VIDEO: Watch Timothy Peters talk to Phil Hewitt/SussexWorld about Horsham Chamber Choir

The concert will be on March 25 under the title Spring: To Life in St John’s Church in Horsham, and it will be the choir’s first under their new director of music Timothy Peters.

Their inaugural performance under Timothy’s baton celebrates the emergence of spring and the sense of renewal and joy of nature that it brings. It promises a wide variety of beautiful – and sometimes haunting – choral pieces including Gerald Finzi’s Seven Poems of Robert Bridges, which provides themes and harmonies evocative of nature in all its aspects, and Mozart’s energetic and uplifting Mass in C, first performed in an Easter mass 250 years ago (known as his Sparrow Mass due to a section within it resembling birds chirping). The choir will be joined by two young trumpeters and the organ scholar of St Paul's Cathedral.

Timothy is looking forward to his Horsham Chamber Choir debut: “I would say that I'm 90 per cent excited and ten per cent daunted. No, I would say I'm 100 per cent excited!

“My career is a portfolio career with lots of different things at different times but I'm now getting back into lots more conducting, and it is great to be working with musicians of this calibre and... well it would be wrong to say with more serious musicians. But it does vary. Sometimes you can do concerts which are much more about the enjoyment and the community aspect but here there is a real responsibility to the audience to give a really special concert.”

It helps that the rapport is already strong with Horsham Chamber Choir: “I just love them! I love them to bits! They are so well established and they have such good communication with each other.

"You can see a lot of politics in choirs but I don't see any of that with them. You can get people saying ‘Well, this is how we should do it’ and ‘Well, this is how we've always done it’, but there is none of that with this choir. It feels that they've got a lot of trust in me and I can get away with a lot of broad brush strokes in telling them what I would like.”

And they are certainly up for a challenge: “A particular piece that we're doing in this concert is the Finzi which I would say is uniquely difficult. The composition is challenging but what I'm saying is that the choir is very good at reading the music. Different choirs have different strengths and I would say that the standard here is semi-professional.

“I would hope that I can bring new ideas, chorally speaking. The choral scene is always at the mercy of academic research and things like that but what I would like is for them to be able to bring a different vocal performance to each piece. We've got some romantic era music. I'm trying to change the relationship between the musical director of the choir and the choir and I know that they've got great experience. It is really about making the music together; it is not about saying ‘I'm the conductor and this is what I want.’ It is about saying ‘I know that you are good musicians. Just use your musicality.’”