Performing

We promote concerts in some of London's finer churches as well as commercial venues such as St Martin in the Fields, St John's Smith Square and LSO St Luke's. We have also sung in The Wigmore Hall, The Queen Elizabeth Hall, The Purcell Room and the Royal Festival Hall foyer, at The Royal Academy of Arts, Westminster and Winchester Cathedrals, Kenwood House, Windsor Castle, Oxford, Cambridge, Yorkminster, Christchurch and St Patrick's Cathedrals Dublin, Prague, Delphi, Stuttgart, Copenhagen and Pamplona. Television apearances include the finals of the 2000 Sainsbury's Choir of the Year competition at the Albert Hall and the Lesley Garrett Easter Special in the company of Jonathan Lemalu and Robin Blaze.

Highlights

• Winning the UK adult choir heat of Let the Peoples Sing
• Jubilee Spectacular Lakeside Prom (including fireworks) at Kenwood House with the BBC Concert Orchestra
• BBC-televised Sainsbury's Choir of the Year finals at the Albert Hall
• Journeys Without Silence season of 2006: a celebration of music written during the choir's twenty year lifetime
• Widely acclaimed James MacMillan CD
• HRH The Prince of Wales' fiftieth birthday concert at Windsor Castle with the English Chamber Orchestra
• more highlights

Broadcasts and recordings
The choir has broadcast several times on radio and television in the UK and the USA, including the first broadcast performance of Henryk Gorecki's Miserere and Three Lullabies on BBC Radio 3, in the presence of the composer. It has also made several commercial recordings, including Delius' complete part-songs. Unjustly neglected repertoire from the last century is another of our target niches, and we have recently released a CD of music by Granville Bantock on the Meridian label.

New music
We have forged relationships with a number of contemporary composers, including Alan Bullard, Geoffrey Burgon, Andrew Hugill, Tarik O'Regan, Howard Skempton and John Tavener, who observed in a television interview, "Amongst chamber choirs they're one of the best". We have regularly premiered and commissioned works by British composers, including John Habron's Salve Regina in 2008, and Exile Lamentations by the Australian composer Paul Stanhope, which we co-commissioned, in 2009.

Early history

The choir was founded in 1986 by Matthew Greenall, Director of the British Music Information Centre, who drew together a number of former members of chamber choirs in Oxford and Cambridge. New music was a priority from the outset, and as early as 1991 the choir released Child of Light, a CD that included first recordings by Peter Maxwell Davies, Kenneth Leighton and Sir John Tavener, who subsequently became the choir's Patron

One of the choir's first broadcasts was of Henryk Gorecki's extraordinary Miserere, with the composer in attendance. Concerts with Patricia Rozario and Stephen Isserlis followed, most notably at the BBC Mercury Music Awards and the ruined stadium in Delphi.

In the late nineties, the choir appeared at the Wigmore Hall with Tasmin Little and Julian Lloyd Webber, and participated in a fiftieth Birthday concert for HRH The Prince of Wales at Windsor Castle alongside Mstislav Rostropovich and the English Chamber Orchestra.

Sam Laughton, Director

Sam read music at Cambridge, where he was organ scholar at Sidney Sussex College. He founded the Cambridge Baroque Singers, and has since become Director of the Craswall Players and the Shipton Festival. He has worked freelance with the Baylis Programme at ENO and Oxford Philomusica, made two recordings as an organist with River Records and appears regularly at the Battersea Arts Centre and the Stoke Newington Festival.

Matthew Greenall, Founder

Matthew founded the choir in 1986 and was its Director until December 1999. After studying at Balliol College Oxford and the Royal Academy of Music, he pursued a career as a professional pianist, conductor and teacher. He was appointed Director of the British Music Information Centre in 1996. He is active as a music journalist, and is a particular authority on new music.

Sir John Tavener, Patron

Born in 1944, and knighted in 2000, Sir John Tavener is perhaps the best known living composer in Britain today. As long ago as 1969, he was asked to write a full-length opera for the Royal Opera House by Benjamin Britten. In the same year, John Lennon began issuing his music on the recently launched Apple label. The world was given a haunting reminder of his genius when "Song for Athene" was sung at the funeral service for Diana, Princess of Wales.

Photograph: Richard Haughton (copyright Chester Music)

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