The Royal Choral Society: Making music since 1872

Choral societies have been a popular feature of the British music scene for centuries, and The Royal Choral Society (RCS), now in its 140th year, is one of the oldest still performing to large audiences in Britain and overseas today.
The story begins on 28th March 1871, when The Royal Albert Hall (RAH) was officially opened. The event was marked by an inaugural concert given by, among others, the Sacred Harmonic Society. Set within the Hall’s distinctive circular format, and with seating for 7,000, the performance was deemed a great success, and it was clear that here was a space that, at last, provided London with the ideal location for grand choral performances.
Three months later, the RAH was the setting for yet another opening concert, this time to mark the beginning of the International Exhibition being held within earshot of the Hall. A largely choral event, it was conducted by the French composer Charles Gounod, and its success was to trigger the foundation of what is known today as The Royal Choral Society.

Charles Gounod

THE CHOIR IS BORN
Both concerts had been planned by the body of Commissioners who had been responsible for the successful Great Exhibition of 1851, and who were now in charge of the development of the RAH and its neighbouring cultural and commercial organisations. Recognising the need to establish a permanent choir for the Hall, they set about raising the necessary capital for its creation and having invited Charles Gounod to be its conductor, auditions were held in the early autumn of 1871.
By October of that year, the Royal Albert Hall Choral Society (RAHCS) – as we were christened ¬ had attracted more than 1,000 members and it had begun to prepare for its first concert.
On 8th May 1872, the choir made its debut with a well-received performance that was witnessed by a distinguished audience led by Queen Victoria. A reviewer for the Musical Times questioned M. Gounod’s appointment as director of an English choir, in a building under royal patronage, but for the British music scene, the conductor’s apparent “desire to create a new world of art in South Kensington, into which the inhabitants of the old world are not presumed to penetrate” was a sign of things to come.

Joseph Barnby

JOSEPH BARNBY
The new choir swiftly established a place in London’s musical life and its position was consolidated late in 1872 when Joseph Barnby, celebrated trainer of Mr Joseph Barnby’s Choir, succeeded M. Gounod as conductor and amalgamated his existing choir with the RAHCS.
Barnby, a plain-speaking Yorkshireman who had presented the first church performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion at Westminster Abbey in 1871 and who with his eponymous choir had revived many other neglected works, insisted on strict choral discipline and encouraged his new choir to sing with a full, robust tone.
The new conductor made his mark immediately in 1873 with four successive performances of the St Matthew Passion, and a lengthy gala concert to celebrate the Shah of Persia’s first visit to Britain. Then, in a move that enhanced the RAHCS’s reputation still further, he invited the composer Giuseppe Verdi to conduct the choir in the British première of his Requiem in 1875; it was an invitation he also issued, nine years later, to Antonin Dvorák, to conduct the choir in a performance of his Stabat Mater.

MESSIAH
In 1878, Barnby established a tradition that remains central to the choir’s annual repertoire today. The Hallelujah chorus from Handel’s Messiah had been sung by the choir at its inaugural concert in 1871, and it had then performed the complete Messiah in its 1873/74 season, but Barnby’s decision to perform it at Easter, on Good Friday, was inspired. The annual performance quickly established itself as one of the defining interpretations of Great Britain’s favourite choral masterpiece, and it is thought that the RCS has sung the work more than 265 times, more times than any other choir.

IMPROVEMENT THROUGH CHALLENGE
Through his promotion of contemporary composers, British and foreign, there is no doubt that Barnby challenged his singers, but by doing so he also helped raise standards. In 1884 he conducted the choir in the British première of Wagner’s Parsifal, given in concert form, and the following year, the RAHCS introduced Gounod’s oratorio, Mors et Vita, to London. Barnby later programmed works such as Parry’s Job, Mancinelli’s oratorio, Isaias, and Peter Benoit’s sacred cantata, Lucifer. He also “discovered” and supported the careers of a number of singers, most notably Clara Butt.

ROYAL PATRONAGE
Given its background and its distinguished connections, the choir has been the subject of coverage in the national press from the outset and in 1888 an important notice was recorded. In its review of the musical highlights of that year, Hazell’s Annual Cyclopedia noted that “The Royal Albert Hall Choral Society, in May, gave a performance of (Arthur Sullivan’s) The Golden Legend by command of the Queen, who was present, and Mr Barnby’s force is henceforward to be called the Royal Choral Society.”
Queen Victoria’s patronage ensured a continued rise in the choir’s fortunes, to such an extent that in 1889 the Royal Choral Society (RCS) took over Novello’s Oratorio Concerts. The choir was by now some 1,200 strong and giving performances of works by composers such as Bach, Handel and Berlioz, composers whose works were to become staples of the choir’s repertoire for many years to come.
Reviewers of the day recorded that Barnby trained and controlled this vast host of voices with considerable skill, but we should not be surprised to hear that such a large choir could also be unwieldy at times. In the winter of 1893, George Bernard Shaw reviewed the now Sir Joseph Barnby’s presentation of Berlioz’s remarkably popular The Damnation of Faust (which remained a regular feature of the RCS’s programmes for the next 20 years). If the RCS was “not impetuously led...” he wrote, it was “certainly well trained. There is a certain vulgarity of speech about it, especially on the part of the men; but the tone is remarkably good and free from incidental noises; the soft passages are pretty and effective; and the execution is careful and precise.”

