Welcome to St Albans Chamber Choir
In this concert, our first since February 2020, we present music for solo violin and choir along with a reprise of our 60th anniversary commission, a choral masterwork from the 19th century and a piece of musical storytelling.
Keep watching the website as we have more planned.
We are tentatively making plans for our 2021-22 Season.
Our first concert will be on Saturday 13 November at the more family-friendly time of 2pm. It is entitled The Lark Ascending and will be held in St Saviour’s Church, Sandpit Lane, St Albans, AL2 4DF. For more details, see the SACC News page.
On Saturday 5 March 2022, we are planning a concert in the Lady Chapel of St Albans Abbey at 7.30pm.
This concert has the working title of All Shall Be Well. The provisional programme includes the following:
| John Gibbons | O God who Desireth Truth |
| Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina | Stabat mater |
| Anton Bruckner | Christus factus est |
| John Gibbons | Why? |
| Ēriks Ešenvalds | In paradisum (with viola and cello) |
| Roxanna Panufnik | All Shall Be Well (with cello) |
| Gregorio Allegri | Miserere |
We are also hoping to perform a concert of secular music on Saturday 11 June 2022 in a venue tbc.
The Lark Ascending In this concert, our first since February 2020, we present music for solo violin and choir along with a reprise of our 60th anniversary commission, a choral masterwork from the 19th century and a piece of musical storytelling. Ralph Vaughan WiIliams’ The Lark Ascending written on the eve of the First World …
Continue reading “The Lark Ascending: Saturday 13 November at 2:00pm”
At the invitation of the Canon Precentor, a former member of SACC, a small group of choir members travelled to Derby on 25 September 2021 to give a lunchtime recital in the beautiful cathedral. Our programme was as follows: Bruckner Locus Iste Palestrina Sicut cervus Giovanni Gabrieli Jubilate Deo Rachmaninoff Bogoroditsye Dyevo Orlando de Lassus …
It’s over a year since we last performed live for you – February 2020. We’ve missed the live singing and seeing you all. As things start to improve, we will be opening up for rehearsals and performances again in the coming months. In the meantime, we have been keeping busy. A few of us took …
On 25th April 2019, St Albans Chamber Choir and the Wormser Kantorei from St Albans’ twin town of Worms in southern Germany celebrated fifty years of joint biennial concerts with a Golden Jubilee concert in St Albans Abbey, at the end of another wonderful week of singing and socialising with old and new friends.
The proud half-century of friendship and music-making started with a town-twinning visit to Worms by the Chamber Choir in 1969, and since then there has been an uninterrupted series of visits, making music and enjoying one another’s company.
The partnership enables the two choirs to perform larger-scale works than would normally be the case in our respective cities, and over the years we have become two of the few amateur choirs to be able to follow musical direction in two languages.
Among the most memorable concerts the joint choirs have given over the years was the performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem in 1985. The work was originally written for the bombed and rebuilt Coventry Cathedral, and in 1985 was performed in the bombed and rebuilt Dreifaltigkeitskirche in Worms, with the choirs led by the two conductors whose own personal friendship did so much to establish and nurture the link, Tobias Ihle and Richard Stangroom.
There have been many fine musical occasions since then, notably our two performances, in St Albans and in Worms, of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony. We expect even more in the future, as we continue to forge ahead under our current directors, John Gibbons and Stefan Merkelbach.
The town-twinning between Worms and St Albans was launched in 1957 and its motto is Ad multos annos; the Chamber Choir and the Kantorei look forward to many more years of music-making and fellowship.
Photograph: SACC and Wormser Kantorei performing in the Dreifaltigkeitskirche in Worms in April 2017