I realise it’s a few years since the Chantry Singers disbanded. The choir was flourishing right to the end, but the founder and musical director felt she had achieved what she wanted with it, and sensed that the market was more crowded with other choirs competing for singers and audience. I sang with it on and off, though I wasn’t with it right at the end, having become discouraged by realising that I was one of their most dispensible singers. Nevertheless, I have fond memories of the concerts in the Abbey and of the people I got to know in the choir.
How to win and retain an audience is a matter which is sufficiently complex to merit a separate post. But I’m not really sure which other choirs were competing for the same singers. There were some larger choirs (and it was at this time that the Minerva Choir raised its game). Smaller ones included Bath Camerata, Paragon Singers, Chandos Singers and A Handful of Singers (founded around the same time) – have I left one out? I’m not sure how large the Bath Cantata Group is. But there seems to be a gap now – no choir of 35 or so singers in Bath doing an orchestral concert once a year and a couple of other concerts.
I wonder if choirs of this sort of size are just difficult to support financially. I recall the demise of the Brandon Hill Singers who were very similar. We needed a full-size orchestra to do works like the German Requiem and that costs a lot of money, but without the bedrock of thousands of pounds that a full-size symphony chorus raises in subscriptions.
[January 2015: I was talking recently to a member of Bath Cantata Group, and I think this choir is moving towards occupying the Chantry Singers-shaped hole, under its new conductor Neil Moore. Although it’s unauditioned, it is taking on larger works in combination with other choirs.]