WORD famous baritone Roderick Williams OBE is visiting the South Hams in the spring to perform with a humble community choir.

Dartington Community Choir says it is an “immense honour” to be given the opportunity welcome the award-winning singer into their midst in April.

Winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Singer of the Year award in 2016, Williams will be joining the choir in two performances of Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony at the picturesque Dartington Great Hall on Sunday 23 and Monday 24 April.

A huge champion of community choirs, Williams said in an interview with ‘Sing Up’ “Community choirs have a massive role to play in providing people with a sense of social cohesion.”

Choir chairman, Roger Robinson, said: “We have been lucky enough to perform with very gifted professional soloists, most of them young and at the beginning of their careers.

“It gives the choir great pleasure to watch them as they go from strength to strength, and to feel that we have had a small part in supporting them early on.  

“But to have an operatic superstar at the height  of his career to sing with us is something we have hardly dared to dream of.

“Yet we will have just such a singer performing win us in Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony next spring; the legendary baritone Roderick Williams has agreed to sing with us.

“This is an immense honour. And to enable as many people  as possible to come to

hear him we have decided to stage two performances.

“This will be a hugely memorable occasion for everyone, and for the choir it will

also be a wonderful way to celebrate our fortieth anniversary season, having first

come together in late 1982.”

Williams has sung major operatic roles in leading opera houses worldwide including the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, English National Opera,  Dutch National Opera, Dallas Opera, and Oper Köln. 

He has sung concert repertoire with all the BBC orchestras, and many other ensembles including the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Russian National Orchestra and Bamberg Symphony Orchestra.

He is also a composer and has had works premiered at the Wigmore and Barbican Halls, the Purcell Room and live on national radio.

Williams was awarded an OBE for services to music in June 2017.

A passionate believer in the importance of community choirs, Williams said to Sing Up: “The collective spirit within such large-scale music has an impact on our fragmenting world, when all the talk is about the dividing of nations, peoples and ethnicities.

“Anything that can bring people together in a common purpose like this has to be good.”

For more information visit www.dartington-community-choir.co.uk