FREDERICK BRIDGE
When Sir Joseph died suddenly in 1892, the committee that now ran the choir invited Frederick Bridge, organist of Westminster Abbey, to be his successor. Perhaps influenced by comments about the choir’s size and its conductor’s ability to wield such numbers successfully, they were drawn by Bridge’s reputation as a shrewd administrator and successful motivator of amateur musicians.
Certainly, in January 1899, the Musical Times noted that the choir comprised 242 sopranos, 174 contraltos, 174 tenors, 236 basses and 16 “superintendents”, a total of 842 singing members.
Under Bridge’s baton, that number was “arranged as two separate choirs, one on each side of the [RAH] organ. At concerts the ladies wore white dresses, those of the right choir adding red sashes and those of the left choir blue ones.” Whatever the strength or weaknesses of its vocal accomplishments, Bridge’s RCS must have been an impressive sight.

CAROLS AND NEW COMPOSITIONS
Under his guidance, the choir continued to grow in reputation and contributed strongly to the remarkable expansion of music-making in Edwardian London: it presented the premières of Ethel Smyth’s powerful Mass in D and Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha, and, in 1912, the choir gave its first annual Christmas Carols concert.
Like Sir Joseph Barnby before him, Bridge – nicknamed Westminster Bridge in a Spy cartoon of the conductor, published in Vanity Fair in April 1904 ¬ also promoted the work of living British composers, and he conducted more than 40 new works either for the first time or soon after their premières elsewhere. He particularly favoured Elgar’s choral works and Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony, and he used his position to champion both composers to the musical establishment of the day. On 26th February 1927, for instance, Elgar conducted the RCS in a performance of his Dream of Gerontius in the Royal Albert Hall; the concert was recorded by HMV Records, and part of it can still be heard on disc today.The choir’s relationship with both Elgar and Vaughan Williams was such that it continues to perform works by them to enthusiastic audiences today; under its current Music Director, Dr Richard Cooke, A Sea Symphony was performed at the idyllic Snape Maltings in 2005, and Elgar’s Music Makers was the highlight of a concert put on during the choir’s tour of Malta, in 2006.

THE FIRST WORLD WAR
Although faced with an inevitable decline in membership and financial insecurities during the First World War, Bridge nevertheless managed to keep the RCS in business. In 1915 he introduced a series of Sunday afternoon concerts at the RAH, and in November 1917, Elgar conducted the Society in the first complete performance of his The Spirit of England. Patriotic fervour continued to colour British music after the end of the war and in March 1921, the choir gave the première of Stanford’s At the Abbey Gate, which is a setting of Mr Justice Darling’s poem in the form of a dialogue between the Unknown Soldier and those who had attended his burial in Westminster Abbey.

INTER WAR YEARS
In 1922, Bridge retired, making way for the RCS’s long-serving organist, H L Balfour, to act as chorus master to a succession of guest conductors, among them Sir Hugh Allen, Eugene Goossens, Albert Coates and the young Adrian Boult.
For all its decline in numbers during the war, the choir was clearly still a very large one and its performances must have been quite something to hear. It was a state of affairs that was not to every conductor’s taste, however: Boult gave his first performance of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius with the choir and the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra in February 1923, and he recalled that “The choir were keen but unwieldy”. However, Edward Bairstow’s recording with the choir of parts of Bach’s Mass in B minor at the RAH on 24th April 1926, supplies evidence to the contrary, and the singers can be heard performing to a stately beat in the Gloria and Sanctus, and producing a rich tone in the Crucifixus.

