A Choir with History!

One of the oldest choral societies in the United Kingdom

Bedford Choral Society is one of the oldest in the country. Founded in 1867 as Bedford Musical Society, it is we believe the 7^th oldest, equal with Edinburgh University Musical Society which dates from the same year.

The only choirs with a longer pedigree than ours are: Halifax (1817), Ipswich (1824), Huddersfield (1836), Windsor and Eton (1837), Guildford (1839) and Royal Liverpool Philharmonic (1840).

In 2015 the late Michael Benson, who was our archivist choir member at that time, published a history of the Bedford Choral Society: Bedford’s Musical Society.

Our Musical Director, Ian Smith, has prepared a schedule of the works performed by Bedford Choral Society.  Schedule-of-works-performed-by-Bedford-Choral-Society-up-to-2025

The first recorded public performance by the Bedford Amateur Musical Society, which was a precursor to the current Bedford Choral Society, was in April 1867. Since then, more concerts were performed although we have been unable to locate programmes for several of these until one in 1880. After this date all  concerts performed by Bedford Choral Society have been listed in chronological order by our current archivist in a spreadsheet which can be located here.  List of Concerts from 1880 to 2024. It includes the date and location of the concert, the composer, the names of the soloists and the front page of the programme.

Although the small print is difficult to read, the words “Carriages at 10.30” appear at the bottom right hand side of the page. That’s not something you see on programmes these days!

In the documented history of our performances over the 150+ years of the Choir’s existence some patterns emerge.

During this whole period we’ve sung the works of more than 100 different composers. The most consistently popular composer throughout our history has proved to be Handel: we have performed his choral music at 70 different concerts. Mendelssohn has also made regular appearances, especially during the first hundred years. Other particularly popular composers have been Bach, Haydn and Brahms.

In the Victorian and Edwardian years the Choir often sang works by then contemporary composers who were popular in their day. Many of us will be unfamiliar with J F Barnett’s The Ancient Mariner, Sterndale Bennett’s The Woman of Samaria or MacFarren’s St John the Baptist, and perhaps they were ‘of their day’ as none of these were performed again after the turn of the 20^th century. Arthur Sullivan however has lasted the course. The Choir first performed his work in 1886 (On Shore and Sea) and has continued to do so for more than a hundred years (HMS Pinafore in 2010).

From the beginning of the 20^th century, performances started to feature more modern and British composers who have joined the ranks of the ‘greats’, including Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Britten.

We haven’t always stuck to the traditional repertoire, branching out instead to perform the work of ‘living’ composers. Samuel Coleridge Taylor for example, considered to be a fairly recent ‘re-discovery’, was on our programmes from the early 1900s while he was still alive. Also during the 20th century we sang the work of numerous contemporary composers including Parry, Stanford, Kodaly, Ireland, Walton and Bernstein. In the 1970s we began performing the compositions of choral music’s ‘national treaure’ John Rutter and a decade later the work of John Willcocks, who also conducted Bedford Choral Society from 1959 to 1987.

It’s interesting to note that in 1991, breaking with a tradition of choral music entirely dominated by male composers, we did actually perform a composition by a woman, Elizabeth Poston. The piece, The Nativity, had been written in 1951.

Into the 21^st century we’ve continued to seek out new or unusual pieces reflecting a range of styles. Will Todd’s Mass in Blue, Fanshawe’s African Sanctus and L’Strange’s Zimbe have offered audiences something different. We work hard on our languages too: apart from the traditional Latin we’ve also sung in Italian, French, German, Russian (Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky) and Hebrew (Whitacre’s Five Hebrew Love Songs).

We’ve performed 3 different pieces composed by Michael Rose, the Choir’s guest conductor from 1973 until 2019.  And our accompanist, Tim Grant-Jones, has also written works for us to perform, including in 2010 The Human Race, as well as very many pieces to keep us entertained and challenged in online rehearsals during the Covid pandemic!

In our history we have celebrated two anniversaries. For the 125^th in November 1991 we commissioned and performed an original piece by Elis Pehonen, Ode to St Cecilia.

25 years later we marked our 150^th by performing two commissioned pieces, Paul Edwards’ Te Deum which had been previously commissioned and performed in 2005 and Tim Grant-Jones’ Psalm 150, specially written for the anniversary and performed as a world premiere. In the same programme we also sang two works performed at the very first concert of Bedford Choral Society in 1867: Mendelssohn’s Lauda Sion, and Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus.