Christchurch Choral Festival 2025

This festival is intended to bring choirs together with an annual opportunity to share repertoire on a larger scale.

As in past years, individual choirs will be grouped into convenient clusters, performing for up to 10 minutes, and choosing their own items, conductors and accompanists. Combined inner-city church choirs, directed by Ravil Atlas, accompanied by Jeremy Woodside, and co-ordinated by the Royal School of Church Music, will open the concert with Bach’s Awake Us, Lord, Gibbons Song 13, and the exuberant Praise Ye the Lord by John Rutter. Community Choirs of Christchurch, conducted by Henry Nicholson, will sing arrangements of Shenandoah, Lullaby of Broadway, and John Rutter’s Home is a Special Kind of Feeling. Young singers will include the Christchurch Boys’ Choir, directed by Courtney Hickmott, who will also direct one of this year’s concert choirs: Schola Cantorum. The “barbershop” tradition will be represented this year by Quantum Acoustics, co-ordinated by Will Lynch, who will sing Shall We Gather At The River, arr. Blake Morgan, She Walks In Beauty (David Zimmerman) and I Carry Your Heart With Me (Rasmus Krigstrom).