The Vancouver Children’s Choir is renowned as one of the finest choirs of its kind in Canada, performing to a professional standard.
Since 1983, the Vancouver Children’s Choir has provided young singers with the opportunity to learn the foundations of choral music from plainsong and Renaissance polyphony to twentieth-century masterpieces and new commissions.
With an average membership of 24 singers in the concert choir, the VCC pursues a varied programme of recordings, concerts and tours, giving performances under the direction of conductor Rupert Lang. The Choir has performed in England, Wales, Italy, Austria, the Czech Republic, the United States and Canada.
For forty years, the Vancouver Children’s Choir has offered excellent vocal training for children ages 7-18 and a wide variety of performance experiences, including singing for His Majesty King Charles III (as HRH the Prince of Wales), the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and world-renowned artists and musicians including Cirque du Soleil, Fretwork and Jackie Chan.
The Choir has released five recordings and recorded soundtrack work for Lionsgate Productions, Disney, the Junos, NBC and Paramount Pictures, as well as provided vocals for artists such as Judith Forst, Jim Byrnes, and the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.
The Choir has brought their voices to a wide variety of famous spaces such as Carnegie Hall in New York, St. Peter’s in Rome, Coventry Cathedral in England, and St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague.
The Choir’s logo was commissioned from renowned artist Susan A. Point to celebrate our 20th anniversary in 2003. “Spirit Song – Echoing the Future” was a real challenge for me,” Susan says. “To equate a visual art form with that of an auditory art form, music, was an exercise that I feel will never fully convey the experience and sensation between two of the five senses. In creating this original design, there were many ideas that I wanted to convey, some of which were: impression of sound; giving voice; children of the earth; the unique west coast environment; and elements of traditional Salish art, a legacy of my ancestral visual language reflecting the spirit of our song.”
CHRIST CHURCH CATHEDRAL
The Choir rehearses at historic Christ Church Cathedral, the oldest building in downtown Vancouver and one of the city’s most beautiful and acoustically rich venues. The church was created in 1888 for what was then a residential neighbourhood in the west end of a small logging town. The building was completed in 1895 in the Gothic Style with ceilings made of cedar planking and ceiling beams and floor constructed out of old-growth Douglas fir. Its wonderful combination of old-world design and new-world materials, stained glass windows and pipe organ is now a Class A Heritage building.