Portsmouth Festival Choir was founded in 1971 by Raymond Calcraft for the first Portsmouth Festival. Following his departure in 1974 we were delighted and privileged to have John Eliot Gardiner as our Conductor until 1978. He encouraged the choir to give concerts outside the Festival. Thus, when the Festival was subsequently discontinued, the Choir was in a strong position to progress as an independent organisation albeit retaining its original name. While the Festival existed Portsmouth Festival Choir had a number of distinguished guest conductors including Sir Charles Groves, Sir David Wilcocks, Sir Roger Norrington, Norman Del Mar, Alexander Lazarev and Richard Hickox. David Gibson became the musical director in 1978, and Martin Merry, Adrian Lucas, Rupert d’Cruze and David Truslove took up successive appointments. Andrew Cleary was appointed in September 2008 and has very successfully directed the last four performances.
The Choir performs most of the standard choral repertoire from the Baroque masters to the 20th century, occasionally exploring less familiar music by living composers such as Malcolm Archer, Cecilia McDowall, Peter Sculthorpe and Geoffrey Bush.
Portsmouth Festival Choir presents at least three concerts each season, its 70-strong members regularly working with professional soloists and orchestral musicians. Since its first concert in Portsmouth's Guildhall the choir has performed regularly at Portsmouth Anglican Cathedral and St Mary’s Portsea, and further afield at Chichester, Huddersfield Town Hall (Orff's Carmina Burana) and The Anvil, Basingstoke (Vaughan Williams' Sea Symphony). In addition the Choir has sung in Germany and France, most recently in Caen.
In recent years the choir has sung Handel's Messiah with the Chameleon Arts Orchestra, Faure's Requiem at St Paul’s Church, Chichester, and Britten's War Requiem, a collaborative event with the Southampton Philharmonic Choir and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, at the Portsmouth Guildhall. Under the baton of Andrew Cleary, the choir’s performances have included Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, Haydn’s Creation and in January a Holocaust Memorial Concert of Karl Jenkins’ The Armed Man and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Dona Nobis Pacem.