USV was formed in 2012 and is open to ALL. We are based at the University of Southampton and our home is Turner Sims, the beautiful concert hall on the Highfield Campus.
The choir is led by Harvey Brough – composer, arranger and musician who is the Turner Sims Professor of Music. Harvey is an accomplished musician, well known as the leader of Harvey and the Wallbangers, now a hugely respected leader of three highly successful choirs – Vox Holloway, London, Vox Populi, Leamington Spa and USV.
Our members are staff from the University, students and many singers from the surrounding areas of the city and further afield.
The choir has grown over the years and we now have between 80 and 90 singers.
We encourage anyone to come to sing with us, whether you have experience of singing or not, whether you read music or not. We do perform to a high standard and have done around 30 concerts of very ambitious programmes, with outstanding soloists and instrumentalists (normally a band of between 4 and 10 world class musicians).
To help our singers learn the music, we have real voice recordings of everything we sing, so you can learn by ear as well as from the score.
Rehearsals are on Wednesday lunchtimes at Turner Sims, between January and May and September and December and we normally perform two concerts a year.
Our next performance is on Friday, May 9 at 7:30pm in Turner Sims. We are performing the songs of Randy Newman.
We start rehearsals for this project on Wednesday, January 29th from 1:10 – 1:50pm. The first few sessions are open to all – come along, borrow a score and try us out. If you wish to keep singing, the only charge is £25 for the score – the sessions are all free.
We do ask our singers to bring in a good audience so we can pay our musicians and soloists – we have filled Turner Sims for most of our concerts.