The Portsmouth Festival Choir was founded in 1971 and gave its first concert in Portsmouth Guildhall as part of the then Portsmouth Festival, a prodigious celebration of music and arts with well-known national and international artistes. During the subsequent twelve years, the Choir performed with a number of leading orchestras and conductors until the Festival ceased to provide the principal basis for the Choir’s activities.
During the last decade, the Choir has sung regularly in Portsmouth and Chichester Cathedrals and in other venues including Portsmouth Guildhall, Huddersfield Town Hall and the Anvil, Basingstoke. The Choir’s repertoire includes popular large-scale sacred works as well as less frequently performed music ranging from early music to works written in the twentieth century. Summer concerts often include secular works including composers such as Gershwin, Delius, Vaughan Williams, Rutter, Copland and even Gilbert and Sullivan.
Portsmouth Festival Choir has often joined forces with other choirs to perform large-scale works and such collaborations have included Vaughan Williams Sea Symphony, Tippett’s A Child of Our Time and Brahm’s German Requiem with the Basingstoke Choral Society, Carmina Burana with the Leeds Philharmonic Choir, Britten’s War Requiem with Portsmouth Choral Union and Southampton Philharmonic Choir and Verdi’s Requiem with the Duisberg Choral Society. The Choir also makes trips abroad and has performed in Germany, Switzerland and France.
The full back catalogue is available in the database:
