Manners McDade's Jeremy Holland-Smith Soundtracks the 'Choir of the Year'

Founded in 1984, “Choir of the Year” celebrates the UK’s world-class choral tradition through a series of live events and BBC television and radio broadcasts. The competition is open to any amateur choir of between 8 and 100 singers and is held every two years.

The musical theme and incidental music for this year’s competition was written by Manners McDade’s composer Jeremy Holland-Smith. 

In addition, his arrangement of the choral piece “Es Ist Ein Ros” for choir and soprano saxophone was performed by Jess Gillam (BBC Young Musician 2016 finalist) and last year’s winning choir, CF1, during the judges deliberations, and broadcasted for the first time on BBC Radio 3 and BBC 4. 

Jeremy is well known for a wide range of projects; some recent highlights include completing a ballet score for the Sarasota Ballet of “The Secret Garden”, making his BBC Proms conducting debut with the “Life Story” Prom (in London and Melbourne, 2015 & 2016), music which Jeremy himself orchestrated for the BBC television series of the same name, scoring “The Passing”, a BAFTA winning Welsh language film (2015), providing the title music for Attenborough at 90 and scoring the 30th anniversary episode of “Casualty”.  Jeremy has also orchestrated the score for “Sing!’, a major Hollywood animated feature from Illumination Entertainment (UK release early 2017).