The Song of Hiawatha

HIAWATHA - A PHENOMENON
The choir had given the first complete performance of Coleridge Taylor’s Scenes from the Song of Hiawatha in 1900, under the baton of the composer himself, and the work was an instant hit. By 1924, Hiawatha was playing to vast audiences and the decision was taken to present the first of a series of fully-staged versions of the trilogy ¬ Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, The Death of Minnehaha and Hiawatha’s Departure. For the next 15 years, more than 1,000 braves and squaws took to the stage for an extended season in the RAH each June, and a legend was born.
A study of the lavish souvenir programme books held in the choir’s archive offers a flavour of these remarkable costumed performances, which featured a chorus of 800 and a 200-strong corps de ballet. Soloists included Lilian Stiles-Allen, Elsie Suddaby, Tudor Davies, Harold Williams and Horace Stevens, while Chief Os-Ke-Non-Ton of the Mohawk Tribe made regular appearances as the Medicine Man. Fired with an almost fanatical enthusiasm for Coleridge Taylor’s sentimental melodies and the spectacular sets, including a vast painted backdrop, waterfalls, wigwams, peace-pipes and various other essential ethnic trappings, the Edwardian public travelled in full costume from the London suburbs and further afield to fill the Hall night after night.
The profits generated by Hiawatha were a boon for the partnership of the Royal Albert Hall Corporation and the RCS, and for the latter, the money established a legacy that supported the choir’s activities throughout the Great Depression and for many years after Hiawatha’s farewell.

Malcolm Sargent

SIR MALCOLM SARGENT
The Hiawatha productions were not only a financial boost for the choir; they served as a perfect vehicle for Malcolm Sargent, who was appointed as permanent conductor to the RCS in 1928, a post he was to hold for 39 years.
In the early days of the Sargent era, the choir extended its discography under exclusive contract to the HMV label, recording extracts from Mendelssohn’s Elijah and Handel’s Messiah, the two works at the heart of the RCS’s repertoire.
While Sargent’s interpretations attracted a mixed press, he was universally acclaimed as the finest British choral conductor of his generation, a born leader of massed amateur singers and an immensely popular figure with audiences who might not otherwise have been attracted to classical music.

THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Sargent, like his predecessor Frederick Bridge, was adamant that the RCS should continue to meet following the outbreak of war. The choir was forced, however, to shift its home base to the relatively cramped Queen’s Hall in Langham Place when the authorities closed the RAH in 1939, and it was there that it subsequently gave morale-boosting performances of Messiah, Elijah and Gerontius.
Ironically, however, it was the Queen’s Hall, rather than the RAH, which was struck by an incendiary bomb on the night of 10th May 1941, and razed to the ground during one of the Luftwaffe’s final and heaviest raids on London before the German war effort turned on Moscow. Later that summer Sargent recalled in a BBC radio broadcast how he “conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Royal Choral Society in the last concert given in the Queen’s Hall.
“The work was The Dream of Gerontius by Elgar,” he recalled, continuing: “It is strangely fitting and became prophetic that the last music and poetry heard in that building was what is usually known as The Angel’s Farewell. The men’s voices, as if speaking for a groaning and war-stricken humanity, murmured ‘Bring us not, Lord, very low. Come back, O Lord, how long.’ Whilst above them the voice of the Angel was singing, ‘Farewell, but not forever! Be brave and patient, swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here, and I will come and wake thee on the morrow.’ Then the whole chorus breathed ‘Amen, Amen.’ Within a few hours our beloved Queen’s Hall met in very truth its night of trial.”
Following the destruction of the Queen’s Hall, the choir returned to the RAH and continued its contribution to the war effort with various charity concerts.

THE PROMS
With the end of war, Sargent and his musical team set about recruiting and training new members for the RCS, their work helped by the fact that the Society was widely perceived as the finest symphonic chorus in the country.
The choir had been involved in the celebrations for Henry Wood’s golden jubilee as a conductor during the 1938 season of the RAH’s annual summer Promenade Concerts, but from 1948 it added its formidable vocal weight to an increasing number of post-war choral Proms.
In 1957, Sargent and the RCS gave the first Proms performance of Elgar’s Gerontius, with members of the Croydon Philharmonic Society; the conductor also introduced many other choral masterpieces to the promenaders, and established the hugely popular Gilbert and Sullivan nights and annual performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as fixtures in the Proms calendar.
By the time of Sargent’s death in 1967, the choir had built a large and fine discography, had begun to tour overseas and was in good health as it approached its centenary season.

ONE HUNDRED YEARS ON
Wyn Morris held the post of conductor for two seasons from 1968 until the appointment in 1972 of Meredith Davies, a close collaborator with Benjamin Britten as musical director of the English Opera Group and shrewd choral conductor.
Writing in the programme for the RCS’s Grand Centenary Concert, given at the RAH on 8th May 1972, Davies observed that “Somewhere during the first century of the Royal Choral Society’s life, the great high noon or heyday of large amateur choirs came and went...Does this mean that the Royal Choral Society enters its second century in a condition of obsolescence? I think not. Far from being the lame ducks of our musical life, your present-day choralists have all the vigour and devotion of their predecessors ¬ and to be neither fashionable nor commercial has a wonderful effect in purifying the motives.”

