‘Which choir is that? They are fantastic!’ was my instant reaction to the performances of the spirituals from A Child of our Time slotted into John Bridcut’s 2023 BBC TV documentary Michael Tippett: The Shadow and the Light. I assumed it was one of the big symphonic choruses, but the singers didn’t look familiar from BBC Proms appearances. Performing from memory, they had a wonderfully flexible sound and were responding with precision to the direction of the conductor; and they had an impressively wide age range.

The orchestra turned out to be the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Harish Shankar, and the choir that had impressed me so much was Glasgow-based Bearsden Choir, impeccably drilled for their contributions to the documentary by their musical director since 2014, Andrew Nunn.

Looking at a map, Bearsden – pronounced with the stress on the second syllable – appears to be a suburb of Glasgow, but administratively it is a separate small town lying within the county of East Dunbartonshire and closely linked to the neighbouring town of Milngavie. The choir has its origins in these two communities, making its debut as Bearsden Burgh Choir in 1968 with a Messiah in the Rio Cinema, Bearsden, conducted by Harry D MacGill, then organist of the town’s Church of Scotland parish church, New Kilpatrick.

For most of its subsequent history it continued to be rooted in Bearsden, though performances in Glasgow concert halls and churches were frequently interspersed with concerts in local venues. There were occasional broadcasts too, especially during the long tenure as musical director (1971-2009) of James Hunter, a senior music and arts producer with BBC Scotland. The ‘Past Concerts’ page on the choir’s website reveals a varied range of musical styles and repertoire and some interesting programme pairings – Schütz’s setting of Psalm 8 with Stainer’s Crucifixion in Paisley Abbey, for example; Rutter’s Gloria with Donald Swann’s Requiem for the Living; a concert that opened with Monteverdi’s Beatus Vir and closed with Randall Thompson’s Alleluia; an evening of Gilbert & Sullivan; ceilidhs, Burns Suppers, church services and BBC Songs of Praise appearances, including one at Glamis Castle in honour of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s 100th birthday, as well as the usual oratorio standards.

Collaborations with other choirs were frequent and the soloists’ list is a rollcall of well-known Scottish singers, plus many from further afield and a 13-year-old violinist called Nicola Benedetti. As well as its own musical directors, the choir has been conducted by the likes of Yehudi Menuhin, Martyn Brabbins, Nicholas Cleobury and Ilan Volkov, and has performed with numerous different orchestras and instrumental ensembles.

Commissions have included The Lamb by Edward Harper (1990), Harmony of Angels by Jennifer Margaret Barker (1992), Ballade pour prier Notre Dame by Martin Dalby (1998) and 23.VII.32 by Oliver Iredale Searle (2008), celebrating the choir’s 40th anniversary year. More recently, in 2023, Love lies Beyond the Tomb, by choir member George Swann, was performed in Glasgow City Halls.

Under the direction of Andrew Nunn and his immediate predecessor Frikki Walker, both of whom have strong connections with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS) and with youth and school choirs, the demographic of Bearsden Choir began to change. In a 2018 promotional video one of the younger members talked enthusiastically about how the numbers of singers her age had grown from a handful to ‘a big bunch of us’ getting the train from Glasgow to Bearsden every week for rehearsals.

Now, however, the traffic is in the other direction. The need to find bigger rehearsal venues to allow for social distancing in the aftermath of the pandemic led to experiments with locations closer to the city centre, and finally, in 2022, to its current home, Wellington Church, a huge neo-classical building opposite Glasgow University’s Gilmorehill campus. This has completed the transformation to being a Greater Glasgow choir – but after much discussion, Nunn tells me, the decision was taken not to change the name, as ‘the brand is just too strong – we want to respect that 55-year history and the reputation built up by my predecessors’.

So where does Bearsden Choir sit in the ecology of Glasgow choirs? ‘As a large, auditioned choir we are comparable to the chorus of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, but our commitment is not quite so demanding. We choose the concerts we do, ranging from two to four concerts a year, and we can prepare for them with just one rehearsal a week plus the concert day. Glasgow has lots of choral societies and chamber choirs … there really is a choir for everybody.’

One of the reasons why Bearsden Choir sounds so good is the attention paid to vocal production, which dates from Frikki Walker’s time and his skill and experience as a professional tenor. Regular sectional sessions benefit from the expertise of soprano Wilma MacDougall, a lecturer at the RCS whose many teaching roles have included work with the RSNO Junior Chorus and National Youth Choir of Scotland. She was visiting on the night I attended a Bearsden Choir rehearsal, which began with her leading an extended general warm-up.

