Voted the fifth-best choir in the world in Gramophone magazine’s ‘20 Greatest Choirs’, The Choir of Trinity College Cambridge comprises around thirty Choral Scholars and two Organ Scholars, all of whom are students at the University. The College’s choral tradition dates back to the all-male choir of the fourteenth century, when former Chapel Royal choristers studied in King’s Hall which later became part of Trinity College. Directors of Music have included Charles Villiers Stanford, Alan Gray, Raymond Leppard and Richard Marlow. Female voices were introduced in the 1980s by Richard Marlow, in a new departure for Cambridge choral music. Stephen Layton was Director of Music from 2006 to 2023.

During term, the Choir’s main focus is the singing of the liturgy in the College Chapel, exploring a wide-ranging repertoire drawn from both Catholic and Protestant traditions. Outside term, the Choir’s programme of performances and recordings has included BBC broadcasts of Bach’s Mass in B minor and Christmas Oratorio with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in London, Haydn’s Nelson Mass with the City of London Sinfonia in Aldeburgh and Cambridge, Poulenc’s Gloria with Britten Sinfonia in Norwich Cathedral, and Handel’s Dettingen Te Deum with the Academy of Ancient Music in London and Cambridge.

Highlights of the Choir’s extensive discography include Howells’s Collegium Regale, which won Australia’s Limelight Recording of the Year in 2016; Howells’s Requiem and other works, which won a Gramophone Award in 2012; and Beyond all mortal dreams, settings of contemporary American a cappella music, nominated for a US Grammy Award in the same year. Five of the Choir’s recordings have been nominated for Gramophone Awards, including Northern Lights, a recording of choral music by the Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds; and Kenneth Leighton’s Crucifixus and other works.

The Choir’s most recent release is Anthems, Vol. 1, a recording spanning two centuries of Anglican works for choir and organ. Fanfare magazine described the album as a ‘moving experience … highly recommended’, while BBC Radio 3 praised the ‘sumptuous sound’. Other releases include recordings of music by Ivo Antognini, Cecilia McDowall and Owain Park, former Organ Scholar at Trinity, the last of which was nominated for Choral Disc of the Year by BBC Music Magazine; David Briggs’s Mass for Notre Dame, described by Gramophone as ‘one of the finest CDs of sacred choral and organ music you’ll ever hear’; Handel’s Chandos Anthems, named by Gramophone as one of the fifty greatest Handel recordings of all time; Bach’s Mass in B minor, hailed by The Sunday Times as ‘wonderfully fresh and athletic’; choral music by Stanford and Finzi; Bach’s Christmas Oratorio; Baltic Exchange, choral music from the Baltic region; Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols and St Nicolas; Handel’s Dettingen Te Deum; works by Polish composer Paweł Łukaszewski and Finnish composer Jaakko Mäntyjärvi; and Yulefest!, a selection of sacred and secular Christmas music, all released on the Hyperion label.

An ambitious programme of tours has taken the Choir to destinations in Europe, the USA, Canada, South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Peru, and on two month-long nationwide tours of Australia as part of the Musica Viva International Concert Season.

Since 2012, in a pioneering move for Cambridge, all services sung by the Choir have been audio livestreamed. Video livestreaming commenced in 2019; as of October 2022, all services are now livestreamed in video. Every livestream since 2012 is available to hear or watch again on the Choir’s website, which has a searchable archive of over 7,500 musical tracks recorded live in services.