Birmingham Festival Choral Society to perform at Lichfield Cathedral
Birmingham Festival Choral Society are looking forward to their first concert in the beautiful setting of Lichfield Cathedral. The original performance of Brahms’ A German Requiem in 2020 was postponed several times, due to the pandemic, but the two year wait will make the performance even more special.
Birmingham Festival Choral Society is a mixed choir, performing a wide range of music from the choral repertoire. For example, last term we mastered unfamiliar jazz rhythms and blues harmonies to sing an exciting concert of Will Todd’s choral jazz and blues music, written within the last 20 years. Next term will be a performance of The Elijah, a work close to our hearts, as we were the choir that sang the premiere at Birmingham Town Hall in 1846, with Mendelssohn himself conducting. The ‘Festival’ in our name refers to the fact that we were formed as the chorus for the famous Birmingham Triennial Festivals, during which many new works were performed for the first time.
Our performance of A German Requiem in Lichfield Cathedral on 2nd July gives a foretaste of our choir tour to the Rhineland of Germany in June 2023. It was important to Brahms to set the music to words in German, his native tongue, and that is the version we will be singing at the concert.