Thank you, Ardcarp - good to see a positive response. yes, the lists certainly exist - and so do the "choirs" - which I put in inverted commas because I know that there are those who would be very reluctant to call many of the groups "choirs". But I'm not going down that bumpy road !
With regard to Richard Barrett's question about other countries, I think the situation in, for example Holland and Germany is very similar to the UK - a wide variety of choral groups singing a fairly similar repertoire. In Sweden, many choirs tend to be associated with churches - even though actual church attendance in Sweden is lower than in the UK. But it's in churches that young singers get the opportunity to sing solos and play pianos - i.e. build up their performance skills.
Many towns and cities in Sweden have excellent youth choirs and a friend of mine has, over the past three or four years, created an British-style robed choir of boys and mainly young men at the church where he is in charge of music - I think there are about thirty of them in the choir. He has a great knowledge of, and love of the Anglican tradition, choral evensong and the like. There are only about three or four such choirs in Sweden.
University student choirs traditionally are male voice - Orphei Drängar from Uppsala and Lunds Studentsångare from Lund are probably the best known. The sound, of course, is very different from Oxbridge college choirs and British male voice choirs.
One major feature of choirs abroad is that they very often have quite an extensive repertoire of songs in English - ballads, songs from musicals, British and American folk songs, sea-shanties etc. In concerts, there is very little use of scores. They don't seem to have any problem singing from memory in English. Scandinavians also have a large repertoire of songs from the other Nordic countries.
Danish choirs, for example, will know several settings of songs by the Swedish song-writer Evert Taube, which they sing in Swedish, of course. Similarly, Swedes will know Norwegian folk songs.
With regard to Richard Barrett's question about other countries, I think the situation in, for example Holland and Germany is very similar to the UK - a wide variety of choral groups singing a fairly similar repertoire. In Sweden, many choirs tend to be associated with churches - even though actual church attendance in Sweden is lower than in the UK. But it's in churches that young singers get the opportunity to sing solos and play pianos - i.e. build up their performance skills.
Many towns and cities in Sweden have excellent youth choirs and a friend of mine has, over the past three or four years, created an British-style robed choir of boys and mainly young men at the church where he is in charge of music - I think there are about thirty of them in the choir. He has a great knowledge of, and love of the Anglican tradition, choral evensong and the like. There are only about three or four such choirs in Sweden.
University student choirs traditionally are male voice - Orphei Drängar from Uppsala and Lunds Studentsångare from Lund are probably the best known. The sound, of course, is very different from Oxbridge college choirs and British male voice choirs.
One major feature of choirs abroad is that they very often have quite an extensive repertoire of songs in English - ballads, songs from musicals, British and American folk songs, sea-shanties etc. In concerts, there is very little use of scores. They don't seem to have any problem singing from memory in English. Scandinavians also have a large repertoire of songs from the other Nordic countries.
Danish choirs, for example, will know several settings of songs by the Swedish song-writer Evert Taube, which they sing in Swedish, of course. Similarly, Swedes will know Norwegian folk songs.
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