The Long View | Who will miss the BBC Singers?

Eight years ago, I arrived in the country in which I now live. To begin with I was living in someone else’s flat, while its owner was living in mine in London. As I fondled the confection of remote controls that lay in front of her widescreen TV, on popped the public service broadcaster, showing a performance by its in-house chamber choir. Its members were singing in four-part harmony while floating in individual canoes, at dusk, on one of the capital’s canals.

This turned out to be a daily fixture: a 3-minute TV show titled Song of the Day. From Monday to Sunday, before the evening news, the public broadcaster’s full-time chamber choir was there on my screen, atmospherically directed music video-style while being overdubbed by their own immaculate performance pre-recorded in a studio. They might be shot on a beach, in a shop or walking the streets of the city. The music they sang was instantly effective: partsongs or folk music, mostly in four-part harmony, luminously performed.

There are probably some people in my adopted country who have never heard of the DR Vocal Ensemble, as the broadcasting choir is called. But I would wager that the majority have. The choir comes up in conversation, even among people who have no discernible interest in classical music and claim never to have been to one of the ensemble's concerts. But most people probably know about the choir given the existence of Song of the Day; given it makes various other regular appearances on screen; given the fact that it led the nation in weekly, live TV sing-alongs during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The comparison with the BBC Singers is all too stark – and bitterly ironic, given the BBC’s broadcasting choir has always been a model for others. Let there be no doubt: it’s a short-sighted travesty that the BBC plans to close the UK’s only full-time professional choir and to undermine three of its own orchestras, even if anyone could see it coming. But it has also been alarming to witness, in the debate that has followed, just how few culturally engaged people even knew the BBC Singers existed.

That’s nobody’s fault but the wider BBC’s, whose leadership have a pathological aversion to putting the corporation’s ensembles on TV outside the Proms - broadcasts that are minimal, seasonal, and distort the everyday reality of its ensemble’s activities, not least by suggesting they’re all based at the Royal Albert Hall. To the uninitiated they are huge, lumbering concerts happening inside a gilded Victorian auditorium, the very antithesis of the immediacy and bespoke TV atmosphere of Song of the Day.The BBC Singers perform Handel’s Solomon in last year's Prom 43 © Chris Christodoulou

The wider BBC’s treatment of its musical ensembles is unfathomable from a European perspective, where broadcasting ensembles are used as broadcasting ensembles, on television and radio, week-in-week-out. The lunacy of the BBC’s new classical music strategy announced last week is its apparent focus on where its orchestras can travel to and which oddball venues they can perform in. That bypasses the entire concept of broadcasting. If you want an ensemble to reach more people and you’re the BBC, you don’t send it to Plymouth once a decade. You put it on BBC Two.

As it is, the BBC Singers has remained steadfast as a radio choir. The dilemma there is the very same dilemma public service broadcasters are wrestling with all over Europe: any choir (or orchestra) can broadcast on public radio, you just need to string up microphones at its concert or press ‘play’ on its CD. Insiders like us can easily argue the difference: no choir has the BBC Singers’ finesse, flexibility or discipline; no choir has its capacity to capitalise on a full-time working model; no choir has such an astonishing track record with new music and music by composers from varied backgrounds.

Those arguments would be a whole lot easier to make if the ensemble we’re talking about was more widely cherished, known, seen, heard - if it was considered part of the cultural fabric of the nation by more people. The BBC Singers could have been an institution millions all over Britain felt some sort of affinity with, even if they’d never been in the same room as its musicians. That’s the power of broadcasting and it’s also the responsibility of public service. The BBC didn’t get the memo. Or, more likely, shredded it years ago.