Mid Sussex singing group Coro Nuovo marks anniversary

Founder Catherine Kent said: “The choir continues to go from strength to strength. We have worked hard to earn our position as a leading Sussex choir.”

Over the years, they have performed more than 30 concerts with around 40 choir members singing in each concert, challenging themselves along the way by learning and singing a wide range of musical genres, among them classical, contemporary, folk, jazz, musical theatre, renaissance, sacred, spiritual, opera and oratorio. In addition to English, they have also sung in Czech, French, German, Italian, Latin, Russian and Welsh. The concert performances have helped local charities raise several thousand pounds, and the choir has supported 25 emerging young Sussex musicians with financial bursaries totalling nearly £15,000.

As Catherine explains: “The original idea for the group was I wanted to sing not necessarily the great big choral works like a big chorus would, the Messiahs and the Requiems, but lots of different things. I wanted to do more diverse repertoire, maybe sing in close harmony and different genres, maybe jazz or spiritual, sacred or renaissance, all sorts of things that are not necessarily the great choral works. I had a chat with Andrew Rees (who became Cuoro Novo’s music director until last year) and said why don't we start a group, not necessarily for concerts but just to get together to sing the kinds of things we wanted to sing. We did that for a while. We started with a couple of workshops and that morphed into the choir itself. Andrew felt that we needed something to aim towards and so we started the concerts. We ran a midsummer opera concert in Haywards Heath. It was packed and that gave the impetus to carry on.” This year’s anniversary year gets underway with their Musical Showstoppers Concert on March 5 at 2.30pm in Holy Trinity Church, Cuckfield organised by Friends of Holy Trinity Church. Come and hear some hit songs from South Pacific, Oliver, Funny Girl, Les Mis and many more. ticketsource.co.uk/friendsofholytrinitycuckfield

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