Classical preview: Sirènes call of success

CAN an all-female group from Glasgow cash in after being named UK Choir of the Year? Its musical director thinks so

Choirs are back in fashion. It’s a phenomenon that cuts across vast swathes of society, from popular TV shows like Gareth Malone’s The Choir: Military Wives to the astonishing multiple achievements of Christopher Bell’s National Youth Choirs of Scotland. Singing is no longer a sissy thing to do.

One person who’s over the moon with Britain’s current choral renaissance is 24-year-old Andrew Nunn, a fresh-faced Middlesbrough-born masters’ student at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. He is still reeling from the success, a month ago, of his choir – Les Sirènes – in winning the UK Choir of the Year Competition, and proudly declares that “it was the best moment of my life”.

If you’ve never heard of Les Sirènes, that’s hardly surprising. Rather like BBC’s Young Musician of the Year, the Choir of the Year finals occupy the marginal broadcasting territory that is BBC4. So it’s likely you missed Nunn’s choir demolish the opposition with its arrangement of Billy Joel’s And So it Goes, after more serious-minded performances of Poulenc and Elgar.

What you’d have seen is a 25-strong, all-female choir made up of current and recently graduated students of the RCS, who are exploring an area of the choral repertoire that rarely gets heard. “You get a lot of girls’ choirs up to the age of 18, and a lot of old ladies’ choirs, but there aren’t many in the 20-40 age group. Exploring that age range is really interesting and very rare,” says Nunn.

They certainly caught the attention of the Choir of the Year judges, who came from a range of musical backgrounds and included West End star Ruthie Henshall. “In choosing the repertoire, we were very careful in playing to our strengths, music with long legato lines and beautiful melodies.” says Nunn.

Just as, five years ago, it paid off for Nunn to volunteer his services as a token tenor in an RCS singing class that was suffering from a lack of male voices. “The singers had to do an ensemble class, which included putting on their own concert, but they had no tenors,” he recalls. “I was in my first year as an oboist, but as a 2nd study singer I had an interest, so went along. When it came to the concert, the girls did some pieces on their own, but it wasn’t holding together very well, so they asked one of the boys to conduct. I did a few, it worked quite well, and we thought ‘let’s do something with this’.” The rest, as they say, is history.

Nunn entered his newly formed female choir for Choir of the Year in 2008, and again in 2010 – “just to give us something to aim for” – but they didn’t get through. It was third time lucky this year and Les Sirènes went all the way to the top.

The win takes the previously ad hoc choir into a new level of operation, he says. “Right now we’re trying to get a recording deal, and we have a couple of options. We have to get our name known now, as that can only happen when you’ve got the title. It would be so easy just to let it all filter away and next year, when a new winner comes along, nobody cares about us. We have six months to get ourselves into the limelight.”

The choir have already tasted the fruits of success, albeit in a frustrating way. Their Christmas Concert tomorrow night at the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Church, Queen’s Cross, Glasgow has, in the wake of their triumph, become a sell-out.

“When I booked the venue, we hadn’t won the competition. Two nights would have been a good idea; it’s important we keep people interested.”

To service their new-found popularity, Nunn is in the process of organising a concert tour. By then, he reckons he will have some really interesting repertoire to perform. “I’m keen that we explore music written for female voice choirs, rather than typical arrangements of existing full choir repertoire. There’s always ‘new’ stuff you can find, particularly by Gustav Holst, whose Hymn to Dionysus is great, but quite obscure,” says Nunn.

Besides having explored music by Vaughan Williams and Holst, the choir has performed newer music by RCS composition graduate Gareth Williams. But now, as a result of the competition, Nunn has the golden opportunity to commission a brand new work for BBC Radio 3.

“It will be fantastic to have a piece of music that bears our name,” he says, adding that he has a few composers in mind, the key criterion being that any new work will have to be melodic in style. “That’s the most important thing about this group. I am working with people who are training to be singers. There are big voices there, but they don’t want to be singing modern stuff that is completely dissonant. That is not our style. Not all composers fit that bill.”

So who does? Nunn stays tight-lipped on that one, so I venture an obvious name – Aberdeen University’s Paul Mealor, whose brilliant blend of lyricism and modernism (as seen through his Military Wives hit and his new anthem for last year’s Royal Wedding) has made him a household name. “He’s certainly high on the radar,” Nunn admits.

As for the future of the choir, Nunn reckons it will ultimately have to move from its current amateur status to something more professional if they are to build on their current success. Now seems like a perfect time to jump on the bandwagon.

• Les Sirènes’s Christmas Programme is at the Mackintosh Church, Queen’s Cross, Glasgow tomorrow. Tel: [phone] or visit www.sirenes.co.uk