It was with great sadness that we heard of the passing of ex-member Alvin Chua on 3rd April as a result of coronavirus. Alvin sang tenor with Diversity Choir for six years from 2006-2012 and is remembered as a friendly, welcoming colleague and a confident, enthusiastic singer who fully involved himself in all aspects of choir life: who could forget the marvelous food, especially curries, that he conjured up for the choir at Diversity weekends at Kench Hill?
He was impressively intelligent (with a PhD from Imperial College) but also impressively modest and loved the madcap nature of some of our warm-ups, chasing each other round the rehearsal room, singing out our different lines from Elizabethan madrigals: he also loved a post-rehearsal pint and chinwag afterwards. I have a very cherished memory of singing with him at St. Paul’s, Covent Garden in 2009 in a duet ‘Sure the dull God of Marriage does not hear: let us rouse him with a Charm’ from Purcell’s ‘The Fairy Queen’. He was a gifted, humorous and lovely man – our sympathies to Alvin’s partner Joe, his mother Molly and the rest of his family.
James Murphy – Tenor.
FUTURE CONCERTS
We had planned several concerts for 2020 but obviously these have now been postponed. They included a Viennese Evening jointly with The Esterhazy Singers in London, and trips to concerts with LGBT choirs in Milan, Italy, and Krakow, Poland.
We all hope to get back to rehearsing together as soon as it is safe to do so, and in the meantime our members are meeting and socialising online.
If you’d like to receive our newsletter with details of our next concerts, please send your name and email to: info@diversitychoir.co.uk