Jervaulx Singers: The acclaimed Yorkshire choir who met at a parent and toddler group

A new choral ensemble, the Ripon-based Jervaulx Singers, are rapidly building up a loyal following and next month they will release their debut album.

Founded in 2021 by Charlie Gower-Smith and Jenny Bianco, over the past three years the Jervaulx Singers (named after the nearby picturesque ruined Cistercian abbey) have presented a series of concerts in Yorkshire, including at the Grassington and Swaledale festivals and the University of Leeds concert series, and across the UK.

Their repertoire is wide-ranging, featuring sacred and secular choral music, as well as opera extracts and solo songs. The ensemble hosts an annual opera gala in which they perform semi-staged pieces, both familiar and new, from the repertoire.

They have achieved a lot in a relatively short time – quickly establishing themselves as one of the finest vocal ensembles in the country, they have deservedly acquired a very appreciative audience.

“Jenny and I met through a parent and toddler group near Ripon,” says Gower-Smith who is the ensemble’s musical director.

“I had just moved to the village with my other half and Jenny’s children are about a year or so older than my two. I grew up in Kent and went to University in Leeds, I met my other half as a student there and I have never left Yorkshire since. Jenny and I met through our kids and our shared love of music and we became good friends.”

Gower-Smith has a background in choral singing and is a conductor of choirs and orchestras.

He is musical director of the acclaimed Chapter House Youth Choir in York and he has worked with numerous choral societies including Leeds Chamber Choir, Chorus of the Royal Northern Sinfonia, Trinity Singers Cambridge and the Hallé Ancoats Community Choir.

Bianco is a trained opera singer, she is a graduate of the opera course and the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and has sung with a number of companies including Welsh National Opera, Birmingham Conservatoire Opera, Wetherby Choral Society and Ryton Chorale.

Both were looking to make more music with others after starting their families, and so the idea of the Jervaulx Singers was born.

“We were wanting to do something that was a little different,” says Bianco.

“With my opera background, I really wanted to keep using my voice in that way and to work with singers who can use their full voice within a choral group.”

Gower-Smith adds: “We had a sense that we wanted to give the singers the freedom to sing out.There are trends in music making that come and go.

“There has been a trend for very smooth and clean vibrato and we wanted to buck the trend and let the singers use their voices and really sing. When you go to the opera you get this full pelt of sound.”

Having decided to set up the ensemble, Gower-Smith and Bianco issued a call-out for singers. “We had a terrific response from all over the country,” says Gower-Smith.

“And we were blown away by the talent. We did our first season at St Andrew’s church in Aldborough with a carol concert for Christmas 2021 and it grew from there.”

Within their first year they took their programme to York, Ripon, Pickering and Wetherby and had collaborated with internationally renowned cellist Jamie Walton, who is also the founder and artistic director of the North York Moors Chamber Music Festival.

“Once we had completed our first year, we started to look forward and plan seasons ahead and one thing that evolved was the programming side of things,” says Bianco.

“We did our first opera gala and then began to think about more thematic programming, to create a kind of narrative structure.”

In March this year they presented a concert in that format for the first time, entitled The Dream. “The idea was that the theme covered the course of a night, from dusk to dawn,” says Gower-Smith.

“We incorporated various pieces in the repertory covering drifting into sleep, dreaming, including a nightmare, and waking. It drew on choral music, song and opera. We also structure the programme so that the music flows from one piece into the next so that the audience is held.

"You are not taken out of it and people seem to love that. In our repertoire we try to balance the familiar along with stuff that audiences maybe don’t know or that is a bit more challenging.”

There are eight singers, many of whom have been trained in opera, and they work with concert pianist Alison Gill, with Gower-Smith conducting.

He says: “The line-up, in terms of singers, does vary slightly as we approach people concert by concert and of course it depends on people’s other commitments.”

The group are now looking forward to the release of their first album, Les Chansons des Roses. “It has been a long process,” says Gower-Smith. “We recorded it back in January. We had three days of six-hour sessions in a beautiful church in York.”

The album really reflects the group’s approach and programming style – with the singers performing as an ensemble but also with opportunities to showcase individual voices.

It features choral, vocal and piano works and includes pieces by Poulenc, Rachmaninov, a Bernstein opera extract and Jonathan Dove’s song cycle The Passing of the Year, as well as other perhaps less familiar pieces such as a traditional Norwegian hymn and an ode to summertime by Lithuanian composer Onutė Narbutaitė, all linked by the theme of the natural world.

As Gower-Smith writes in the sleeve notes: “It is a celebration of nature and the human voice.”

The Jervaulx Singers launch their debut album Les Chansons des Roses with a special concert on October 26 at 7.30pm at St John’s Church, Sharow, near Ripon, North Yorkshire. Tickets, jervaulxsingers.com The album is released on October 4 through Convivium Records.