhilarating, complex rhythms was a particular favourite with the audience. And, of course, no anniversary concert would have been complete without a work by our wonderful founder, Andrew Carter, who sadly passed away during the year. We were proud to sing his haunting setting of John Donne’s poem No man is an island. 

It was a treat for the current choir to see former members enjoying favourites from the repertoire such as the Moses Hogan arrangement of the spiritual, My soul’s been anchored in the Lord and for us all to sing together after the interval. Former conductor, Jane Sturmheit, joined us to direct two other great favourites, Shenandoah and Finzi’s My spirit sang all day and gave a moving speech acknowledging Andrew Carter’s influence and the sense of camaraderie that continues to make the choir such a special community for us all. These sentiments were later echoed in speeches by our Musical Director, Ben Morris and Chair, Sarah Hewlett at a fabulous reception in the Hospitium in York’s Museum Gardens. We also said a very fond farewell to one of our longest-standing members, David Frith, who, over more than 40 years has made a tremendous contribution to the choir.

Huge thanks are due to the committee and the many choir members who made the day such a success and we are glad so many former members, now living right across the country, came back to join us. We leave the last word to one of them:

“It was such a joy and privilege to sing with your wonderful choir, as well as to hear them sing on their own…it was lovely to meet up with old friends and maybe to make new ones.”

Written by Rachel Hicks
Photography by Gular Abbasova