The Senior Chamber Choir has had an eventful year since winning the BBC Radio Ulster School Choir of the Year competition in April last year. The choir was honoured with an invitation to provide the opening concert for the Charles Wood Choral Festival in Armagh in August, an event that attracts both amateur and professional singers and conductors from all over the British Isles. Traditionally, the choir that performs at the opening concert is regarded as the epitome of choral singing and the standard to which all at the festival should aspire.

The Chamber Choir then had to ‘reform’ very quickly (as over one third of singers left for pastures-new) and the next event was to sing in Belfast City Hall in October at a memorial service for parents who had lost children. Again, this was an honour but it was also a very sobering Sunday afternoon for all concerned.

Performing with the Ulster Orchestra in the Ulster Hall is an experience that is normally only granted to the Belfast Philharmonic Choir but in November our Chamber Choir (augmented by the Senior Choir) was invited to perform Handel’s “Zadok the Priest” with the orchestra for a LIVE radio broadcast. And speaking of priests, the choir also provided a half-hour programme also side two of the “Three Singing Priests” for the 200th Anniversary of St Mark’s Church here in Newtownards.

The choir’s Christmas programme took these young people to St Anne’s Cathedral, carol singing in Castle Court and another radio broadcast recording in the BBC Blackstaff Studios in Belfast to record a programme which was broadcast on Christmas Eve and then repeated on Christmas Day.