⛪ Holy Trinity, Guildford

📅 Sat 2nd November 2024; 7pm


A very warm welcome to Guildford Chamber Choir’s website. 

Earlier in the year, the choir enjoyed a wonderful concert, in tribute to our founder, Richard Fox, and are gratefully to all our supporters. We were delighted to raise more than £1300 for the Phyllis Tuckwell Hospice.

Our next concert will be our autumn offering. Join us on Saturday November 2nd 7pm at Holy Trinity Church, to sing Handel's wonderful Messiah.


Emma Humphreys

Chair of Guildford Chamber Choir



We welcome new singers to the choir!

We would particularly welcome hearing from any new basses!

We are a smallish, friendly project choir, singing three concerts a year with additional events such as an annual Cathedral visit. Rehearsals take place during a 3 to 4 week period before each performance, dates of which are published at least 6 months in advance. Singers may normally sing in a particular concert only if they have attended all the rehearsals. These usually number between 5 and 7, depending on the concert programme.

The choir is run by an elected committee of volunteer members with our Principal Conductor as an advisory member. 

All members contribute to the smooth running of the choir by distributing publicity materials, selling tickets, helping to prepare the concert venues on the day, and assisting with post-concert parties.

To request an audition please email:

secretary@guildfordchamberchoir.org.uk

Guildford Chamber Choir was founded in 1980 with the express aim of performing choral music of the finest quality from the 16th century to the present day. Over the years the choir has remained loyal to this aim, gaining an enviable reputation both for the high standard of its singing and for performing varied and often unusual repertoire. As well as being at the forefront of Guildford music-making, the Guildford Chamber Choir’s reputation has stretched beyond the town and county boundaries. More about the choir....

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Honorary Patrons

Mr & Mrs Michael More-Molyneux

Steven Grahl

Peter Wright

Data Protection and Retention Policy

Keeping data safe and secure is important to us and we are committed to the changes introduced by the European data protection law known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which goes into effect on 25 May 2018.To learn about data privacy and how we process personal data, please view our Data Protection and Retention Policy.

Chamber Choir presents joyful tribute to founder

Guildford Chamber Choir, St Nicolas Church, Guildford, 15th June 2024

Richard Fox was a man of many parts, a coach, a businessman, a great walker (as anyone who has trod the Fox Way circular walk around Guildford will know) and an enthusiastic singer. And he had that gift of bringing joy to all around him, even during his final illness. So the tribute to him by the Guildford Chamber Choir, which he founded in 1980, had to be joyful, from the outset, with William Byrd’s rousing anthem Sing Joyfully. This was followed by Robert Parsons’ reflective Ave Maria, broadcast by the Choir on BBC Radio 3 in 1987 and a moving off-copy performance of Fauré’s Cantique de Jean Racine. These were conducted by the Choir’s Principal Conductor, Max Barley with the Fauré accompanied on piano by Peter Wright, the Choir’s first regular conductor and sometime director of music at Southwark Cathedral. The first half of the concert also included Duruflé’s haunting Ubi Caritas¸and Vaughan Williams’ rousing Let all the world in every corner sing.

Peter Wright moved from the piano to conduct Stanford’s Three Unaccompanied Motets, familiar items in the choral repertoire. These received disciplined performances, as did the beautiful The Blue Bird, in which soprano Helen Pritchard soared beautifully to her ‘blue’ note. In complete contrast was Finzi’s lively My spirit sang all day  and Vaughan Williams’s beautiful setting of The Turtle Dove, with Simon Phillips as bass soloist, moved the audience almost to tears. Appropriately so, as all the music in the concert had been chosen by Richard before his death.

John Bawden conducted the Guildford Chamber Choir’s first concert back in 1980, and he was back on the podium on Saturday, not only as singer and conductor but as composer/arranger. Under his direction the Choir performed three arrangements of popular songs made for Equinox, the vocal quartet he founded in the late 1970s/early 1980s: Jim Godwin, bass in that quartet, also sings in the Choir. Two of these arrangements (Bacharach’s Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head and The Beatles’ When I’m Sixty-Four) were accompanied skillfully by the Marianne Windham Trio who in true jazz tradition improvised their parts, as well as contributing two instrumental pieces Lullaby of Birdland and I’ll remember April.

 John Bawden’s skill as a composer was evident in his Laudate, written for the Epsom Chamber Choir but in fact premiered by the Guildford Chamber Choir in November 2021. Three settings of Shakespeare and Marlowe by the recently honoured Sir John Rutter, accompanied by the trio, preceded the final item, Bawden’s hilarious arrangement of I do like to be beside the seaside.

A collection was taken for the Phyllis Tuckwell Hospice, which provided support for Richard during his final illness, and an enjoyable party followed the concert.

Shelagh Godwin