Brandenburg Choral Festival returns to London this week

The Brandenburg Choral Festival is set to return to the capital this weekend with a series of concerts taking place across London in March and April. The festival presents a celebration of a broad range of choirs and vocal ensembles from every musical background.

Founded in 2010 as a series of six concerts at St Martin-in-the-Fields, the festival reached its peak just before the pandemic with two seasons and a total of around 120 concerts a year, but was heavily impacted by the pandemic. Although choral activity continued through online choral community, the Brandenburg Camino, and Brandenburg’s Choral Cruises, this year’s festival marks the start an era of restoration for the festival.

Brandenburg artistic director Bob Porter said: ‘After a difficult few years recovering from the Covid pandemic we’re really encouraged to see green shoots appearing all the time. Our next batch of concerts will see some of our old friends join us alongside elite young singers from Harvard-Westlake School in the US and from Oxford University.’

London-based choir Southern Spirit Singers will open the festival on Saturday (23 March) with a concert centred around the ‘Sounds of Spring’. The programme, which has a 50/50 split between female and male composers, will present works by Cecilia McDowall, Mia Makaroff, Sarah Quartel, Elaine Hagenberg and Fanny Hensel alongside Laura Mvula’s Sing to the Moon, written for the BBC Singers in 2020. Tickets can be found here.