NEW DUBLIN VOICES

International award-winning New Dublin Voices is a leading Irish chamber choir. Founded by conductor Bernie Sherlock in 2005, from the start NDV has presented concert programs that are fresh, innovative, and exciting, ranging widely in style and period from the medieval to the contemporary. The choir takes special pleasure in exploring the music of living composers, leading the way in performing, premiering, commissioning and disseminating Irish choral music and introducing international choral music to Irish audiences, accumulating in a huge number of Irish premieres, as well as 31 world premieres by Irish composers. International award-winning New Dublin Voices is a leading Irish chamber choir.

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NDV has won prizes at major competitions in France, Hungary, Germany, Finland, Belgium, Spain, England and Italy, including first prize at the Concorso Polifonico in Arezzo, Italy in August 2013, thereby becoming the first Irish choir to win a place in the European Grand Prix for Choral Singing. Awards also include the Grand Prix at the 12th Budapest International Choir Competition 2009 and all six prizes, including Choir of the Festival, at the 2011 International Choir Contest of Flanders-Maasmechelen. Most recently they were awarded the Fleischmann International Trophy at the 2015 Cork International Choral Festival, the first Irish choir to do so in 17 years. New Dublin Voices was chosen and invited to take part in four of Europe’s most prestigeous festivals: Musique en Morvan, France, 2012; the European Youth Choir Festival, Switzerland, 2014; Polyfollia, France, 2014; and the Festival des Choeurs Lauréats, France, 2015. The choir’s busy calendar also includes fund-raising for charities, television appearances, guesting with Ireland's professional orchestras, and performing at special public events.

 

NDV features on the soundtrack of The Letter, a movie about Mother Teresa due for release in 2015. In 2010 the choir released two CDs – Something Beginning with B, featuring everything from Byrd to the Beatles, and Christmas with New Dublin Voices. Their latest CD, Music from Ireland, is devoted to music by Irish composers and was released in 2014 by Ireland’s leading record label, RTÉ lyric fm. The singers who make up New Dublin Voices come from many backgrounds but share in common high levels of experience and musicianship, a commitment to attracting new audiences, and above all a love of performing excellent choral music.

BERNIE SHERLOCK, conductor

Bernie Sherlock is an award-winning Irish conductor with an international profile as an adjudicator, choral animateur, and teacher of conducting and aural training. She has won prizes for best conductor or best interpretation at several European competitions and has given workshops on a wide variety of subjects for different organisations.

 

Bernie has extensive experience directing a wide range of choirs. She was Director of Choirs at the DIT Conservatory of Music & Drama for ten years, and for nine years was Musical Director of the Dublin University Choral Society in Trinity College. Since 2007 Bernie has been Musical Director of the eminent Culwick Choral Society, founded in 1898, with whom she has prepared and conducted many of the great works from the repertoire for large choir. She founded her international award-winning chamber choir, New Dublin Voices, in 2005.

 

Bernie is a Music Lecturer at the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama and she also lectured for many years in the School of Music at Trinity College Dublin. She has been the Artistic Director of the annual AOIC International Conducting Summer School since 2008. In 1993 she founded the Kodály Society of Ireland, whose International Music Course she directed from 1993 – 1998. Bernie is the Irish representative on the World Choir Council. Bernie received her training in choral conducting during two years of study in Hungary with Peter Erdei and Ildikó Herboly Kocsár. She subsequently studied orchestral conducting with Gerhard Markson during his tenure as principal conductor of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, leading to a Masters in Musicology and Performance from the National University of Ireland.