23 Concerts, Two Weddings and a Funeral
(A Brief History of Thurstonland Community Choir)
It all began almost exactly 14 years ago, when a local resident, Valda Dawson, having heard some excellent singing around the village Christmas tree, knocked on the Carmichaels’ door and asked if they would consider starting a village choir.
She knocked on the right door: Robin was a singer with the Hallé Choir and Angela an excellent pianist and piano teacher. A perfect pairing with the Carmichaels as Choir Director and Accompanist and some as yet unexplored local talent was about to start!
Our first concert was held in the village school in 2012 to help celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and the choir gradually grew from there to reach about 30 members. Our first Christmas Concert that year featured musical performances by children from the village and an amazing variety of choral music, from the traditional ‘Dashing Away with a Smoothing Iron’ to the 14th century ‘Gaudete’.
This set the tone for all our concerts: a huge variety of songs, from rounds like ‘Ol’ Abram Brown’ (Britten) to sacred works in Latin, such as ‘Panis Angelicus’ (Franck), musical medleys from famous shows such as ‘Les Misérables’ and the lovely Fauré Requiem, with which we celebrated the Tour de France passing our village in 2014.
Another notable feature of our concerts was the amazing charitable donations we were able to make, with money from our concert tickets, our legendary raffles and the collection boxes in the Church Room after each concert. Hundreds of glasses of wine and fruit juice were poured over the 3 years of our concerts, with each donation helping us to raise over £20,000 paid out to 23 charities, some more than once.
For such a small village, the generosity of these charitable donations has astonished both us and our various recipients, and for that we want to thank all the people in the community who have supported our musical ventures and donated so generously over the years.
The annual Christmas carol singing round the village has been another successful project for the choir over the years, again with lots of support and donations towards our chosen charity each year from the village community, and this is one aspect of the choir’s work which we hope to continue, with a planned carol singing date this year on Monday, 22nd December. We hope that lots of you will join us for this event!
Throughout all the years of performances, the inspiration behind the choir’s success has been the amazing professionalism, hard work and commitment shown by our Choir Director and Accompanist, Robin and Angela Carmichael. We want to thank them here for all they have done to make a small village community choir such an important part of all our lives.
Now, in perfect symmetry, we end as we began, with a single local resident. A small group of Thurstonland Choir altos and sopranos has agreed to sing at the funeral of a much-loved choir member, Barry Cooper, on November 24th 2025, at St Thomas’ Church, where we practised every Thursday for so many years: a fitting valediction for both Barry and Thurstonland Community Choir.
