The English Arts Chorale 2010

Artistic Director: Leslie Olive

The English Arts Chorale is an ambitious, enthusiastic choir which aims to enjoy its music-making by achieving the very highest artistic standards. In its 30-year history, under its founder conductor Leslie Olive it has performed with distinguished orchestras including the Philharmonia Orchestra, the English Chamber Orchestra, London Mozart Players, and the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra, appearing at the Royal Festival Hall, the Barbican, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Snape Maltings, St Albans Town Hall, Fairfield Hall, and the cathedrals of St Edmundsbury, Manchester, Peterborough, Lichfield, Wells, Guildford, Chichester, Ely, Southwark, and Rochester as well as churches and regional concert halls too numerous to mention. It has toured to Paris, Belgium, and the Czech Republic. It has performed some less familiar repertoire such as Vaughan Williams' A Pilgrim's Progress, as well as routinely performing the Fauré, Mozart, and Verdi Requiems entirely from memory. In 1993 it gave birth to Reigate Summer Music Festival, where it performed all three of Elgar's major repertoire oratorios - The Dream of Gerontius, The Apostles, and The Kingdom - within a week.

In 2006 The English Arts Chorale was fortunate to team up with the Prague Conservatoire Orchestra, an outstanding youth orchestra. They came to England for a long weekend and together performed The Dream of Gerontius at Ely and Rochester Cathedrals on consecutive days. The following month the choir travelled to Prague where it performed, again with the Prague Conservatoire Orchestra, in the magnificent setting of the Smetana Hall.

The English Arts Chorale has broadcast on numerous occasions for BBC radio, and has worked with conductors including Klaus Tennstedt, Sir Roger Norrington, and Brian Kay.

Although The English Arts Chorale performs much of the standard oratorio repertoire, it also aims to introduce works by lesser-known composers such as American Morten Lauridsen, whose music is ideally suited to the transparent quality of their ensemble. Language is an extra challenge – The English Arts Chorale has sung in French, German, Hebrew, Latin, Japanese, Russian – and English.

The future

In the build-up to the 30th anniversary The English Arts Chorale will be performing two great works by English composers. The concert, at Snape Maltings on 10 July 2010, contains Ralph Vaughan Williams’ magnificent Sea Symphony and William Walton’s breath-taking Belshazzar’s Feast, two major works which show the versatility of The English Arts Chorale to excellent effect.

The first concert performed by The English Arts Chorale was Handel’s Messiah on Good Friday 1981. To celebrate thirty years of music-making they will again be performing Messiah in the same venue, St Mary’s Church, Reigate, just before Easter 2011. The rest of the celebratory season promises to bring great music to audiences not only locally but in Cambridge, Chichester, London and many other venues.

The Chorale is constantly on the look-out for new singers in all sections, and our busy 2010-11 Season is no exception. If you share our passion, come and join us! Our aspiration can be summed up in our Mission Statement: