LitFest
Choir of The Queen’s College
with Owen Reese conductor
1 July 2026
19.30
St Jude on the Hill
Hailed by BBC Music Magazine as ‘an undoubted jewel in Britain’s choral scene’ and
by Classic FM as ‘one of the world’s most renowned choirs’, the Choir of The Queen’s
College Oxford offers an evening of radiant choral music. Under the visionary directionof Owen Rees, the choir performs a selection of a cappella works by composers from the 16th to the 21st centuries, including Britten, Holst, Stanford, Parry, Chilcott, Whitacre and Rutter.
Highlights include former Suburb resident Harold Darke Blessed is the Man that endureth Temptation, Holst Ave Maria, Whitacre Lux Aurumque, Stanford’s piercingly beautiful The Blue Bird, and a selection of traditional folk arrangements. The concert also includes popular favourites such as Somewhere Over the Rainbow and Moon River. Expect the choir to make creative use of St Jude’s acoustic by positioning singers in varying configurations around the building.
Choir of The Queen’s College, Oxford
‘An undoubted jewel in Britain’s choral scene’ (BBC Music Magazine) and recently hailed as ‘one of the world’s most renowned choirs’ by Classic FM, the Choir of The Queen’s College Oxford is among the finest and most active university choirs in the UK with the interpretations of the Director, Owen Rees, having been described as ‘revelatory and even visionary’ (BBC Music Magazine).
The Choir’s extensive concert schedule involves appearances across the UK and abroad, including work with the Academy of Ancient Music, the Britten Sinfonia, and the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra. It regularly tours abroad, and concert tours have included China, Taiwan, the USA, Sri Lanka, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, France, the Low Countries, and Germany.
The choir’s wide-ranging repertory incorporates a rich array of Renaissance and Baroque music and contemporary works. The group broadcasts regularly on BBC Radio, and during the academic year it provides the music for services in the splendid Baroque chapel of The Queen’s College. Among its recordings, Carols from Queen’s enjoyed nine weeks in the Specialist Classical Charts, was ‘Drive Feature Album of the Week’ on Classic FM, and was a Telegraph Christmas pick; A New Heaven and The House of the Mind both went straight to no. 1 in the Specialist Classical Chart in their first week of sales; a recording of music by the great Tudor composer John Taverner received a Diapason d’or and was described by Diapason as ‘a splendid triumph of English choral art at its best’; and That Sweet City was a Gramophone Critics’ Choice for 2024. A forthcoming disc of twentieth-century English choral music, The Crown of Life, will be released on the Signum label in March 2026.
Queen’s Choir has also recorded for film in the famous Abbey Road Studios, and appears on the Grammy-nominated soundtrack of the Warner-Brothers film Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The choir’s TV work has included Lucy Worsley’s A Merry Tudor Christmas (BBC2) in 2019.