Be Uplifted with HCS

HCS Chair Jane Sargent welcomes you to the 2022/23 season.

Last season we were able to return to the concert stage, but still working through the uncertainties of public performance with Covid worries at the front of people’s minds. So this year feels like a real return to a full-blooded choral season, with works by Brahms, Beethoven, Mendelssohn as well as the great Huddersfield tradition, the December Messiah performances.

The Covid year left its mark on all of us, and so we open this season with the World Premiere in live performance of two new works that we commissioned during the pandemic, We’ll Sing and The Songthrush and the Mountain Ash. Words from Poet Laureate Simon Armitage and music by Cheryl Frances-Hoad and Daniel Kidane, now orchestrated for the first time, combined with dance and video (by Century Films) to produce a poignant online experience which was then taken up in Simon’s BBC special A Pandemic Poem – where did the world go? It is our tribute to the memory of those dreadful months and of the members of the Society who were taken from us.

I’m particularly looking forward to the stellar line-up of soloists who are engaged for this season, and to the return to the Town Hall podium of our Artistic Advisor and English National Opera director Martyn Brabbins, who remains a great advocate for all things Choral. The choir itself is back in strength with a record number of successful auditions in the last year, so I hope you’ll be joining me in what promises to be a joyous and uplifting musical journey.