Exmoor Singers of London Chamber Choir

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The Exmoor Singers of London Chamber Choir is a choir with a strong focus on music by living composers and in particular British composers.^[1]

As hosts of the London Tallis Festival, the choir was most recently broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 28 October 2007.^[2] In addition, the choir collaborated with rock group Bloc Party^[3] to perform at the BBC Electric Proms,^[4] which was broadcast on both BBC2 television and BBC Radio 1, on 27 and 29 October 2007 respectively. The choir also appears regularly on BBC1 television on Songs of Praise.^{[5][6][7][8][9][10]}

Exmoor Singers actively promote music by living composers, in dedicated concerts; by more generally programming new works; and specifically in commissioning new works. For the choir's first concert dedicated entirely to living composers, on 29 May 2002, the group received a four-star review from The Times.^[11]

The choir has given a number of first performances, but more particularly aims to give second performances of works that might not otherwise be heard again.

[edit] New commissioned music

The choir has commissioned six new choral works:

• Sounds: Three Kandinsky Poems (1999) – David Sawer
• This Sceptr'd Isle (2005) – Paul Ayres
• Dreaming England (This Sceptr'd Isle) (2005) – Peter McGarr
• Tentatio (2006) – Jaakko Mäntyjärvi
• Their Lonely Betters (based on a poem by W. H. Auden) (2007) – James Lavino
• Love You Big as the Sky (a Lindisfarne Love Song) (2007) – Peter McGarr (broadcast in full on BBC Radio 3)

The two works commissioned in 2005 entitled This Sceptr'd Isle^[12] are potentially the only settings for choir based on the speech in William Shakespeare's King Richard II, Act 2 scene 1.

Both Tentatio and Love You Big as the Sky were commissioned for the Tallis Festival, and are 40-part unaccompanied works inspired by Thomas Tallis' Spem in alium.

[edit] References