Early in 2020, we began rehearsing for the world premiere of a new opera commissioned from Jonathan Dove and poet Ian McMillan, The Tin Soldier, scheduled for the autumn. We also rehearsed Mendelssohn’s Elijah for a planned concert in Leeds Town Hall which could not take place because of the Pandemic, which was becoming increasingly threatening. The first lockdown was announced in March, and soon we were considering ways to keep in contact with each other at a time when singing in groups and choirs was particularly risky.
In April we received a Chorus newsletter headed STAY HOME, PROTECT THE NHS, which included encouraging messages from Simon Wright. From now on, we would use Zoom. Soon we were all in front of our screens at home. Individuals recorded their own voices wearing headphones to hear a backing track, then emailed the results to our accompanist and Assistant to the Artistic Adviser Rebecca Taylor, who revealed herself as a technical expert. We were soon watching our lockdown efforts on YouTube – Rachmaninov’s Bogoroditse Devo (part of his Vespers) and Purcell’s Come Ye Sons of Art. Weekly rehearsals also included special guests, 'pub' quizzes and other activities which were chronicled in a video by Rebecca Taylor here.
Live singing resumed in the summer of 2021. In October we were at the Barbican in A Night at the Opera, with a programme of well-known extracts, along with the York Guildhall Orchestra, and in November we marked the temporary closure of Leeds Town Hall for Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, the ‘Resurrection Symphony’. Accompanied by the Orchestra of Opera North, we sang with the Chorus of Opera North, and Leeds Philharmonic Chorus. The annual Christmas concert was again in St Edmund’s.
A collaboration with Bournemouth Symphony Chorus, which had been mooted for quite a while, finally took place in April 2022. We travelled to stay in Winchester in order to take part in intensive rehearsals of Richard Blackford’s Pietá along with our new colleagues. The work was commissioned by Bournemouth, and is a setting of the Stabat Mater. World-renowned tenor Jonas Kaufmann wrote of Pietà:
The concert took place in a packed Winchester Cathedral. In May, our concert at St Edmund’s featured works by Beamish, Tallis, Macmillan, Elgar, Hadley, Wesley, Stanford and Finzi. In October, we were at the Barbican with the York Guildhall Orchestra for a programme of popular orchestral and choral music which included Lambert’s difficult masterpiece, his cantata The Rio Grande, and in December we were back at St Edmund’s for our Christmas concert, which on this occasion had a programme which included readings from the work of authors like Dylan Thomas and a much-applauded appearance of Chorister of the Year Naomi Simon.
In our February 2023 concert in the Barbican, we performed with the York Guildhall Orchestra, conducted by Simon Wright, with an all-Beethoven programme. This included the Choral Symphony and the cantata Meeres Stille und Glückliche Fahrt, the composer’s setting of two poems by Goethe.
