Dr Simon Lindley celebrated his 50th concert with Sheffield Bach Choir at their annual offering for the Broomhill Festival in St Mark’s Church on 22 June 2019. The audience enjoyed a lively evening in a programme that couldn’t have been more different from Simon’s first concert with the choir – a performance of Mendelsson’s St Paul in their 60^thanniversary season in 2009. 

The programme featured American Serenade by the late Donald Hunt, who wrote the orchestration specifically for the Sheffield Bach Choir and featuring individual numbers for shows such as High Society, Porgy and Bess and Show Boat – songs that went down very well with the audience, some of whom were clearly singing along. Also well received were arrangements of American classic songs, newly orchestrated by the choir’s President George Nicholson, Professor of Composition at Sheffield University, who displayed obvious enjoyment on hearing his orchestration played with such verve by Sally Robinson’s wonderful National Festival Orchestra.

The evening ended with John Rutter’s popular Feel The Spirit, sung with lively enthusiasm by the choir and by talented mezzo soprano Joanna Gamble – and by the audience, who joined in with great gusto in an encore of the final chorus ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’.