Leeds Festival Chorus currently consists of about 160 amateur singers, trained to the highest standards by its Chorus Master, Simon Wright.

The Chorus itself promotes three prestigious concerts each season. It also sings for the BBC and accepts other engagements. It records and tours - a section of the Chorus made a most successful visit to the Czech Republic, singing in Prague and Pilsen in 1996.

Leeds Festival Chorus was founded in 1858 to sing at the first Leeds Musical Festival when Queen Victoria opened Leeds Town Hall. The Triennial Musical Festival achieved international status and much of its success from the quality of the Chorus and from the new works commissioned from composers such as Dvorak, Elgar, Massenet and Humperdinck. The tradition of commissioning new music continued into the twentieth century: Holst's Choral Symphony and Walton's Belshazzar's Feast were commissioned for the Festival. In more recent years Alexander Goehr and David Blake have written works for the Chorus as have Michael Berkeley and Dmitri Smirnov. Dominic Muldowney has done so for the year 2000.

What the critics said about some of the concerts:

"The unscheduled ripple of applause that greeted the end of the first section of Verdi's Four Sacred Pieces was no more that the exquisite singing of the Leeds Festival Chorus deserved....Throughout, the chorus provided a highly enjoyable performance, the female voices bright and incisive, the male departments mellow and well balanced "
David Denton, of a concert of Strauss and Verdi at Leeds Town Hall, Yorkshire Post, 15 March 1999

"The choir...revealed remarkable flexibility in Poulenc's four Motets,
alive to the expressive potential of the tricky chromatics of the Tenebrae Factae"
Martin Dreyer, of a concert of Poulenc and Debussy at Ampleforth Abbey, York Evening Press, 15 June 1998

"....the womens' voices gave to the composer's Litanies a youthful innocence, ethereal tone, exquisite chording"
Donald Webster, Yorkshire Post 15 June 1998

"The chorus were superb, vocally well-balanced and virile in the big choral moments, the evening brought to a thunderous conclusion"
David Denton, of Elgar's Caractacus in the Leeds Town Hall, Yorkshire Post 9 March 1998

"a dramatic and full-bodied performance"
Karen Joyner, Yorkshire Evening Post, 9 March 1998

"a full-toned majestic final chorus"
Donald Webster, of Haydn's Creation at Leeds Town Hall, Yorkshire Post, 3 November 1997

"My main excuse for enjoying the piece so much was that Tortelier gave such a belter of a performance. ... The combined Leeds Festival Chorus and City of Birmingham Choir sang both lustily and lustfully."
David Fanning, of Orff’s Carmina Burana broadcast from the Bridgewater Hall, May 1997 Daily Telegraph, 31 May 1997