Last Choir Standing

Suzi Digby

Incredibly passionate about singing, both from a musical perspective and for its ability to transform lives, Suzi has an international reputation as a choral director and conductor.

In 1993 Suzi founded the Voices Foundation. Working in infant and primary schools in deprived areas throughout England and Wales, the Foundation aims to transform children and the ethos of schools through singing, helping children socially, emotionally and intellectually. Also reaching out to schools internationally, close to one million children have benefited from the scheme.

Suzi also founded the chamber choir Voce in 2003. Comprising experienced singers in their twenties and thirties, they perform frequent concerts and tour abroad regularly. With a very high standard expected of her singers, she aims for Voce to become one of the finest chamber choirs in Britain and they are already well on their way.

In 2007 Suzi received the OBE for services to music education.

How did you get involved in the show?

“Well my lifetime’s work has been dedicated to improving the lives of other people through singing and another of my ambitions, as a result of that, is to get the country singing because I have myself had such a positive and enriched experience of having singing in my life.

“So everything I do is various applications of that and up until now I’ve done it in a high impact low profile way. So I was a little bit ambivalent about doing something which was catering for the masses in a way that might dumb down. But what’s happened is that it’s been the opposite. We’ve attracted choirs of such high quality that you can actually use high quality to access mass audience.”

What can viewers expect from Last Choir Standing?

“They can expect a representation of what this country is better at than any other country in world, which is an incredible range of musical expertise, representing many, many cultures and walks of life.

“We’re on a cusp of launching in to a new era of choral music. Where as before it’s always been associated with churches and cathedrals, now what’s happening is that we’re getting that same quality coming from this 500 year old tradition of people being able to do anything musically with their voice, but being directed at a mass audience. It’s a new era; we couldn’t have done this ten years ago.”

What are you looking for from the choirs taking part?

“I’m very, very fussy and I’m very hard to please and it’s got to be everything. So it’s like a great athlete or a gymnast - it’s no good for a gymnast to stroll through everything technically and then artistically not have anything special. Or a great ballet dancer who’s got to be in tip-top form but also has got to be very expressive.

“So a choir has to be in tune, it has to be technically absolutely top notch - with choirs you’ve got to have the voice as well as everything else. The director has got to be able to control all that and bring it together because a choir is not a backing group, a choir’s not a soloist, it’s a group of individuals expressing a common emotion or a common idea or text - the words of the song have got to come through to us in a way that is really full of impact as well. And it’s got to be moving, it’s got to be either moving for joy or moving for sorrow or moving for some other deep emotion.”

From what you’ve seen so far what’s impressed you about the choirs which have auditioned?

“It’s just the fact that I know that this is world class standard. I know that these choirs - it would be hard to find anywhere in the world anything better and I really believe that.”

Have you got any advice for the choirs taking part?

“I would say, it’s going to be tough and don’t rest on your laurels, however good you think you are, you’ve got to get a lot better.

“There’s no shortcut in a TV studio, you’ve got to prepare for the space. I think performing in front of an audience is the least of their problems, because in fact if anything, the audience will help. It’s much easier to perform to an audience than to perform to an empty space, so the tension and the pressure I’m not worrying about that. I’m much more worried about how well prepared they are because they’ve got to entertain as well as move us.”

Have you ever sung in a choir?

“I’ve been singing since I was born! I started singing when I was three. My father took me to church choir when I was nine and that’s where it all started. It was such a gift. For a lot of people it’s going to be this Saturday night show that is the way in, this is the way to realise that music can be part of their lives.”

What kind of judge are will you be on the show?

“My number one rule is to never send anyone away feeling humiliated. Ok, I’ll be tough but they’ll know what they have to do to get better. If they’re open to criticism, which they must be, I’ll always give them a reason and I’ll always do it in a way that if someone is really just a disaster because of the piece they’ve chosen, I’ll say it’s because of the piece they’ve chosen or if everything’s wrong because of the balance and the blend and the tuning, I’ll say look with the right training you can get that right, you can fix it but at the moment it’s not good enough. So it’s a question of sending everybody away thinking, god I can’t wait to get back to prove her wrong.”

How did you get involved in the music education work that you do?

“There are two things that happened - from the age of twelve I was really interested in child psychology and subtly I was always making friends with the unpopular girls at school. So I had this real desire to help, an instinct to help vulnerable people, and I was a musician, I was always going to be a musician that was a sort of force of its own. So as things came together I was very, very drawn to working with large groups of children and making them feel better about themselves and I realised the way to do that was through singing.

“And so I started working a lot with children but also for my artistic gratification I worked with very many good musicians, so the two came hand in hand. So I started the Voices Foundation. I went out and trained all these teachers and we’ve trained 20,000 teachers and those teachers are going to teach other teachers. These are ordinary class teachers, not teachers with musical training. We teach them in our methods, so that they can teach music like they teach maths and English through the voice.

“So it’s not just about getting people signing it’s about educating them musically, turning them into musicians because everyone has musical intelligence. What I don’t want is the next generation to perpetuate the stigma that music is for talented people only. It’s not true, it’s laziness on the part of the educational establishment, it’s not a recreational option it’s a necessity.”