Crouch End Festival Chorus

History and Organisation

In 1984 tenors David Temple and John Gregson organised a scratch choir of amateur singers to perform Verdi’s Requiem in a local arts festival in Crouch End, north London. The choir was named Crouch End Festival Chorus. Over the past 30 years its membership has grown to around 150 singers who rehearse weekly in Muswell Hill and perform at venues across London including the Barbican Hall, Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, and Royal Albert Hall.

CEFC is a charitable company run by a board of trustees elected by its members, with the day-to-day functions of the organisation carried out by a management committee of volunteers from the choir’s ranks. Members join the choir via a formal audition and all singers are re-auditioned every three years.

Classical Repertoire

CEFC has performed on a number of occasions in the BBC Proms series. In 2010, the chorus was invited to perform in a First Night performance of Mahler’s 8th Symphony with the BBC Symphony Chorus and Sydney Philharmonia Choirs. Other Proms appearances include Verdi’s Requiem (2008), Berlioz’ Te Deum (2009), Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder (2012), the Sports Prom and Rachmaninov’s The Bells (2014), and Charles Ives ’ Symphony No.4 (2015).

CEFC has also collaborated with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus to perform the War Requiem by Benjamin Britten in November 2013 under Semyon Bychkov.

CEFC promotes and performs new and contemporary classical music. Its commissions include Orlando Gough’s Shift (2004), inspired by the composer’s fascination with the history of labour and traditional working song, two large scale choral works by James McCarthy: 17 Days (2012), which explores the emotional landscape of the Chilean mining accident of 2010, and Malala (2014), inspired by the story of Nobel peace prize winner Malala Yousafzai. Will Todd chose a setting of Dylan Thomas’s Rage Against the Dying of the Light for the second of four works commissioned to celebrate CEFC’s 30th Birthday in 2014. In 2015, CEFC gave the first performance of Roland Perrin's Lansky: The Mob’s Money Man, a fusion of New York and Cuban jazz and traditional Jewish Klezmer music written for jazz singer, narrator, choir and jazz orchestra.

Other presentations of works by living composers include choral music by John Adams, Philip Glass and Eric Whitacre.

In addition to supporting new music, CEFC performs traditional choral repertoire, with recent performances of Bach: Mass in B minor at baroque pitch, Mozart: Mass in C minor, Monteverdi: Vespers of 1610, Tallis: Spem in Alium, and Mahler: Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection”.

Popular Music

In 2010, CEFC singers joined patron and regular collaborator Ray Davies on stage at the Glastonbury Festival performing to an audience of 50,000 people. The following year, the choir appeared again with Ray Davies in the final concert of the Meltdown Festival curated by the artist for the Royal Festival Hall. Also in 2011 came a performance with Basement Jaxx at the Barbican.

CEFC’s working relationship with Noel Gallagher began in 2008 with an Oasis gig for the BBC’s Electric Proms. After contributing to the debut album by Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds in 2012, the choir toured with the band throughout the UK, and again in 2015.

Film and TV

CEFC features on a number of original film soundtracks including The Awakening (2011) and Prince Caspian (2008), as well as in music composed for the BBC’s classic sci-fi series Dr Who. Composers Hans Zimmer and Ennio Morricone have both booked CEFC to perform in live concerts of their music.

Recordings

The choir has credits on more than one hundred CDs including albums by Lesley Garrett, Katherine Jenkins, Alfie Boe, and Kate Royal, and by rock and pop artists Travis, The Divine Comedy, Ray Davies, and Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds. Ray Davies’ The Kinks Choral Collection featuring CEFC reached the UK top 30 best-selling albums in 2009 and Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds achieved the top spot in the Official UK Chart in 2011.