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About Fairford and District Choral Society
There has been a choral society based in Fairford
for many years. Archive photographs go back to 1948.
The society was conducted by John
Henderson, Tony Frewer and Julia Morris for a number of
years but disbanded in the 1970s. Later, in the 1990s, St Mary’s
Church, Fairford started to hold concerts of sacred music on Palm
Sunday drawing singers from Fairford and the surrounding area. Works
sung included the Fauré, Rutter and Mozart Requiems, the Somervell
Passion, Stainer’s Crucifixion, Schubert and Haydn Masses and Handel’s
Messiah. This Palm Sunday choir became Fairford & District
Choral Society in 2006.
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The Fairford
and District Choral Society 1948
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The choir performs choral music of many different types,
from the 15th century to the 21st, to as high a standard as possible;
to help us in this we engage soloists and accompanists who are
professionals singing and playing in some of the finest choirs in
Britain. Our aim is to be a welcoming and friendly choir.
The music director from 2006 until the end of 2015
was John Read. His
successor in January 2016 was Marysia Gorska-Saj,
who had two periods of maternity leave during which the conductors
were Jessi Pywell (2019-20) and Katrine
Reimers (2022). Marysia conducted her final concert with us
in December 2023.
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From January 2024 our new Music Director is Nia
Llewelyn Jones.
Nia Llewelyn Jones grew up in North Wales where singing and making
music played a central part in her upbringing.
She studied music at Cambridge, and was awarded a scholarship to study
conducting with Simon Halsey in Birmingham, where she spent time
assisting with the CBSO’s many choral forces. She is also a trained
teacher.
Nia has served Gloucester Cathedral for 10 years, where she is
presently Assistant Conductor. She has coached over 3,000
school children to sing as part of the Cathedral’s Junior Voices
Project. The greatest privilege of her career was becoming
the inaugural Conductor of the Girl Choristers, following the historic
admission of girls to the Cathedral Choir in November 2016.
She has also performed at the historic Three Choirs Festival, including
conducting two large-scale musical youth projects, accompanied by
members of the Philharmonia Orchestra; Carl Davis’s Last Train to
Tomorrow, in 2019, and the contemporary opera, The Happy Princess in
2023.
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Nia has worked as a symphonic chorus director at the LSO, chorus
mastering for Sir Simon Rattle, among others. She has also enjoyed
orchestral conducting engagements with the BBC National Orchestra of
Wales, including a televised children’s programme about classical
music.
Nia has directed both the National Youth Choir of Wales and the
National Youth Training Choir of Wales. This included a tour of
Argentina, commemorating 150 years of the Welsh settlement in Patagonia.
Nia loves writing music for children, ranging from a sung-through
musical Nativity to many liturgical works.
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