Name: Choir and Music Trust Fundraiser Concert
Start: 2025-11-01T19:00:00+00:00
End: 2025-11-01T21:00:00+00:00
Location: All Saints Church, Margaret Street

The campaign for our Choir and Music Trust Fund will be launched at a concert given by our choir on 1 November at All Saints.
About this Event

This will be a concert of sacred music including a number of substantial items which the choir often doesn’t have the opportunity to sing because of time or liturgical constraints. The programme will include Bairstow’s Blessed City, Heavenly Salem, Macdowell’s Annunciation, Macmillan’s A special Appeal, Finzi’s Lo the full and final sacrifice, Holst’s Nunc Dimittis, and Parry’s Songs of Farewell.

Our total music budget each year is about £120,000. Our parish is lucky to have a special Choir and Music Trust Fund whose income can only be spent on the music. This was founded around thirty years ago and has done much to ensure that, in a period when many parishes have cut back their musical offering, All Saints’ has maintained a very substantial and ambitious programme. We are essentially the only historic Anglo-Catholic church left in England that offers each Sunday a full High Mass and Evensong & Benediction with full professional choir.

Our Music Fund was endowed generously by former generations of worshippers. The problem is quite simply this. The Choir and Music Trust Fund’s annual income is struggling to keep up with the increasing costs of running a professional choir. Its current annual income is around £60,000 and now only manages to cover about half of our music expenditure. This means our PCC has to find £60,000 a year to pay for music, which an enormous – and increasingly unsustainable – proportion of our annual outgoings.

Increasing the endowment (and therefore income) of our Music Trust Fund will ensure two things: first, as the costs of professional music making rise, it will enable us to make sure the music programme we offer is preserved, strengthened, and maintained; second, it will release significant amounts of cash in our annual PCC budget for other purposes over the next decade, which will allow a range of new projects to get off the ground orientated towards further growth and development in our parish’s life.

Our aspiration is this: to have doubled the Music and Choir Trust Fund’s endowment by 2035. This means we are seeking to raise £2,000,000 over ten years. The first part of this campaign will be a year long focussed series of fundraising activities to raise awareness and to kick start these efforts. This initial period of fundraising will run from All Saints’ Day 2025 to All Saints’ Day 2026.