The Exmoor Singers of London Chamber Choir is a choir with a strong focus on music by living composers and in particular British composers. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom, the UK or Britain,is a Sovereign state located ^[1]

As hosts of the London Tallis Festival, the choir was most recently broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 28 October 2007. The Tallis Festival, hosted by Exmoor Singers of London forms the Tallis Festival Choir for just one weekend every 12 to 18 months ^[2] In addition, the choir collaborated with rock group Bloc Party^[3] to perform at the BBC Electric Proms,^[4] which was broadcast on both BBC2 television and BBC Radio 1, on 27 and 29 October 2007 respectively. Bloc Party are a British Indie rock band composed of Kele Okereke on vocals and Rhythm guitar, Russell Lissack on The choir also appears regularly on BBC1 television on Songs of Praise. Songs of Praise is a BBC television programme based around traditional Christian Hymns With an average of nearly 3 million viewers weekly it ^{[5][6][7][8][9][10]}

Exmoor Singers actively promote music by living composers, in dedicated concerts; by more generally programming new works; and specifically in commissioning new works. For the choir's first concert dedicated entirely to living composers, on 29 May 2002, the group received a four-star review from The Times. The Times is a daily national Newspaper published in the United Kingdom since 1785 when it was known as The Daily Universal Register. ^[11]

The choir has given a number of first performances, but more particularly aims to give second performances of works that might not otherwise be heard again.

New commissioned music

The choir has commissioned six new choral works:

• Sounds: Three Kandinsky Poems (1999) – David Sawer
• This Sceptr'd Isle (2005) – Paul Ayres
• Dreaming England (This Sceptr'd Isle) (2005) – Peter McGarr
• Tentatio (2006) – Jaakko Mäntyjärvi
• Their Lonely Betters (based on a poem by W. H. Auden) (2007) – James Lavino
• Love You Big as the Sky (a Lindisfarne Love Song) (2007) – Peter McGarr (broadcast in full on BBC Radio 3)

The two works commissioned in 2005 entitled This Sceptr'd Isle^[12] are potentially the only settings for choir based on the speech in William Shakespeare's King Richard II, Act 2 scene 1. Wassily Kandinsky (Russian Василий Кандинский first name pronounced as) ( – 13 December 1944 was a Russian painter, Printmaker Jaakko Mäntyjärvi (born 1963 in Turku, Finland) is a Finnish translator and Composer of Classical music. Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973 ˈwɪstən ˈhjuː ˈɔːdən who signed his works W James Lavino is an American Composer, known especially for his choral music and his music for film and television Lindisfarne () (variant spelling Lindesfarne is a Tidal island off the north-east coast of England. William Shakespeare ( baptised Richard II (6 January 1367 &ndash ca 14 February 1400 was King of England from 1377 until he was deposed in 1399

Both Tentatio and Love You Big as the Sky were commissioned for the Tallis Festival, and are 40-part unaccompanied works inspired by Thomas Tallis' Spem in alium. The Tallis Festival, hosted by Exmoor Singers of London forms the Tallis Festival Choir for just one weekend every 12 to 18 months Spem in alium is a forty-part Motet by Thomas Tallis, composed circa 1570 for eight choirs of five voices each

References

---

© 2009 citizendia.org; parts available under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License, from http://en.wikipedia.org