Name:
Peter Johnstone
What made you want to sing in The Bach Choir?
Having sung for over 30 years with the Cambridge University Musical Society chorus, I felt I needed a new challenge. The Bach Choir was the obvious choice for me because of its historic links with CUMS (I first joined CUMS when David Willcocks conducted both choirs, and I’ve known David Hill since he was the CUMS accompanist for a year as an undergraduate), and it has amply provided the challenge I wanted.
What’s your favourite thing about singing in The Bach Choir?
Being part of a `family’ of over 200 singers who have widely differing backgrounds, but who all care passionately about singing — and about one another. (It was only when I spent five months in hospital with Covid-19 that I came to realise fully how much that meant to me).
What were your childhood experiences of singing?
I didn’t start until I went to boarding school at the age of 12. There was no opportunity for choral singing at my primary school, but I then went to an all-male school where any new boy whose voice hadn’t yet broken and who wasn’t completely unmusical was press-ganged into the school choir. That happened to me, and I’m so glad it did!
What’s your favourite piece of choral or classical music?
Appropriately, it’s the first thing I ever sang with The Bach Choir: Bach’s B Minor Mass. (I sang it as part of a `loan’ of CUMS tenors and basses in 1974; it was also one of the first things the Choir did after I joined it in 2004).
What advice would you give to potential new members of The Bach Choir?
Go for it! You don’t need to be an enormously talented singer, though you do need to be a reasonably good sight-reader (or to spend time on your own learning music if you’re not).