Choral Workshop 2026
Saturday 7 February 20269.30am–5.00pm
St Mary’s Church, Bathwick
This year’s spotlight was on Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes (BWV 76) — the very first cantata Bach presented in the Thomaskirche and an audacious display of his creative ambition. From its trumpet-blazoned opening to the intimate colours of oboe d’amore and viola da gamba, the work sweeps through a sumptuous kaleidoscope of musical forms, clearly crafted to astonish its original congregation — and still dazzling today.
Alongside this, we explored much-loved movements from Bach’s radiant motet Jesu, meine Freude (BWV 227), including the dramatic ‘So aber Christus’ and the defiant ‘Trotz dem alten Drachen’.
Leading the day was our musical director, Benedict Collins Rice, joined by a full complement of professional soloists from the Oxford Bach Soloists – a partnership that has flourished year on year and elevated our end-of-day showcases to ever greater heights. This workshop was no exception: specialist baroque instrumentalists from Bristol Ensemble (string quartet, oboe and natural trumpet) joined forces with our soloists to bring Bach’s music thrillingly to life in a final performance.
Our annual workshop is a winter highlight – a bright spark in February’s greyness, filled with inspiring music-making, friendly faces, tea & coffee breaks, and Di’s legendary raffle.
Pärt / Bach
Saturday 28 March 20267.30pm
Christ Church, Bath
Bath Bach Choir’s spring concert brings together two composers separated by centuries yet united in faith and shaped by traditions that value music not as an ornament but as a proclamation. Heard together, these works reveal contrasting responses to the same impulse: to let music serve the word of God.
Johann Sebastian Bach harnessed music to articulate his own passionate beliefs. Arvo Pärt, an Orthodox Christian who turned 90 last year, strove to create a musical genre that would, in its simplicity, bring the sacred texts to the forefront. This programme offers not so much a clash of styles as a rare chance to hear how belief, discipline and listening can shape music across centuries – and still ask us to listen differently.
Bach’s Jesu, meine Freude stands at the heart of Lutheran musical culture, where theology, text and sound are inseparable. Written for a funeral in Leipzig in 1723, this much-loved motet interweaves chorales by Johann Franck with verses from St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, using symmetrical design and contrapuntal craft to explore core Lutheran concerns: the struggle between flesh and spirit, death and consolation, fear and faith.
Pärt’s Passio emerges from a very different world, yet one equally shaped by faith and structure. Written in 1982, the work sets St John’s Passion in Latin, using the composer’s austere, bell-like tintinnabuli style to allow the text to speak. It requires particular purity of singing and playing that elicits a glorious spiritual stillness in the listener.
Joining Bath Bach Choir under Christ Church’s magnificently domed chancel will be the singers and instrumentalists (violin, oboe, bassoon, cello) of The Facade Ensemble, a chamber group that specialises in bringing 20th-century music to the forefront of today’s listening experiences.
Bath Bach Choir
The Facade Ensemble
Marcus Sealy organ
Benedict Collins Rice conductor
Belshazzar’s Feast
by William WaltonSaturday 4 July 2026
7.30pm
Bath Abbey
Willard White tops the bill at Bath Abbey on 4 July with combined Bath & Bury Bach Choirs
Bath Bach Choir and Bury Bach Choir jointly present William Walton’s magnificent oratorio Belshazzar’s Feast, one of the most thrilling and dramatic works in the choral repertoire, with baritone solos performed by the legendary Willard White.
This biblical epic tells the story of the Babylonian king’s downfall with power and intensity, featuring some of the most exciting and rhythmically complex choral writing ever composed. From the haunting opening narration, to the triumphant finale celebrating the liberation of the Jewish people, Walton’s masterpiece will transport you to the drama and decadence of ancient Babylon for an evening of musical storytelling at its absolute finest.
Belshazzar’s Feast is a work that will highlight the performance skills of these two fine choirs, coming together for the first time this summer under the baton of their shared musical director, Benedict Collins Rice. To complete the programme there will be a Willard White solo and favourite English choral pieces by Parry (Blest Pair of Sirens; I was Glad) and Walton (Coronation Te Deum composed for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Abbey).
Book now for this rare opportunity to hear one of Britain’s greatest choral works performed live by a choir of 140 singers and an orchestra of over 50 players – a musical experience that will stay with you long after the final notes fade away.
Willard White baritone
Bath Bach Choir
Bury Bach Choir
Southern Sinfonia
Benedict Collins Rice conductor
The choirs’ first ever collaboration will see them perform the same programme in St Edmundsbury Cathedral, Bury St Edmunds, on Saturday 13 June, in which the baritone solos will be sung by the stellar Roderick Williams.
Photo © Theo Williams
Bach Resounding
Saturday 17 October 20267.30pm
Bath Abbey
What could be more uplifting for an autumn evening than a concert of J S Bach resounding exuberantly throughout every corner of Bath Abbey’s historic stone vaults?
Bath Bach Choir comes home to present an evening devoted to the master, pairing his intimate Mass in F and substantial Cantata BWV 21 with the familiar strains of the first ‘Brandenburg’ Concerto.
Composed around 1719–20, Bach’s four-movement Brandenburg Concerto No 1 opens the programme, creating a sense of occasion with its rhythmic energy, colourful orchestration and lively interplay between strings, wind and horns. The opening movement has a wonderfully festive character, with the horns providing hunting-like brilliance. In contrast, the second movement is quiet and lyrical, with the oboes and strings creating a more reflective atmosphere. The third movement returns to lively Baroque energy, while the finale is a polonaise – a Polish-style dance – followed by a fast minuet and trio, giving the concerto an unusually varied sequence of dances and moods.
Bach’s Mass in F major brings warmth and expressive depth, a compact and richly varied example of his sacred choral writing. Much smaller in scale than his monumental Mass in B minor, it belongs to a group of four so-called Lutheran Masses that Bach assembled around the 1730s, probably drawing on music he had written earlier. The Mass sets the first two sections of the traditional Latin Mass: Kyrie (asking for mercy) and Gloria (a joyful proclamation of praise), using a four-part choir with soloists, strings, wind and continuo.
Cantata BWV 21, Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis (‘I had much affliction in my heart’) is one of Bach’s most emotionally powerful cantatas, less of a Baroque religious work than an exploration of the human experience of suffering, hope and ultimately joy. Scored for four vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra, it takes the listener on a remarkable musical journey, from a dark and restless opening chorus to an uplifting final movement, where the darkness has been transformed into radiant confidence and joy. Bath probably composed it in 1713 during his time in Weimar, revising it several times afterwards. It was performed in Leipzig on the third Sunday after Trinity in 1723.
As it approaches its 80th anniversary, Bath Bach Choir is delighted to give a warm welcome to instrumentalists from Bristol Ensemble Baroque, and singers from Oxford Bach Soloists, to complete the line-up for what will be a heartwarming evening of musical brilliance in Bath Abbey.
Brandenburg Concerto No 1
Mass in F major BWV 233
Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis BWV 21
Bristol Ensemble Baroque
Oxford Bach Soloists
Isobel Cleverley soprano
Alicia Hunt alto
Iris Oliver baritone
Benedict Collins Rice conductor
