City Chamber Choir is a highly professional amateur group with a membership of 25–30 singers, which rehearses weekly in the City of London.

Music Director Stephen Jones founded the choir in 1987 to explore neglected repertoire, especially British twentieth century works. Since that time CCC has given many performances of little known, but beautiful and impressive music. As a result, the choir has been awarded PRS Choral Enterprise Awards on six occasions and has been invited to record by the British Music Society. In 1996, the choir won the Choir of the Day award in the regional heats and reached the semi-finals of the Sainsbury’s Choir of the Year competition, appearing on BBC television.

Since its inception, the choir’s repertoire has included many masterpieces from the last five hundred years, but there has been an emphasis on the twentieth century. CCC has performed at a number of prestigious events, including:

• the Tudeley Festival, where it gave the final concert, dedicated to the music of E J Moeran
• Trinity House in the presence of HRH the Duke of Edinburgh
• the Spitalfields Winter Festival
• William Walton centenary concert in the presence of Lady Walton and the Rt Hon. Sir Edward Heath.
• Concert featuring music by William Lloyd Webber with cellist Julian Lloyd Webber; the concert included two first performances
• performance of the Duruflé Requiem in Paris in the presence of Mme Duruflé
• workshop with Bob Chilcott, the choir’s President, under the auspices of the City of London Festival.
• providing choral accompaniment for an English National Ballet event at St Paul’s Cathedral as part of the City of London Festival.
• being invited to perform at concerts and church services in the Netherlands.
• recording tracks for use in theatre performances, including the National Theatre.

Under the auspices of the British Music Society, CCC recorded Songs of Springtime, a CD of British twentieth century music, which includes several world premier recordings. In the centenary year of Leslie Heward, CCC’s performance of The Witches’ Sabbath was heard on BBC Radio 3. Further CDs include The Morley Collection and programmes of Christmas music and British music.

To mark its tenth anniversary, CCC began the 1997/8 season with a performance of South of the Line by John Joubert in the presence of the composer, and to mark his 70th birthday. The season ended with the first London performance of Beautiful Days by Peter McGarr and the world première of Pensive by David Horne.

For our thirtieth anniversary in 2018 we performed an all-British programme at St Paul’s Covent Garden with The Covent Garden Chamber Orchestra featuring Howells An English Mass, Vaughan Williams The Lark Ascending, McDowall The Descending Blue and the first performance of Samuel Wilson’s Spring.

The choir’s commitment to new music has resulted in a number of performances over the years of works by composers as diverse as Colin Arenstein, Andrew Peggie, Peter Skellern, and Stephen Johns. The choir has also made première recordings of works by established composers including Peter Wishart, Edgar Bainton, E J Moeran, Arthur Benjamin and Leslie Heward. Meanwhile the quest for unjustly neglected repertoire from any age continues.