Millennium Harvest: The BBC Singers Commissions for 1999

One recurring theme in the 75-year history of the BBC Singers (and their various predecessors) has been the tension between their role as a model for amateur choirs and their capabilities as a professional ensemble. Their longest-serving director, Leslie Woodgate, who was in charge from 1934 until his death in 1961, was also an important figure in the amateur choral movement; he clearly believed that part of the BBC choruses' role in broadcasting was to demonstrate how part-songs and oratorios, and indeed hymns and psalms, should be performed. But, given the quality of the forces he had at his disposal, Woodgate was hardly likely to turn down opportunities to conduct the first performances of, for example, Britten's A Boy was born and Hymn to St Cecilia, nor decline to prepare the chorus for the premieres of Bartok's Cantata Profana and Webern's Das Augenlicht and First Cantata.