Long-term readers of this blog will know that I long for the Bath Festival Chorus to be revived. I was asked for my thoughts by another interested party and here they are, edited slightly in the interests of diplomacy:
The original Bath Festival Chorus existed in the earlier years of the Festival under Menuhin. It was revived in 1992 by Nigel Perrin and championed by Richard Hickox, performing in the Bath Festival and the Bath Mozartfest as well as giving independent concerts. The core of the membership were members of the Bath Camerata, with invited singers from other choirs in Bath. But in the new millennium its performances grew rarer and its final appearance was in 2005 when it took part in an orchestral concert in the Abbey and a concert of its own conducted by James MacMillan, no less, in Christ Church Julian Rd.
I never sang in the BFC myself, though I was offered a place and turned it down, which I later regretted because the chance to join didn’t come again. So I’m a bit vague about how exactly it worked – actually this vagueness may have been one of the problems with it.
So what went wrong? The following reasons have all occurred to me or been suggested by others:
a) lack of support from Festival organisers. I don’t think Joanna MacGregor had any interest in the BFC when she ran the Festival, and no attempt was made to revive it then. But it was already less of a fixture when she took over. There were also concerns about the choral/orchestral concerts taking risks with a substantial slice of the Festival’s budget.
b) neither the Forum nor the Abbey were ideal venues and the BFC often performed elsewhere such as Wells Cathedral or Clifton Cathedral. But Wells Cathedral became more problematic as a venue, I’m told.
c) Richard Hickox was busy with the BBCNOW, then started spending much of the year in Australia and no longer had time to be involved. Some of us hoped that if he retired to the area he would take up the BFC again, but his death in 2008 put paid to that idea.
d) someone needed to do the admin, with time and energy, as well as the connexions in Bath’s choral world.
e) ‘it was hard to find rehearsal times because every night one or other of Bath’s choirs would be rehearsing’. I’ve been told this but don’t really believe it as the BFC had only a few rehearsals per event, on different nights of the week.
The obstacles. to restarting the choir are rather different from the reasons it wound up in 2005, I think. One is the general shortage of audiences for choral concerts – a serious problem in Bristol at the moment and not unknown in Bath. (My theory for what it’s worth is that there are more choirs around giving concerts, but audiences have not expanded at the same rate.).
I also don’t think it would now be possible to run the choir in the invitation-only way it worked before. These days, such a choir would be expected to have a website and a procedure for applying to join. This and other matters such as music hire would require administration.
There might also be resistance from those who currently sing in Festival choral concerts, when they occur. And it would be essential to have the support of people high up in the organisation of the Bath Festival and/or the Mozartfest.
On the other hand, there is a feeling that the Bath Festival shouldn’t become a festival of chamber music (as nearly happened in 2014), and that other similar festivals (Cheltenham, 3 Choirs etc.) have their own choruses, so why can’t Bath? There certainly are a lot of singers around here, and not all to be found in Bath’s choirs.