Emerging conductor Jocelyn Freeman is the London-based Associate Choral Leader at St Martin-in-the-Fields, where she works weekly with the Choral Scholars and is setting up the new Square Mile Community Choir. She is swiftly accumulating directing experience, appearing with Ashtead Choral Society, the Lakewood Sinfonia and Lewisham Choral Society, and is Director of Music at St Laurence Church, Catford.

An advocate for diversity and a skilled communicator in a range of artistic endeavours, she is Founder and Artistic Director of SongEasel and has curated extensive concert and recording projects to wide critical acclaim. Her award-winning work as pianist has seen her endorsed with a prestigious Associateship from the Royal Academy of Music and collaborate with some of the world’s leading singers. This expertise constantly informs her conducting practice as she builds these skills directing choral and operatic repertoire.

 

Martha Littlehales is a West Midlands conductor, singer and accompanist, as well as the Associate Choral Leader for the Diocese of Manchester. Having trained with the choral conducting charity Sing For Pleasure, she directs the Wolverhampton People’s Show Choir, HMP Stafford’s prison choir and Northfield Notes. Recent engagements include teaching music for the Commonwealth Games and conducting 400 singers for a commission written by the Birmingham Poet Laureate at Symphony Hall. Additionally, she is a Koestler Award commended arranger and a keen amateur accordion player! She is looking forward to strengthening St Martins’ ties to Manchester with the Great Sacred Music concerts at St Paul’s, Withington that she directs weekly, as well as devising future projects in the area to promote accessible music-making.

 

 

Having achieved a starred first in her undergraduate music degree at Selwyn College, Cambridge University, Chloë Allison went on to complete her PhD research on medieval Parisian Polyphony at the same institution. She began directing choirs during her PhD, drawing on her experience as a singer. She now still works with one of these first choirs, ‘Women of Note’, a Cambridge community choir, as well as directing Aquila, an upper-voices choir at St Johns College Cambridge, Selwyn Voices, the community choir of Selwyn College, and Choir 2000, a high-quality, 100-singer choral society in Histon near Cambridge. Alongside her choral conducting, she now works as an undergraduate lecturer at Cambridge and is an experienced singer teacher and performer, described by Plays to See as having ‘a powerful mezzo voice and an arresting stage presence’. Utilising her skills in academia, education and performance, she is founder and director of Marginalia Performance, a collective who remake operas for new audiences and young people, bring cutting-edge research to life on stage and telling stories that have remained hidden on the margins of history.