‘Wilma’s the boss for anything technical,’ Nunn tells me. ‘She really understands and loves the science of voice production and is up to date with all the latest research in vocal pedagogy, so I defer to her.’ MacDougall talks to the choir about being aware of the upper partials in their sound and putting spin on their top notes, but also uses a lot of metaphors and visual imagery. Quite a few of the exercises are unfamiliar to me, and there’s a long list of details for the singers to remember as they work on rising phrases … ‘feeling the space around your back; soft knees; floating ribs; you’ve got a marshmallow between your back teeth; and smiling eyes, as though Wilma has just come through the door and fallen flat on her face, and you’re trying not to laugh’.

After about 20 minutes the sopranos and altos with MacDougall and pianist Lynda Cochrane move to a smaller hall to work in detail on a very short section of the Agnus dei from Bob Chilcott’s Little Jazz Mass, honing in particularly on tuning and blend but also on awareness of other parts and of precise volume. Meanwhile the tenors and basses are working with Nunn and the choir’s principal accompanist Christopher Nickol on a section of Will Todd’s Mass in Blue, focusing on similar issues but particularly on making sure everyone is singing exactly the right notes and watching the conductor – ‘you can mark in the maths all you want, but the answer is not in the book, that’s just a note of the composer’s intention, on the night I’m in charge, I will tell you when I want the note to end!’ Video clips on the choir’s YouTube channel demonstrate that it pays off. All eyes are indeed on the conductor, and there’s a wonderfully intense performance of the Kyrie in The Dream of Gerontius, sung from memory before scores are opened for the next section of the work.

After a tea break the singers swap rooms, and it’s only in the last 15 minutes of the three-hour rehearsal that they join forces and work intensively on building up one chord in the Credo of the Todd Mass. Nunn concedes that he drives the choir very hard, indeed at one point he stops and says: ‘I do realise how niche this is, how hard you’ve all been working all day … I know some of you are caring for children or your social workers, at least one of you is a GP … you’re dealing with really serious issues, whereas it is my job to care about these four notes, I’ll go home thinking about them. I do realise how bizarre that is!’

Soprano Sarah Strachan has belonged to the choir for 20 years and now chairs the committee. Asked how she decided that this was the choir for her when her husband’s job necessitated a move to Glasgow from Manchester, she admits that a Google search was initially responsible. ‘A benefit of the name starting with the second letter of the alphabet! I explored a couple of other local options, but Bearsden was easily the most friendly and I felt at home with the standard of the singing. It has risen every year since I joined, which is very challenging to a keen amateur musician, but fun all the same.

‘Andrew’s bubbly personality shines out and sets the tone for every rehearsal,’ she adds. ‘He has boundless energy! He is friendly, approachable and his commitment and dedication to the choir are exemplary. He has the amazing ability of being able to command respect whilst sharing a joke or a funny story, which makes rehearsals fun as well as challenging. Andrew has exceptional musical talent and knows the individual voices – and names – of everyone in the choir. His acute ear can hear if one person is out on a note and he doesn’t settle until he is convinced that that note is perfect, which makes for very polished performances at a high level.’

Nunn struck career gold at an early age when Les Sirènes, the upper-voice female choir he founded at the RCS, won the 2012 BBC Choir of the Year Competition, but he reflects that he was still very young when he took over Bearsden Choir two years later, and has learned as much from the choir as they have learned from him. ‘I’ve ticked off a lot of “firsts” with them! My first complete Messiah, first B minor Mass, Verdi Requiem, Gerontius.’

Meeting the challenges of Covid, especially under the particularly strict and extended Scottish regulations, was of course a taxing experience, but Bearsden Choir’s online performances, edited by Andrew Forbes, director of music at Glasgow Cathedral, were among the most successful run by any amateur choir. Otherwise, Nunn cites a 2016 choral education project on Haydn’s Nelson Mass, involving nine schools and the RCS Junior Conservatoire, as another highlight … though he admits that he always thinks the last concert was the best they’ve ever done. The recent Todd and Chilcott choral jazz concert was no exception: ‘I loved the music, I knew the choir was well prepared, so I felt really relaxed, and the Richard Michael Jazz Quartet and our soprano soloist Sarah-Jane Lewis were really fantastic.’

Sarah Strachan is equally enthusiastic about the jazz concert. ‘We were incredibly fortunate to have the amazing quartet accompanying us and they really made the evening go with a swing, involving the choir as an ad hoc and unrehearsed backing group for their set, which was a lot of fun. The trio of energies created by Richard, Sarah-Jane and Andrew was infectious and the choir really upped their game, singing to a standard that in my opinion reached an all-time high.’

And what of the future? ‘We are open to collaborations with other choirs of a similar standard and hope one day to get an opportunity to go on tour,’ says Strachan. ‘We would certainly welcome the opportunity of singing in some of the bigger scale choral repertoire with full orchestra, so watch this space!’

Clare Stevens works as a writer, editor and publicist in the Welsh Marches