CONTINUING TRADITIONS
During the last 25 years, the RCS has upheld the best of its traditions, unashamedly promoting large-scale performances of Messiah and other Baroque works in an age that increasingly favours the authentic treatment of music from earlier times, while adapting its activities to ensure survival.
Davies and his successor, the inspirational Hungarian-born musician Laszlo Heltay, prepared the choir for such diverse challenges as concert tours to America, France, Poland, Switzerland and Portugal; the premières of works by Raymond Premru, Anthony Milner and Geoffrey Burgon; a memorable performance of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder at the Proms with the National Youth Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez; and a costumed Christmas show at the London Palladium. The choir also made many festival and other appearances at important British venues, and contributions to the Classic Rock and Hooked On… series of recordings before Heltay’s tenure as conductor ended in December 1993.

Richard Cooke
conducting a rehearsal at
Canterbury Cathedral

AND CREATING NEW ONES
For the next two seasons, the choir was led by guest conductors, giving the members the opportunity to experience a wide-range of musical ideas, before Dr Richard Cooke, chorus master of the London Philharmonic Choir, was appointed as Musical Director in 1995.
Under him, the last few years have seen an even greater diversification of the RCS’s musical activities, giving choir members challenges undreamed of in the past.
There has been close co-operation with a number of national charities for Gala Concerts, programmes of opera selections and popular choral music. Venues have included Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s, and the Cathedrals of Canterbury, Winchester, Salisbury, Exeter, Chichester & Rochester, Symphony Hall, Birmingham, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, St David’s Hall, Cardiff and Palais de Congrès, Lille.
On 8th May 1997, the RCS gave an anniversary concert at the RAH in the presence of HRH The Princess Margaret and the choir’s President, HRH The Duke of Kent ¬ 125 years to the day since the Royal Choral Society’s first concert in 1872. Later, in 2007, the choir was among the performers invited to sing an arrangement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by Billy Bragg, in the presence of the RCS’s patron, HM The Queen, at the reopening of the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank.
The traditional concert season has undergone a transformation, with outdoor events and summer festivals, and in recent years the choir has performed at venues such as Kenwood House, Marble Hill, Milton Keynes Bowl, Crystal Palace and Hampton Court. For the last few years, the choir has also been invited to make an annual appearance on stage in Hyde Park, leading the audience as part of the Proms in the Park link-up with the Last Night of the Proms at the RAH.
The RCS returned to the recording studio in the 1990s, reconfirming its pedigree with powerful versions of Handel’s Messiah and Verdi’s Requiem, both conducted by Owain Arwel Hughes. These were followed by a chart-topping Last Night of the Proms with Barry Wordsworth, and Carmina Burana with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Dr Cooke. Since the late 1990s, the RCS has also appeared on television, including taking part in the national commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the end of the Falklands War, and made regular soundtrack recordings for Sky TV and most recently, for a programme for Channel 5. Among other highlights, it has performed at the O2 with Kiri te Kanawa and Andrea Bocelli, opened the Slovakian festival Pohoda with a performance of Rachmaninov’s Vespers, and is also a regular performer in the bi-annual, sell-out Classical Spectacular concerts presented by Raymond Gubbay at the RAH.

LOOKING AHEAD
The broadening of the RCS’s musical experience has not, however, been at the expense of its standard choral repertoire. In the last 10 years, countless performances have been given of Baroque sacred music, oratorio, and 20th-century works. Important for a choir too, is the expanding of its own musical knowledge, and under Dr Cooke rarely performed works by Berlioz - Damnation of Faust and the Grande Messe des Morts - the Mahler Symphonies and Schubert Masses have been explored and performed to acclaim.
Overseas travel continues to be a feature, and most recently the choir has performed Rachmaninov’s Vespers, first in Brighton before taking it to Slovakia, where the choir sang the work at midnight, on an open air stage, as the opening set for the global musical festival, Pohoda, and then again in the old town of the country’s capital, Bratislava.
The history of the RCS is far from over. It has entered the 21st century in good health, with 175 singing members and an annual concert commitments list that numbers upward of 19 a year and more. For the last six years, the Society has been run voluntarily from within its own ranks, which has released valuable funds to ensure two additional annual concerts that the choir promotes itself, one in the summer and the other for Remembrance Day; and under Dr Cooke, its repertoire continues to develop.
As the choir turns its eyes to its 140th year, there is no doubt that it has a history to live up to. It began on 8th October 2011, when the RCS joined the resident choir of Central Hall, Westminster, in a performance that marked that Hall’s entry to London’s concert hall circuit. The Society returned to the same Hall on 11th November for its own annual Remembrance Concert, when it performed Mozart’s Requiem and Brahm’s Schicksalslied with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, before entering the second half of its winter season. There is a competition under way, for a young, new composer to write a Christmas carol for the choir, and plans are being laid for a return the recording studio.
To recall Meredith Davies’s assertion on the anniversary of its 100th year, the choir is far from obsolescent. It is thriving.

(This Brief History is based on research by Peggy Wilson MBE, choir member 1954 to 1997)

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