Leeds Festival Chorus
The Leeds Festival Chorus is a mixed choir from Leeds, West Yorkshire, England with about 170 members.
History
The Leeds Festival Chorus was founded in 1858, when Queen Victoria the Leeds Town Hall was opened. He sang at the first Leeds Festival for classical music and was always reassembled for subsequent festivals. In 1985, the choir became independent in 2008 and celebrated its 150th anniversary with the premiere of a commissioned work by Judith Bingham. In February 2003, the Chorus sang the chorus part of Mozart's Requiem in the British premiere of the ballet Requiem! by Birgit Scherzer for the Northern Ballet Theatre. In December 2007, the choir sang Handel 's Messiah back in the Leeds Town Hall, together with the Northern Sinfonia. The work was performed for the first time shortly after the opening of the Town Hall in 1858 by the choir at the same place.
Their repertoire includes works by J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Berlioz, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Elgar, Hindemith, Mahler, Mozart, Poulenc, Rossini, Schubert, Richard Strauss, Schoenberg, Tallis Verdi. The Leeds Festival Chorus collaborated with the English Chamber Orchestra, the Hallé Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Northern Sinfonia, the Orchestra of Opera North and the London Chamber Orchestra. Commissioned works for the choir were Antonín Dvořák St. Ludmilla and Edward Elgar's Caractacus and William Walton's Belshazzar's Feast, which was premiered under the baton of Sir Malcolm Sargent.
In addition to concerts in Leeds Town Hall, partly as a contribution to the Leeds International Concert Season, the choir at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester has occurred, as well as and in the York Minster and the Royal Albert Hall in London as part of the BBC Proms the summer of 2013 in Venice. The choir is occasionally heard on BBC Radio 3.
The Leeds Festival Chorus was, inter alia, by Arthur Sullivan, Thomas Beecham, John Barbirolli, Carlo Maria Giulini, Jascha Horenstein, Hans Richter Pierre Boulez, Charles Mackerras, Colin Davis, John Eliot Gardiner, Yan Pascal Tortelier, Mark Elder, Roger Norrington, John Lubbock and Andrew Davis conducted. Simon Wright is currently artistic director and conductor of the Leeds Festival Chorus.